Rumination vs reflection: what’s the difference?

Many studies find that reflecting on why you feel upset leads to physical and mental health benefits, yet an equally large body of research finds that attempts to understand your feelings often backfire into rumination that makes people feel worse. Researchers call this the self-reflection paradox.

In experiments, people who looked back on an upsetting experience from a distance, like "a fly on the wall", reacted less physically and recovered faster than people who relived it through their own eyes.

The first row comes from the 1999 study above. The other rows are examples and prompts, not research results.

A 2008 review of repetitive thought (Watkins, listed under Sources) describes two lines of evidence on this.

The review describes a study that split rumination into brooding ("moody pondering") and reflective pondering (turning inward on purpose to solve problems and ease symptoms of depression). Brooding predicted more depression a year later; reflective pondering went with more depression at the time but less a year later.

In studies the review describes, dwelling on an upsetting event in an abstract way, on its causes, meanings and implications, led to slower recovery from negative mood than dwelling on it in a concrete, experiential way.

So when you go back over something, describe the scene in plain detail (who said what, what you did next) instead of asking what it proves about you.

If you keep returning to something and call it processing, it is worth checking which way it is going. The research on repetitive thought describes both directions.

A 2008 review describes repetitive thought as thinking attentively, repetitively or frequently about yourself and your world. It found that such thinking can have unconstructive consequences, such as depression and anxiety, or constructive ones, such as recovering from upsetting events and preparing and planning ahead.

If what you keep returning to is a frightening or traumatic event, you do not have to process it alone; the lines under “When to get help” are there for that.

Ask yourself these after a stretch of thinking about yourself or something that happened:

• Am I curious about this, or am I trying to make a bad feeling go away?
• Am I describing what happened, or judging what it says about me?
• Could I tell a friend one thing I have learned from the last ten minutes?
• Do I feel a bit clearer, or the same or worse than when I started?

Mostly the second answers? Switch from going over it to working through it with the step-by-step rumination sheet, or, for something you got wrong, the mistake check.