Have you spent too many sleepless nights or distressing days dwelling on bad feelings and experiences of the past? Rumination is the compulsive focusing on causes and consequences of your distress. While worry focuses on potential bad events in the future, rumination focuses on past and current failures, disappointment, or suffering.
Rumination interferes with the confidence you need to problem-solve and move forward in your life in a positive way. Moreover, ongoing repetitive circular thinking about failures and distress often leads to depression as well as addictions.
Solution
The solution is to learn to notice each time you start ruminating. Then immediately distract yourself with a healthy activity for at least two minutes. Only two minutes of distraction will stop you from ruminating. You may have to do this countless times a day when you first start, but if you keep it up, your ruminating will diminish and then disappear.
Depending on your personality, effective distraction may have to involve your mind, your body, or both. Think of a mental or physical activity that is engaging enough to distract you.
Here are some examples:
• Organize papers or your accounting.
• Read a book.
• Do fifty sit ups.
• Clean your house while listening to your favorite music.
• Call a friend.
• Do a sport or take a walk while listening to a book on tape.
• Do an interactive video or game, such as a language or geography game, or lumosity.
• Clear clutter, focusing on what should be thrown out or where to put things.
• Catch up on social media or emails.
• Plan a dinner party or a trip.
Remember that you only need to distract yourself for two minutes. But if you distract yourself with something positive or productive many times a day, you’ll also have accomplished something worthwhile in the meantime. You’ll be better read, in better shape, caught up with friends, and you will have a cleaner house. These small satisfactions will also help you to stop ruminating about past negative events.
If you don’t have two minutes to spare, consider doing what a friend of mine did during a painful break up to keep her from dwelling in negative thinking. She wore a rubber band around her wrist and snapped it each time she started to ruminate about the past or worry about the future. Her wrist turned red, but her emotional health remained stable and empowered despite the losses and transition she faced.
Minor forms of mental or physical toxicity all contribute to unhappiness and suffering. When your physical chemistry is askew or your thinking is in a rut, the result can be mild despondency and lethargy.
Unless you are suffering from clinical depression or illness, you can feel happier in less than an hour by following these steps. Even in the case of clinical depression or illness you can enhance your emotional well-being. Take care of your body
First, physical chemistry makes a big difference in how we feel.
1. Drink a glass of water and have a healthy snack. If you like, top it off with a piece of dark chocolate.
2. Take a walk outside and get some fresh air, do some exercise, or dance around in your living room or office..
3. If helpful, take a quick shower.
4. Change your facial expression and posture to one that exudes peace and contentment. Happy body language has been proven to change your brain chemistry in a very positive way. Smile, and say “hello” to people you happen to see, anybody.
Take care of your psyche/spirit
There are several activities you can engage in to clear out negative thinking such as fear, anger, or greed.
1. Call or email someone who would be happy to hear from you. Communicate to say “hello,” share your news and ask about them, but do not complain. It’s surprising how good it can make you feel to reach out to someone who would appreciate hearing from you. It gets you away from focusing on yourself.
2. Clear the clutter of one drawer, cabinet or area on your desk. It may be overwhelming to think about organizing your whole office or closet. But you can get quite a bit done if you dedicate five minutes to clean and organize one area. Clearing physical clutter helps clear the mind. Or spend some time in the garden – a proven mood enhancer.
3. Sit down for three minutes, or even one minute, and think about five or more things that you are grateful for. Breathe slowly and deeply. If you like to meditate or pray, you can do that instead.
After less than an hour, you should feel quite refreshed, which will allow you to become more focused, calm, and directed during the rest of your day. Physical well-being and psychological inner peace allow us to feel grounded and be present in the moment, connect with others, and flourish in our actions.
When people are immersed in fear, they generally don’t feel secure enough to focus on higher-level aspirations such as improving their relationships or expressing their creativity. Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs is an elegant picture of the order in which human needs are met. Generally, it is easier to focus on love and happiness when you are not worried about food and shelter.
Understanding Maslow’s hierarchy helps us deal with people in our lives who are under stress. Where someone is on the pyramid is not solely a function of external factors, but also a function of the person’s psychological tendencies. Understanding where they are helps us to relate to them more effectively.
As with most theories, the hierarchy of needs is a useful way of seeing general patterns, but it is not a rigid structure.
Living at a lower level of needs
Many people around the world live on one of the bottom two rungs of the pyramid for their entire lives because their physiological or safety needs are always under threat. When you are hungry or living in an area of civil unrest or war, you don’t have time to worry about your child’s self-esteem or your own self-actualization.
Yet, poverty and unrest do not preclude higher levels of psychological attainment, such as pursuit of friendship, community, and living up to your potential. However, the greater the external threat the more challenging it becomes to pursue those higher aspirations.
"Maslow's Pyramid of Needs"
Living at a higher level of needs
These articles are primarily read by and written for people who value personal growth and loving relationships. They are fortunate to be free from the relentless worry about basic needs and survival, and can thus focus on higher needs such as belonging, love, and life’s meaning.
Yet, in an instant, anyone can suddenly find him- or herself at the lowest level on the pyramid, if only psychologically. A person who becomes ill or loses a spouse or a job may be racked with fear as nightmarish as someone living in the middle of a wartime environment. The chemical and psychological responses may be just as severe as if there were a deadly threat.
Even when future safety is not at stake, someone who loses his or her job may react as though it were. For instance, someone whose very identity is based on being a productive career-oriented person may feel annihilated when he or she loses that job.
Psychological response
While the hierarchy of needs is greatly influenced by external circumstances, another critical factor is the psychological state you choose when the going gets rough.
Even some of the most fortunate people, who don’t need to worry about food and shelter, may live under great stress worrying about their financial deals or the stock market, finding themselves at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy psychologically. The same is true of some healthy people who live in constant fear of disease and thus have turned into hypochondriacs, or exercise fanatics, who destroy their bodies in their obsessive quest for “health.” It is low-level fear that drives them even though they have adequate health, food, and shelter.
On the opposite side, there are people whose basic needs are constantly threatened, and yet, they are able to live in a tranquil psychological state aspiring to love and self-actualization. Thus, they manage to reside at the top of the pyramid.
Anyone can find him- or herself at the bottom, and anyone can bring him- or herself to the top. Clearly, however, the worse the external circumstances, the more challenging it becomes to have the ability, strength, and support to focus on higher-level needs.
Dealing with someone on the lower level
When someone has dropped into a lower level of the pyramid, it is not the best time to discuss how to improve your relationship or your happiness. It is more effective and compassionate to meet that person on his or her current level and try to help.
Imagine your teenage child comes home from school under great stress because of a remark made by a peer. The parent should realize that the teenager has dropped into the bottom of the pyramid psychologically. While such an event may seem trivial to an adult, to a teenager it is not. Don’t expect warmth and family affiliation. Simply be there to help if help is needed.
Similarly, if your partner has lost his job, don’t expect him to work on the relationship. He just needs to know he is loved, unconditionally. This is where your own ability to remain calm and non-reactive can help him from spiraling downwards into panic.
Sometimes getting out of the circular thinking that creates panic may require a change of activities or a change of setting to evoke a different psychological state. For some people that might involve playing with the kids, going to an inspirational talk or church, or doing volunteer work. For others, it might involve playing a sport, watching a game with friends, or going on a trip.
Nobody’s life is ever totally secure. It is left up to us to seek and aspire to higher levels of meaning despite life’s uncertainty. One of the best examples is the Greek sage and philosopher Epictetus, who wrote his most inspiring work while imprisoned.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
~Epictetus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.
"Gravitas" by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
While optimism tends to attract happier states of mind, we should avoid being judgmental toward those living through darker moods. It’s important to ask if a friend needs help or wants to talk about problems. Yet simply being there can be more beneficial than jumping in quickly to “fix” someone’s mild sadness and gloom.
In addition to being compassionate, we need to be able to give others space to process their own emotional states. There is a place and purpose for melancholy, heartache, and disenchantment.
Psychologist James Hillman claims that the “gravitas” accompanying mild depression may allow us to discover consciousness and the depths of the soul. “It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness.”
Rather than giving in to a dark mood or blaming someone else, a person undergoing the blues has an opportunity to listen to what the unconscious is trying to say.
For instance, someone who identifies with being action-oriented may ignore grief and loss. Those neglected feelings may gain energy in the form of a shadow that one day will burst to the surface as emotional outbursts or depression. Mild and temporary depression can be a wake up call to the sleepwalker within us, allowing us to take time to mull over our life’s journey.
If a friend’s melancholy goes on too long or becomes severe, however, it may be time to intensify concern about his or her inability to get out of the depressed state. Dark moods push people away and prolong isolation and solitude, which can perpetuate a cycle that becomes increasingly difficult to break. If depression is leading to atrophy and degeneration, it’s important to encourage the friend to get help or see a health care professional.
"Trepidatious" by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
Many times, because they don’t know what else to do, people use drugs as a way of medicating themselves out of depression or anxiety. In the beginning it seems to work, but eventually the effectiveness diminishes.
To try to recapture the earlier benefit, people will use more and more of the drug, which backfires. Their lives fall apart, and the depression and anxiety come back in full force.
Pot in and of itself can cause loss of motivation, increased obsessiveness, panic, anxiety, loss of memory and of course weight gain.
Pot does not cause schizpophrenia, but if someone is vulnerable to schizophrenia, it sure can bring it on, make it worse, and prevent recovery. Use of drugs can be the person’s way of trying to medicate the early symptoms.
If you are close to him or her, start going to Alanon, which helps those who come from dysfunctional families or who are close to a substance abuser. Also see if you can get your friend into counseling and a 12 step program. If he ‘gets it’ he will thank you down the line.
