Rumination and Playful Imagination || By Catherine Dockery, MA, Conscious Aging Facilitator
Rumination
Rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences without moving into problem-solving. Round and round you go. But did you know that familiar, automatic and repetitive patterns of behavior are also forms of rumination? Playing the same feelings and reactions over and over based on long-ago events that created behavior patterns.
The repetitive, negative aspects of rumination can contribute to the development of depression or anxiety and can worsen existing conditions.
According to Dr. Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis and author of Why We Remember, “When a person who is in a depressed mood ruminates, they are more likely to remember more negative things that happened to them in the past, they interpret situations in their current lives more negatively, and they are more hopeless about the future. Even in people without depression or anxiety, rumination can contribute to negative emotions. This can become a cycle where the more a person ruminates, the worse they feel, which then contributes to more rumination.”
The preoccupation with problems also makes it difficult to move beyond the problem and allow mental space for focusing on problem-solving. Being mindful of how we create memories will lead to happier memories.
Painting a Picture with Playful Imagination
Dr. Ranganath further explains that memories reside in the brain in clusters of thoughts, feelings, sensations and objects and events. Like smelling chocolate chip cookies and thinking of childhood. We remember more like a painting than a photograph.
Its beautiful to think of memories as paintings. If you start painting a picture, you are going to get some parts completely right, like the color of someone’s shirt, the color of their eyes, the shape of their head, and so forth. But, it’s not going to be perfect. You’ll make some mistakes. You’ll also leave some things out to which you might not have paid attention. There will be some parts of the painting that are not really right or wrong but they’re more an interpretation, a perspective. That which a person is bringing to a piece of art. That is how memories are held, not in true or false sense, but a construction of one’s own making.
How does someone shift the story so that they don’t feel stuck in the past of traumatic memories. Instead, they can distance themselves and see themselves from afar without them feeling the full force of the original pain. They can look at the situation and start to change the story for themselves. How do we start to do this? Are there any strategies or process that we can actually do?
Curiosity
Sometimes our biggest breakthroughs come, not when we get what we want, but when we don’t get what we want and then improvise. I remember when my daughter was beginning to think about where to go to college. I didn’t have the means to take college trips, so I brought her to my workplace and she interviewed people about their career paths. What we both learned was that no one completely planned their career path. Life circumstances took them down roads they hadn’t planned. Their curiosity pulled them into directions they could not have foreseen.
The brain rewards us for our curiosity by releasing feel-good neurotransmitters called dopamine. In other words, the brain likes curiosity and rewards us for engaging in it. Neurotransmitters that make us feel good are the body’s way of motivating us toward behaviors that are beneficial to our survival. In fact, we received more of these neurotransmitters just for our curiosity than by getting the outcome of what we are seeking. In other words, we get more reward to being curious about something than we get by getting answers. Getting the question is more motivating than getting the answer.
The brain also rewards us for novelty. We get more reward for seeking something new than by judging and feeling certain. Curiosity and novelty are imaginative. We learn from our mistakes more than successes. The brain likes the new and exploration. But we are taught to conform! We have to be intentional about allowing ourselves to explore due to this cultural training.
Next time you find yourself ruminating on something, give yourself the freedom to wonder, ponder, and explore. Think outside the box. Take your ruminations to extremes just to begin to play and open your imagination. This will allow your reward center to activate may bring new insights.
References and Further ReadingWhy We Remember by Dr Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis
About the author: Rev. Catherine Dockery, MA, is a People House minister and a trained facilitator in conscious aging, nonviolent communication and resonant healing of trauma. She has an MA in Public Administration and BA in Communications both from the University of Colorado at Denver. Catherine started The Center for Conscious Aging in 2015 where she conducts workshops, personal coaching and support groups for older adults helping them to understand their developmental changes and transform their lives. She has 10 years of experience in individual and group facilitation and presents on aging topics throughout Colorado. To learn more about Catherine’s services please visit www.centerforconsciousaging.org or email [email protected]
