Rumination, my old friend. Come to ruminate again.
If you are like me (I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.) your brain has a tendency to play things on a loop. I just wrote that as loup. Your brain has a tendency to play things as a wolf? I guess. If the wolf was really anxious and constantly trying to solve problems that aren’t problems.
Like, imagine if every interaction and experience you have ever had was a test. (Which in a more existential sense, it kind of is.) And so you worry about this test beforehand, trying to imagine scenarios and how you will deal with them. Then you have the test. Then after the test, rather than taking what you learned and moving on, you put it on repeat. You play it over and over in your head, trying to fix flaws. Then when you run out of ways to improve on it, you try finding flaws you didn’t catch the first 30 times you went over it.
You would hope this would be less of a problem in our plague times. But instead, it’s mutated into a ruminator’s nightmare. Not only is there the added fear of missing a hygiene gesture and being generally hyperaware of our surroundings at all times, but interactions with other humans are less common and thus more ripe for obsessing over.
Uh oh, your throat feels a little dry. Time to start contact-tracing your movements in the past two weeks. You need to be social near other humans? Time to devise a mental plan of any imagined circumstances and then spend weeks afterward analyzing every word and gesture for fear of causing negative feelings during a precious and rare social moment and also because it’s the only time you’ve talked to a person in person in weeks so that is your only new rumination footage and thus it gets overplayed, like if you could only download one season of TV a month and so once you get it, you watch the shit out of it because it’s new. (Please send cash so I can get more data on my prepaid phone).
Bad thought patterns can be broken by distractions. I am a huge proponent of distractions. I have tinnitus and visual snow, and the only way to deal with it is to distract by having sounds always on and movement or patterns always in view. Like right now when I made myself think about my visual snow, now it’s very apparent in my vision because I’m thinking about it. Once these thoughts pass, I’ll go back to not noticing it. An over-active puzzle-solver brain function is the same. Distract the rest of your brain with other things. Almost like hitting a jukebox with your hip to get the record back on track but don’t do that to your head. I wasn’t even born when jukeboxes or the character famous for hip-checking jukeboxes were a thing. Maybe I could go undercover as a boomer. Infiltrate their really boring facebook chats.
Speaking of, I no longer have any social media. What a time to not be screaming and or screamed at on the internet. And I am currently living alone while chronically ill during a plague in a country where I don’t speak the language very well, so I’m a bit limited with distractions. Cats work. Tea. Food. Windows (the kind that show you the outside of your house not the operating software, or though I guess also Windows because that’s what my computer runs on and that’s got distractions on it. So,) Windows (the operating software). Soon you get really fast at recognizing a rumination loop. (It’s forever a wolf in my head now.)
Rumination OCD is a real thing. Anxiety branches into many things that can include obsessive thinking patterns and behaviours, especially with reactions to trauma. It just means some people’s Worry Wolves are bigger than other people’s. Or more aggressive. Or more neurotic. Or a combination of those. Maybe it’s a quantity thing. There are 16 wolves in you. They are all very worried.
One you spot the Worry Wolf(ves), you can distract it with a metaphorical cat. As long as you are not a real wolf, it can be a literal cat. (Yes, a few wolves have been known to be friends with cats. However, not using a cat to distract a wolf from over-analyzing imagined and real situations is still strong advice for most circumstances.) Or TV. Or books. Or walking outside. Or hip-checking a jukebox. Or looking up what jukeboxes are. Or what a juke is.
Challenge the Worry Wolf to climb a Tangent Tree? We climbed up this one too far, the air is getting thin.
But you know, the wolf had distracted me from my visual snow. Until now.
