Happy Wednesday, friend!

You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

Donating is Advocating

The How to Live newsletter is a valued mental health resource. I spend hundreds of hours and dollars a month to keep it going.

Everyone who helps sustain this project becomes a mental health advocate.

If you’ve gained wisdom or gleaned insight from this newsletter, please consider a donation in any amount, or upgrading for $6/month and help me continue to keep this newsletter paywall-free.

Your patronage has an enormous impact and makes a real difference.

🙏🏼 ❤️

Resolving the Unresolvable: The Difference Between Thinking and Ruminating

Much of my time is spent thinking, reading, and interrogating myself and others about the myriad problems caused by existence. How can we know the unknowable?

How do we make conscious all that which is unconscious?

How do we make certain all that’s uncertain?

And how, as Rilke instructs in this perfect gem, do we live with all that is unresolved in our hearts?

While these are questions I’ve been grappling with for most of my life, they make living more interesting—they don’t stop me in my tracks, or interfere with my daily functioning.

The thoughts that get caught in one place and repeat ruin me; this stuckness is called rumination, and it’s a beast.

If I’ve learned anything over my thousands of weeks being alive, there is a way of pondering and worrying that is productive, and a way that can be quite unproductive.

When we think or worry productively, we move through a process that includes closure—when we think, we get somewhere. When we ruminate, however, we get nowhere.

We become trapped in a spin cycle of questioning with no foreseeable escape—we remain unresolved.

People with a proclivity toward anxiety (hello!) often believe that worrying will solve their problems. Worrying is active; it offers a false sense of control over a situation, and anxious people tend to rely on it, misusing it like a self-soothing blanket.

The problem is that anxiety traps us in place, and so does ruminating. And just like anxiety, ruminating often causes the ruminator to feel out of control. There is a skinny line between worrying and ruminating. While both are symptoms of anxiety and depression, worry is more lenient; it’ll allow any thought in, no matter what it’s wearing.

Rumination, on the other hand, has a dress code. It prefers its thoughts to behave in the same manner, repeatedly sticking and recycling the same negative material.

Ruminating is a trap posing as a good plan made by a bad friend. And like a bad friend, rumination is poisonous. When it surfaces, it signals that something inside of you needs attention.

A couple of weeks ago, I got caught in its crosshairs. A worry got lodged in my brain and caused me so much discomfort that I could not carry on with my day until I dislodged it.

I was so stuck in my head that I felt like this ruminating thought was now me, permanently: One-Thought-Amanda.

It lasted for DAYS. It was finally resolved when a friend asked me a question that helped prod the worry out of its wedge. She approached the question from a different angle, offering me some objectivity I couldn’t provide myself.

While I was grateful to my friend, I wanted to do for myself what she had inadvertently done for me. But first, I tried to get a closer look at rumination and ask it some questions.

I could think of no better person to help me do that than Dr. Tamar Chansky, psychologist, author, and founder of the Children’s and Adult Center for OCD and Anxiety in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

So, let’s jump in…

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These frameworks and perspectives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

Unlock full access

Join How to Live