As I was doom-scrolling my news feed the other day, I stumbled across an article entitled, “A Surprising Reason Why Depressed People Don’t Get Better.” (Psychology Today, October 13, 2023, if you want to Google it.)

The article discussed two techniques that can help people overcome depression and talked about several studies where they taught these techniques to depressed people and then measured whether their study subjects actually applied those techniques. Although the sample sizes were small, they generally found that depressed subjects didn’t apply the techniques in a way that reduced their depression.

Their takeaway: more studies are needed to determine why depressed people choose emotion-regulation techniques that do not improve their mood.

My takeaway: I never thought about it like that.

What are these two techniques?

The two techniques are Rumination and Distraction.

You’re probably already familiar with them:

• Rumination is when you obsess about something, letting the associated emotions flood your body.
• Distraction is when you deliberately focus on something else, so that you don’t ruminate on it.

We do this all the time, right?

Let’s say you’re working heads-down on something and your boss pops out of her office, calls you in, and demands to know why your team is over budget. Your brain can’t switch gears that fast and your mind goes blank. You freeze. Panic hormones flood through your body. And they must be showing on your face because she keeps asking the same question over and over, as if you are dumb. Finally, disgusted with your ineptitude, she lets you escape.

If you stay up all night, replaying the scene over and over, beating yourself up, keeping those panic hormones flooding through your body, you are Ruminating.

If, on the other hand, you say to yourself, “That was pretty intense.” And then look at a picture of your kid or your cat, or Antarctica, or something else positive, and let the positive emotions associated with that flood your body – or maybe go for a walk in the park, feel the breeze on your face, listen to the leaves rubbing together, watch the dogs in their playground, immerse yourself in the moment, that’s Distraction.

And, when you do it right, distraction calms you down enough that you can eventually remember that you were also wondering about the budget overruns that you inherited and had started to analyze them before you got pulled in a different direction. Which is much more productive than staying up all night, running on a hamster-wheel, replaying an unpleasant scene over and over.

When you think about emotional regulation this way, it’s easy to see how ruminating about stressful or unpleasant situations can cause you to be in a bad mood or even become anxious or depressed, to feel that things won’t get better.

Applying These to Positive Memories

What I realized, after reading this article, is that many of us actually apply Rumination and Distraction ineptly to positive memories.

Consider this:

You give a presentation or turn in a report. Your boss and other participants tell you what a great job you did and you smile politely, and thank them.

But, inside you’re telling yourself that they’re just being nice, or that they feel sorry for you because your laptop kept crashing. Or you just say Thanks, and immediately run to the next meeting or go back to worrying about why your team was over budget. In this case, you are Distracting yourself from positive emotions.

Imagine instead that you repeat their positive feedback inside your head, take a deep breath and let it reverberate, until your inner child raises a fist to the sky and sings We Are the Champions, and you let positive hormones flood through your body. Imagine that you text your spouse about how great you feel, and your sister, and you write a post for social media sharing your joy, and you settle into bed that night remembering how good that feels, giving one last happy sigh as you lay your head on the pillow. If you obsess about this memory that way, that’s also Rumination.

And we don’t do enough of this. Especially in this busy busy work world, where the only thing that matters is what have you done for me lately, and do you have that report, and you’re late for the next meeting, and the next and the next, and why is your team over budget!

My Takeaway

When I think about the happiest people I know – my friend Allyson, for example – I realized that they use Rumination and Distraction all the time.

They use Rumination to get every drop of enjoyment out of the positive experiences that life gives them, really soaking them in. And when bad experiences happen to them, they acknowledge how awful it feels – and, instead of replaying the bad memory on an endless loop, they distract themselves with that positive memory.

People love being around Allyson. Even the crankiest corporate lawyers call to set her alight and end up eating out of her hand. Because her joy in life is contagious.

So here’s what I’m working on:

• When I have a good experience, pause, take a deep breath, let myself feel the positive emotion, and linger on that memory.
• When I have a bad experience, acknowledge how stressful or unpleasant it was, take a deep breath, and then think about a good experience memory – really immerse myself in it, until it overshadows the bad experience.

And then go on with life.

It’s an experiment.

How Meditation Helps Me

My meditation practice can help me practice recognizing when I am falling into rumination about negative things. And it can help me practice distracting myself by focusing on my breath, or sound, or relaxing different muscle groups.

In fact, for me, that’s mostly what meditation is: practice recognizing when I am thinking (ruminating) and practice letting go of thinking (distraction).

A lot of people have told me that they’re not good at meditating because they just keep thinking all the time. Yes, that’s great! That gives you lots of practice catching yourself thinking and then practice letting go of thinking!

That’s all life is anyway: practice.