Rumination, Mental Backrooms, and Yapping as Therapy

A short exploration of rumination and how, for me, yapping at a microphone provides some escape from my own mental backrooms.  

Transcript

Speaker 0:02

Hello, beautiful internet person. Welcome again to Null by Design. This time we're going to get a little bit lost in our own backrooms of our minds talking about rumination, which I really do think of as the backrooms of our own minds and thoughts. A nice and terribly liminal space that we can wander through and become lost in. In fact, this is attempt number two at recording this episode in general because in the first go-through, I became very lost in my own thoughts and little bit of narration, and so I think it's especially appropriate to talk about getting lost in thought and ways that that can be both productive and non productive, and how different sorts of activities, like yapping at a microphone, or any other creative pursuit, can give us a therapeutic method of harnessing our rumination and directing our minds forward and back out of those back rooms. To get started this time, I would also like to give credit to three particular creators who, along my own journey, I have found particular enjoyment in and who I have drawn inspiration from. Let's start off with woodshed theory. Woodshed theory is run by the wonderful Claire, and in particular, I have followed her along for her porch coffee sessions. They were formerly weekly, now somewhat more infrequent. But Claire is an individual who has struggled with neurodivergence and who, as a therapeutic tool for developing community, started recording porch coffee. And it has been a wonderful journey to follow along with because as someone else in the neurodivergent community, I fully agree that it can be difficult to maintain wide networks of friendships or to maintain community with others. And so by putting one's thoughts and feelings out into the world, it is one way of creating and harnessing creativity for community. Claire also does a lot with crafts around knitting and crochet. And if you are into that kind of thing, one, go check out the Woodshed Theory channel, but also feel free to stop by her store and give some support to an amazing person through a purchase of one of her crafts. Another person whose podcast I came to through my therapist when I began discussing having any desire to do some recording of my own thoughts, my therapist suggested that I immediately check out the Blind Boy Podcast, and it is an extraordinary show run by a truly amazing storyteller. The episode that came out recently, and I think really played a role in helping me take this episode idea from just some loose thoughts about rumination to something about how rumination and recording and feelings of flow and the therapeutic nature of capturing and publishing, in particular for me, recording and publishing my thoughts and voice into this void between the platforms. Ah, but his recent episode, this is a mental health episode about being autistic. If you are not autistic, you might not like it, and should listen to Diary of a CEO instead. Quite a mouthful of a title, but one that I love, because hey, not everything is for everyone, but there's something for you out there instead. If you are into these discussions of neurodivergence, you should check out that episode. It focuses a lot on an article that has come out recently, a study that has come out as a public article recently. It is a published academic article. It started off behind a paywall as most academic uh publications do, but is now free access to anyone. So I really recommend checking out the article uh that he dives into. But it is a non-pathologizing study of autism and flow states, and it is an excellent article. It is an article and study that focuses on the lived experiences of autistic individuals and does not look at autism specifically as a pathologized illness, but just as a human experience and one which benefits from engagement with flow states, which needs to experience flow through what often is described as special interests. Uh, Blind Boy discuss how he dislikes the term special interest, and it is a discussion that I agree with. Uh, but just to kind of use the common terminology here, how engaging with special interests, with engaging in hobbies that allow us to experience flow states are not just nice, but something that is critical to mental well-being. And that is something I will go further into here in my own life and experience, both with how it has helped me, with my own experiences of rumination, and just how this as a creative process helps me to experience flow states and helps me to find a sense of mental balance and well-being. And so both the podcast in its full cycle, it is it has been around for quite a while, there is a lot to go through, but it is amazing from episode one. So you can hop into it at any point along the way, you can hop into it all the way at the beginning. Every part of it is a wonderful journey and something that deserves as much of your attention as you can give to it. A third creator who possibly not as upbeat as Woodshed Theory or Blind Boy Podcast is the functional melancholic. Uh this is another YouTube creator, someone who is a functional melancholic. I would describe many of the thoughts that I get lost in in my own day-to-day to be within that sort of melancholic, pessimistic view. I try to be, I guess, a little bit more positive in what I record than he probably is in his own recordings and broadcast. But there's nothing wrong with that. I think that focusing on the ruminative, dark thoughts that we can get trapped in, and doing so from a very particular philosophical lens, is something that he does amazingly well. And in a recent episode, why we can't be alone with our thoughts, dealing with a power outage and having to just be stuck with only his own mind for company, was an uncomfortable experience, and how that relates to our modern experience is one that I think has a lot of value. Because as I sit here talking about these things while I sit here recording my own thoughts, I am sitting with my thoughts. This is something that forces me to be here with myself, the functional melancholic recording his own thoughts and feelings, even if there is some amount of scripting involved in all of these activities, is about sitting quietly with your own mind, about letting your thoughts spool out of your mouth. And that is something, again, worth listening to quite a bit of what he's done. He has a lot of really excellent distillations of philosophy in how we go about living our modern lives from a very melancholic direction, but again, one that I think is valuable spending some time with. And those are three creators who I have spent quite a bit of time with, who have provided quite a bit of inspiration in many different ways, and if you are enjoying anything that I do here, I think you'll find some enjoyment there. So please give them all a listen. They are all truly excellent people. But why are we here? Why are we here today? And what is it about rumination that I want to talk about? First, let's kind of get into more of a definition of rumination. I keep saying the word, but we haven't given it any real defining characteristics. And I'm going to come at this from a psychological science perspective. That's where my own academic specialty is, and I've spent quite a bit of time in my life researching rumination in different capacities. I won't get too super deep into that because I can get lost in my own thoughts as I did for take one of this very quickly if I let myself try and think about all of the different things that rumination may encompass. But let's dive into some definition content. From a psychology perspective, rumination really comes from response style theory as its sort of origin story. Rumination is focused attention on the symptoms of one's mental distress. Response styles theory deals with, in general, the different ways that a person can respond to distress, rumination being one of many. I won't go into more of those response styles, though, if you would like to hear more about response style theory, leave a comment. I'm absolutely certain I'll respond with probably a full episode about it because we're at that point in this journey where I will do almost anything for your attention. Because that's my response style right here, right now. But rumination as a definitional topic, being something that we are attending to with mental distress and thinking about that distress, it is, from that perspective, a part of, and this is another model within the study of rumination, uh, but the self-regulatory executive function model, which looks at rumination as repetitive thoughts generated by attempts to cope with self-discrepancy that are directed primarily toward processing the content of self-referent information and not toward immediate goal-directed action. In three points, rumination is thoughts that are about how do I feel about this event? How can I change my thoughts and feelings about what has occurred? And how can I prevent disturbing thoughts or feelings in the future? And that, I think, that last point is a particular core of rumination. How can I prevent mental distress in the future? And directing a lot of thought toward that. And it's that thinking about how we can prevent future distress that can often prevent goal-seeking behavior that may actually be more effective at helping us deal with mental distress. Oftentimes, the way to deal with things that make us uncomfortable is to move further into that discomfort so that we can understand how best to deal with it instead of by continuously avoiding things that make us uncomfortable. But this is also coming from a model that is specifically about self-regulatory executive function. And if you were someone in the neurodivergent community, executive function may be one of those things that you already have difficulty with. Self-regulatory executive function isn't exactly something that I have in my A list of skills. And this, I think, is also how many of us can get trapped within ruminative cycles, is that we're trying to think through how we can generate executive function, how we can deal with many different things in our lives, and get trapped within that motion without moving directly forward. The other area that I want to discuss about rumination is really a sort of dialectic with this, a oppositional look at rumination that I think if we hold these ideas in tension can have a lot of value in being able to walk the tight rope between them. The other area of psychological theory that often deals with rumination is goal progress theory. For example, in goal progress theory, rumination is conceptualized not as a reaction to mood or to distress, but as a response to a failure to progress toward a goal. Specifically, goal progress theory views rumination as the tendency to think recurrently about important, higher order goals that have not yet been attained, or towards which sufficient progress has not been made in our own mind. That in and of itself is stating that rumination is directly goal-oriented. And I think that when we hold these things intention, that rumination can both prevent us from goal-oriented behaviors, but be very much about thinking about what our goals are and recursively thinking about how we can make progress toward that goal, while also being about avoiding distress, can tell us a lot about the experience of rumination, especially within the neurodivergent community. One of the places that I see this in particular within my own life, in the lives of those around me, and in the descriptions from other channels, from other creators, and has been summed up as the gifted child paradox or the gifted child problem. As children, many of us were probably very good at many things, in some aspect, because many of the things that we were directed toward were things that we could be good at and that were easy, and that as especially in adulthood, we work toward much more difficult projects and much more difficult goals, we find ourselves encountering things that are inherently much more difficult and which don't come to us with any natural ease. And so if we're not good at that thing, after having spent so much time being rewarded for being a gifted child, it feels like there must be something bad about us that we can't accomplish these different goals in our lives. And that, I think, sums up a lot about where we can get really trapped within rumination, automatic negative thought, and where we are trying to do things in our lives that are inherently difficult and that cause us discomfort that we want to avoid. And this can come out in different forms of psychopathology. Rumination is often studied in its relationship to different kinds of psychopathology. And we'll cover just a couple of those very quickly. I don't want to get too trapped within this because this is something that like uh the Blind Boy podcast and the episode that I mentioned. I want to be a largely non-pathologizing view of rumination and how we can deal with it through our own actions and creativity. So I don't want to get too lost in this, but I think it is worthwhile to discuss where we have seen rumination as playing a role in certain kinds of mental disorder. The most common place that rumination is talked about within the realm of psychopathology is in depression, that rumination has a tendency to possibly precede experiences of depression, but more often that it can deepen and lengthen experiences of depression. In part, this is because we are thinking about why I am depressed, how can I avoid being depressed, or how can I avoid feeling these negative emotions that are all around me within the experience of depression. And it tends to focus on how do I avoid thoughts and feelings within myself and not what can I go out and do that may make me feel better. Because most of those things that we can go out and do and that might make us feel better, we have to come through a substantial amount of discomfort just to even get out that door, just to go on a walk, to get some sunlight on our face, which is probably going to make us feel wonderful by the time we get back home, will have been a very uncomfortable experience to get started doing. And that is where rumination can prevent us from going and doing what we need to do, even if it's uncomfortable, to get ourselves out of a deeper discomfort. The other place that rumination has emerged as an important factor in is in our understanding of self-objectification and in its relationship to eating disorders. Again, these are places where attention from others or attention from ourself about things we don't like in our appearance leads us to focus very deeply on what is within our immediate control and experience. And to some degree, wanting to improve our appearance, wanting to improve our physical health can be very positive if it is directed toward healthy activities. However, many of the things that are within our control and things that are immediately achievable are through self-restriction. And that can be self-restriction in not eating in experiences of anorexia, or through binging and purging cycles, as we see in bulimia and related disorders. But these are all things that are within our immediate control that we can think through that we have access to. Again, these are directly pathologizing views and consequences of rumination. I don't want to get too trapped within that, but those are things where if you are doing any additional research on this subject, you'll see it come up within relationship to those disorders in particular. And there is a lot of excellent work that's been done. It is work that can be very helpful to read through. It is work that may require a journey with a therapist to really get into, unravel, and understand if any of that plays a role in your own life. Because again, rumination, listening to someone who is just out here on the internet is never a substitute for doing some of that more difficult work that may require professional assistance to get through in a way that. That is healthy and is considering you and the full scope of your life. So if any of that rang any kind of bell and you feel like you have access to those resources, certainly be sure uh to partake in that and go through that journey. It is a journey that I have been on. I have my own experiences with trauma, depression, and as I've discussed within the neurodivergent community, in my own experience of being a late diagnosed autistic dude. So coming back out of the world of pathology, what is it about rumination, about these backrooms in our minds that I think we can find ways of working with? Because rumination, if we put pathology to the side, can be both positive and negative. It's very easy to get lost in our own thoughts and to go on a journey. I find myself doing that whenever I'm reading a particularly good book. I may read a page or a paragraph that's particularly insightful to me, and my brain might chew on that little bit of text for ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour. I often come out of a certain sort of reverie to find that my e-reader has just straight up turned off in an effort to save its own battery from my worse inclinations of just becoming completely lost in my own thoughts. And some of that is wonderful. I experience my own tremendous experiences of flow states just in reading. I like getting lost in text of almost any kind. It can be I'm I'm currently in addition to There is No Anti-Mimetics Division Reading, an anatomy of fascism. Not exactly a wonderful light work, but as I reflect upon histories that led us to a First and Second World War that seem like they may be playing a role within our current societies, within politics that are playing themselves out right now around the world, I can very easily get lost reflecting on one or two paragraphs within that work and just playing through the movie in my mind of does this or doesn't this have a place in the world that I'm experiencing today? And to that degree, that is ruminative thought. Those thoughts may not end up going anywhere. I am getting trapped within those little backrooms in my own mind, exploring hallways that forever grow in a direction that leads me nowhere. And sometimes that's fine. But sometimes it can also be easy to get lost there in ways that become non-productive. In ways that only lead me into further, darker, spiraling thoughts. If I think about, let's say, as other topics I've brought up, AI. AI is an interesting set of tools. There may be some beneficial factors and facets to these technologies. But I also see how it has led to the detriment of those around me. I see how people are using chat boxes as a replacement for professional therapy and instead being led deep into psychosis. I see how it is eliminating jobs all across many different markets. I see how it is constricting the options that new graduates will have available to them while they're having CEOs give commencement speeches to them about how wonderful these tools that are eliminating entry-level jobs must be. And it's easy to get fully trapped in very dark recesses and corners of my own mind, and not find a way out, to not understand if there's going to be a light on the other side of that tunnel, or whether it's a tunnel that only spirals further and further into the earth with no return. And so how do we get back out of that? And that is where for me, and I think for some of the creators that I mentioned earlier, the very act of recording our thoughts can help lead us back from those back rooms and back into the light. For me, needing to record my thoughts out loud and maybe come to some kind of conclusion, some nice little lukewarm take at the end of that hallway between the platforms that my mind finds itself wandering in between means that I need to give those spiraling thoughts a sense of perhaps narrative. I wouldn't call what we're going through right now particularly a narrative, but it is instead of just a spiral looping back in and of itself, more of a spiral staircase, ascending from one starting point up to another space, up to another room in my mind. It's like riding a train from stop to stop. And a model train may not guide us to any new place. Most trains go in a loop, and that's just fine. Sometimes it is just the journey that is the purpose. But it is that journey. It's having, even if we're coming back to rest at a familiar spot, having some journey that we are going along. For me, recording is that journey. I prefer recording to journaling. For me, the act of journaling, the act of handwriting, is often fairly difficult. I have a tendency to grip pens like I'm trying to choke it to death. And that's not great. I don't have that light touch with a pen that makes journaling a particularly positive experience for me, and often my thoughts are going faster than my hand can go. And in my own mind, in all of my own thoughts, I'm one of those people who has an inner narrator and an inner monologue. Thoughts don't just occur, they are my voice working through the thoughts in my mind at the rate that I speak. That's sometimes wonderful. Sometimes it's an absolute hellscape to get trapped in and to wander across. But again, the act of putting my thoughts out into this kind of medium means that I need to have some spot that I am attempting to arrive at. And to that degree, I think that many different forms of creative pursuit give us that same way of working through our thoughts. Because any artistic pursuit involves a very deep examination of ourself. If this is painting, if it is writing, if it's music, even if it's gaming, we are putting ourselves into that medium. We are investing our thoughts and our energy into that journey and adding ourselves into it along the way. Really, it is whatever creative pursuit allows you to experience any kind of flow that makes you feel free, that allows time to pass as if it didn't fully exist. For me, again, recording is a part of that, the editing process in and of itself, although it's not something that's all that much fun, necessarily, is something that by using a set of predictable tools, I enter into from both the recording phase to the editing phase, a space in which time doesn't fully exist, in which I and the set of tools that I'm using are one in the same. You see someone on stage having an enrapturing performance with an instrument with their voice. You see a masterpiece painting that took who knows how many hours in sum to put together. You were seeing where other people have found those expressions where they are losing themselves in their art. And you don't have to have a joyous experience. Most of my flow states don't necessarily involve joy. They don't necessarily, I think, involve peak emotions, but it is losing yourself within your process. And in finding those processes where you can lose yourself, where you can direct your attention and get something out of that. Especially again, I think if you're able to take ruminative thoughts and then work that into any kind of creative process. And again, what you are doing with that, where you are putting that energy matters not at all in terms of the medium that you are approaching. It just matters that you have something where you can take whatever inner monologue might trouble you and direct it toward an objective. Again, for me, that is putting out this episode right here. It is my thoughts and feelings about rumination as I thought about them through the work of other creators, was something that I myself was becoming trapped in about how do I think about this in my own life. And here it is. Here is that journey along one line of those thoughts. Spoken out loud, as most of this has come to me. There's some light amount of scripting that went on before that, and that's also part of the process, part of the experience of flow over a longer uh intermediary period of time, is all of the steps of thinking through the topic and giving that topic structure and scaffolding, and then letting it spool its way out, having some safe way of working through that experience of those thoughts, and having it mean something at the end, not just letting it loop back in and around to itself, but having an objective here at the end. In this case, again. The publication of this is the receipt of that work. And that journey may twist and turn, it may be unpredictable. And again, like a train, like a model train, it may start and end at the same location, and that may be just fine, as long as you understand why you went along each path, why you had any particular stop along the way, that you let yourself not just spiral out of control and into a thought, but that you've taken an effortful approach to it, that you have crafted your own personal journey and monologue in whatever format you seek to choose. And I hope that whatever it is that you find as a way to turn rumination into a therapeutic practice, that perhaps you also publish that art along the way, because it is all art. Art is our expression in almost any format and medium. Be it a little audio play, perhaps only to myself, is a little audio log that just helps me think through my thoughts, whether it's the black door painted over and over again in severance, whether it's the reading of a wonderful book and reflections on it, whether it's the building of an extraordinary town in a video game. Whatever helps guide you, make sure to make that space for it. Make that space for it meaningful. Give yourself time, place, and permission to engage with it. I think far too often we're told that these pursuits are silly, and that if we're not doing it specifically to monetize it, that it's especially silly. There's no sponsor to this. There's only a cost incurred to me putting these words out there into the world, and I enjoy it particularly for that. This is not something that is a commercial pursuit. It is instead just one expression of creativity that I found myself in, and I hope you do too. Again, before I get too ruminative just on this last little thought, we should probably leave it off. But make sure wherever and whenever you can, you are making that space in your heart for where your mind goes. Allow it to build and ebb and flow however it wants. And I hope, as you do, I'll meet you here again in this little space between the platforms. Have a wonderful one.