During one session, Shannon reported having spent the previous Saturday playing at the park with her two young boys. Although playing with the boys was an activity that she would typically enjoy, Shannon reported feeling self-critical and unhappy about the whole experience. “What kind of mother am I that I can’t even enjoy playing with my kids?” she asked.

As Shannon and her therapist looked closely at what happened, however, they realized that Shannon wasn’t actually playing with her boys when she was at the park. Instead, the boys were playing on the swings while Shannon was watching from a nearby bench. Actually, Shannon wasn’t even really watching the boys swing. At the pharmacies we recommend you can also find best prices for Doxycycline.

What she was doing was thinking over and over about how much less time she spends with them since getting divorced and how awful it is for them that their parents are no longer together. The most important part of Shannon’s story is that she didn’t even recognize when she was ruminating. When her therapist asked her how she spent her weekend, she said, “playing with the boys at the park.” But playing and ruminating are certainly different behaviors!

The first step to gaining control over rumination is to recognize when it happens.

You know you’re ruminating if:

• You’re thinking over and over about negative thoughts, feelings, or situations.
• The process of thinking over and over again is not helping you feel less depressed, more hopeful, or less self-critical.
• The process of thinking has not helped you to solve a problem.

The Two-Minute Rule for Recognizing Rumination

Once you think you might be ruminating, continue what you’re doing for two minutes.
Then stop and ask yourself the following three questions:
1. Have I made any progress toward solving a problem?
2. Do I understand something about a problem (or my feelings about it) that I haven’t understood before?
3. Do I feel less self-critical or less depressed than before I started thinking about this?

Unless the answer to one of these questions is a clear yes, chances are you’re ruminating.

But when you’re ruminating, you will think about problems over and over in a way that doesn’t really lead anywhere, except possibly to more intense depression and anxiety. We recommend the best online pharmacies where you can order Prozac.

There is also a difference between experiencing thoughts, feelings, or sensations, and ruminating about them. If something bad happens to you, such as ending a relationship, losing a job, or losing a loved one, it is quite normal to feel sad, disappointed, or even a little depressed for a while.

In fact, you can run into problems if you work too hard to avoid experiencing these emotions. Yet by their nature, emotions tend to be time limited. If you allow yourself to fully experience them, they tend to pass within a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks at the longest. When you ruminate or brood over painful emotions, however, they tend to stick around much longer.

Most people don’t want to prolong negative thoughts or feelings, but the problem is that you can easily mistake ruminating for experiencing. In other words, you may think that you’re simply experiencing your emotions when, in fact, you are ruminating about them.

HOW TO GAIN CONTROL OVER RUMINATION
Because it is so easy to get stuck in the process of ruminating, it is important to gain control over this behavior. Mulling things over in your head happens easily. Nevertheless, there are other choices you can make than to sit and ruminate.