How do anxiety and ruminations reinforce each other?

This is how anxiety interacts with psychological ruminations and vice versa.

Anxiety is a popularly known concept, not least because virtually everyone has felt it at very high levels throughout their lives.

However, this psychological phenomenon has a powerful ally that is not so often talked about: psychological rumination.

In this article we will see how anxiety and rumination reinforce each other and why they sometimes end up reinforcing each other.and why sometimes they end up generating a problem that is becoming bigger and bigger.

What is the psychological rumination?

The psychological rumination can be explained of summarized way like a propensity to to turn over and over again to the same type of thoughts. This is what we often experience when we notice that it is difficult to stop thinking about something, in those situations in which certain contents of our mind "pull us" and, almost without realizing it, we begin to associate everything that happens to us with those thoughts that we were already pondering, so that we become more and more involved in it.

Sometimes, psychological rumination can act as fuel for creative processes, as it helps us to focus on a subject and see in it an infinite number of nuances. However, on almost all occasions it goes hand in hand with a certain degree of discomfort and, as we shall see, stress or anxiety.

On the other hand, the concept of psychological rumination is closely related to that of intrusive thoughts.. This type of mental images and ideas emerge in our consciousness without warning and have a disruptive effect, that is, they disturb in some sense our state of mind, dragging with them a whole series of thoughts that have little or nothing to do with what we had in mind before that first "intrusion".

If psychological rumination is a vicious circle in constant movement and transformation, intrusive thoughts are the elements that give it impulse, and at the same time, they are part of its content, what we are thinking about.

They are usually mental contents with an emotional charge, that is to say, with a great capacity to mobilize our emotions. a great capacity to mobilize our emotions, either because they lead us toThey are usually emotionally charged mental contents, that is to say, with a great capacity to mobilize our emotions, either because they lead us to evoke important memories for us or because they lead us to focus our attention on ideas to which we are sensitive or vulnerable. In practice, the type of feelings and emotions associated with intrusive thoughts usually orbit around anxiety and fear... and in the next section we will see what that is all about.

How do anxiety and rumination interact?

Now that we have seen what psychological rumination consists of, it is time to ask ourselves what this phenomenon has to do with the fact of being anxious. The answer to this question is already intuited in the very concept of "anxiety".

After all, anxiety is a psychological and physiological a psychological and physiological response to real or imagined situations that put us "on guard", i.e. that require us to be "on our guard".that is, that require us to be ready to act quickly at any sign that we may be harmed by a situation, either by exposing ourselves to danger or by missing opportunities that would make us feel bad. In other words, anxiety is based on avoidance: we stay on alert to try not to let something happen that would hurt us physically or emotionally. And what is one of the most sudden experiences that can cause us discomfort without doing anything to deserve it? Exactly, intrusive thoughts.

What explains the interaction between anxiety and psychological rumination is mainly that the simple fact of trying to avoid intrusive thoughts makes us much more vulnerable to them, attracting them to our consciousness and causing us to fall squarely into psychological rumination.

If we are alert to try not to think about something, we will surely end up thinking about it, because we will be establishing many connections between the two.If we are alert to try not to think about something, we will surely end up thinking about it, because we will be establishing many connections between ideas that have as their epicenter those thoughts that we are trying to avoid. By giving so much importance to these mental contents, any stimulus that may vaguely remind us of any of the concepts associated with them, will transport our attentional focus towards these intrusive thoughts, making them go from being latent to being active and capturing all our attention.

Thus, rumination reinforces the state of anxiety by exposing us over and over again to certain images and thoughts that we try to avoidIn turn, anxiety makes us very defensive because we feel vulnerable. Both psychological phenomena become confused with each other as they feed back on each other.

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these kinds of disturbances of thought and emotion. Although neither anxiety nor rumination are psychological disorders in themselves, in psychotherapy it is very common to intervene in these forms of discomfort, helping patients to better modulate not only their emotions, but also their thoughts and their attentional focus.

Are you interested in starting a psychological therapy process?

If you are going through a complicated time and are looking for professional psychological support, I invite you to contact me.

My name is Paloma Rey Cardona and I am a General Health Psychologist; in my office you can have therapy services for children and adolescents or for adults, and we also offer online sessions by video call.