ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, do you know the origin of the word ruminate?
ADI IGNATIUS: I actually do. It comes from ruminants, those animals we love who chew their cud all day.
ALISON BEARD: Yes, exactly. Giraffes, cows, camels. And I didn’t always know that, but once I learned it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it so perfectly describes what humans are doing when they ruminate. We’re taking our worries about making the right decisions or replaying past mistakes and we just continue to chew on them over and over in really unproductive ways that diminish our focus and ultimately at work hurt our performance.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I assume a lot of our listeners, a lot of leaders struggle with this kind of overthinking, whether or not they talk about it publicly. I mean, think about you get an evaluation and your boss tells you six positive things and one area that needs work and you can obsess on that one negative, maybe even slightly negative thing because we have trouble letting go of them.
ALISON BEARD: Yes, exactly. And wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. So our guest today is going to explain how to break out of this cycle. Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a journalist and author of the book, Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist.
I spoke with her about what’s happening in our brains when we get stuck in this type of thinking, how it plays out at work, and most importantly, concrete practical things that we can do to stop and even shift negative thoughts to positive ones. Here’s our conversation.
How do you define rumination and how do you see it negatively affecting our professional lives?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Well, it’s interesting because when we look at the research on rumination, we find that a third of people don’t really know what the word means, and this is kind of an issue because we’re ruminating more than we ever have before, and what I mean by that is those sticky, icky thought spirals that you get stuck in that you would rather not be spending your precious mental energy on and yet you can’t exit them, or they keep sucking you back in seductively.
We can kind of think of it this way. We don’t want to be doing it, but we keep doing it. We replay conversations, things that happened in the workplace, or we predict what might happen next in the future, and often our ruminative thought spiraling is marked by criticizing ourselves and criticizing others.
ALISON BEARD: And so briefly explain what’s going on in our brain when we’re stuck in these types of thought patterns.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: It’s so fascinating, because over the past few years we’ve come to see that rumination is really taking place in one specific area of the brain known as the Default Mode Network. Not to get too techy on people, but it’s an area of three brain networks, literally one at the front of the brain, one in the side and one in the back. And when we’re in self-referential thinking, what do I mean by that? Oh, what did they think of me? What did I do wrong? What was that about in that meeting or what did my boss mean by that cryptic email? When that area of the brain gets going on self-referential thinking, it goes on lockdown. It’s over-performing, and we can’t get out of it.
Well, what does that mean in the workplace? It means that that area of the brain on lockdown is preventing 267 other areas of the brain that allow for creativity, ideation, connection, problem solving, healthy discussion. They’re all shut down. Task positive areas of the brain cannot function when the Default Mode Network has a spun up in thought loops that don’t serve us.
ALISON BEARD: You mentioned that we’re ruminating more than ever before. Why is that?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Well, no one knows exactly why, but we have a lot of good theories about it, and those theories include our lives online. We’re experiencing this unending fire hose of negativity and outrage. We all spend a lot of time on our devices on social media, which algorithms are spinning up that kind of over-emotional response. But also in the workplace specifically, we’re doing everything digitally, like Slack, email, very little face-to-face. The human brain needs an awful lot of context to discern if something is threat positive or to reduce threat in terms of our social comfort and our wellbeing. When we’re doing everything on Slack or we’re doing everything through email or Microsoft Teams, we don’t get the context to discern whether or not there is some kind of social emotional threat.
And most workplace drama is really mind drama. It’s that over-interpretation, that thought spiraling around, what did that email mean? Or how come those two people agreed in the meeting? It seemed like they cut me out. All of that that’s happening without the context of our human ability to read thousands of micro signals that might just tell us that this is not a big deal, we sort of erased them and lifted them out of the workplace.
ALISON BEARD: We are taught to be thoughtful at work, particularly people who are successful. They know how to prepare for risks, they know how to review previous situations to make sure they can improve in the future. So how do you recognize when you’re going beyond that sort of good type of thinking and analysis and instead veering into more dangerous, unhelpful territory?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Right. So we tend to think of thinking as this very positive thing, but we have to be able to distinguish between that kind of healthy thinking, productivity, problem solving, creativity focus, ideation, all the good things we want in ourselves and in the people who work with us versus unhealthy overthinking.
So the first thing you want to ask yourself is: is this something I’m choosing to think about? Because rumination is like a runaway car, right? We can’t put on the brakes or we try, but we’re sucked back in over and over again. And another question we can ask ourselves is this the first time I’ve thought about this? Usually the answer is no. I was thinking about it in the shower. I was thinking about it when I was walking the dog. I was thinking about it when I was making dinner. Am I losing whole swaths of time?
You can also ask yourself, is this going to matter a year from now? Is this going to matter five years from now? And that usually is a good indicator that we’re caught up in something that really isn’t going to matter in the long term, but it’s mattering to our immediate sense of belonging. And of course the big question is this getting me anywhere? Am I coming any closer to a solution? I can promise you that rumination is extremely seductive, that it will give you an answer, but it’s a false promise. In the end, you’re not getting closer to a solution.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. So if those questions don’t stop you from overthinking, you do have recommendations to break out of the negative thought patterns.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Yes.
ALISON BEARD: Why don’t you walk me through and our listeners through your MIST technique and explain why it works.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: So I went around to a lot of the top neuroscientists in the country and worked to come up with a framework based on what we can see on FMRI scans that will actually unlock this part of the brain that locks us down into rumination and came up with the MIST Framework.
MIST, it’s an acronym, of course, because what writer doesn’t love an acronym. M is for mental imagery. So when we’re ruminating, we see a lot of movie-like reels that we load up time and time again, right? Usually these reels are creating a story that we’ve been telling ourselves for a long time about us, about ourselves. So can you think of something that you’ve been ruminating about lately that’s just coming back up in the same reel over and over again and kind of identify it?
ALISON BEARD: So my producer asked me to think of something that I’ve been ruminating about related to my professional life, and so I actually went back to an old story. So it’s not something I’m currently ruminating about, but it clearly still sticks with me. When I was working in London at the Financial Times, I was the editor of the House and Home section and it became a standalone section apart from the Weekend FT, and as a result of that, I on Fridays would need to go to the morning meeting. Now, the morning meeting was led by the editor-in-chief. It had all the most senior accomplished editors in the paper and they would explain what stories that they were running that day and this was interest rate hikes, corporate mergers, military conflicts. And then I, a young woman at the time would go in and talk about my feature on the Milan Furniture Fair or properties in Spain.
And so it was a nerve-wracking experience to begin with. And then one day, I was talking about an interview about a garden or a home with the former UK First Lady, Cherie Blair, and I mispronounced her name Cherry and I wanted to drop into the ground and I just thought to myself, oh my gosh, I have confirmed their opinion that I am this silly little girl in their room of big important men and I thought about it for a really long time afterwards. So walk me through how if you had known me then, you would’ve made me stop thinking about it.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: So I would start with the MIST Framework and I would say, “Okay, here is my old story from you in your words. Alison, tell me, what’s your old story?” It might be something like, “Here’s my old story of how as a woman I’m dismissed or here’s my old story of how I can’t find the right words. So here’s my old story of how…” Go ahead.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I would say here’s my old story of how when I joined the Financial Times almost directly out of college, I felt a little bit out of my depth and I did have to work alongside extremely accomplished reporters and editors and I needed to learn how to hang with them.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Good. Excellent. That’s it. Here’s my old story of how I’m out of my depth in comparison to the people around me. And then we’re going to bring an I, which is for interior emotion, intense emotion. So every time we load these same reels, it gives rise to a lot of emotions. So we’re going to go from M, we’re going to add that on to your sentence. Here’s my old story about how I’m out of my depth around accomplished people, which makes me feel…
ALISON BEARD: Okay. Here’s my old story of how I feel out of depth around accomplished colleagues and it makes me feel anxious.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Great. And so as we’re doing that, we’re going to go into S for somatic sensations. Those are just physical bodily sensations that as I said, across evolutionary time we evolve so that whenever we detect social threat, we develop these big chemical responses and they show up in our body. So where is it showing up in your body?
ALISON BEARD: I have a distinct memory of just feeling my cheeks flushed and also butterflies, like sick to my stomach.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: So here’s my old story of how I feel out of my depth with accomplished colleagues, which makes me feel anxious and my stomach churn or whatever. Let’s do the whole thing, and that’s T for tie it together.
ALISON BEARD: Here’s my old story of how I feel out of my depth around accomplished colleagues, which makes me feel anxious and makes the blood rise to my cheeks and gives me butterflies in my stomach.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Exactly. Okay. So that is MIST. We did mental imagery, intense interior emotion, and we did somatic sensations and we tied it all together. That is your personal rumination code.
ALISON BEARD: How does that help?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Because often the kind of things that we’re caught in that are sticking with us, the conversation we’re replaying from the lunch meeting yesterday or the email that we’ve read to our spouse three times like, “What do you think he meant by this?” Often the story that gets going in our head, which is, “Hey, I’m out of my depth,” for you, I’m telling you yours. It’s often a story that’s run for very long time throughout our lives. Our personal codes of rumination, they’re signal fires from the past and we had very good research on this that often our early experiences, they don’t stay in the past, they become templates.
And that means that later at work an email in which your idea is critiqued in a very professional way, it might not feel neutral. It might feel like a threat to your sense of mattering and belonging. And the number one thing we ruminate about is our sense of whether we matter to the people and places that matter to us.
ALISON BEARD: So we’ve asked ourselves the questions, like is this helpful thinking or not helpful thinking? We’ve done the MIST Framework to figure out why the pattern might be repeating for us, but then you also have some suggestions for just actually disrupting the thought in the moment. Even if we know it’s unhelpful, when we know where it’s coming from, we still can’t help ourselves. There’s some advice that you have.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Yes. And that advice is also based on neuroscience and the idea that the longer we ruminate or the longer we get caught in a specific rumination pattern, which we all have, the more we’re throwing down that neural circuitry that makes it easier and easier for us to get sucked back into those thought patterns. And what we want to do is interrupt those neural tracks. And so we want to do what I call ballistic interruptions by, again, using language as our portal to escape. These can be really, really simple. You have to come up with your own, whatever really resonates and lands with you with emotional grit. It can be as simple as something like cancel, or not today, you don’t.
Now here’s another trick for your brain. When you use your name in the third person or you refer to yourself as you, your brain is more likely to pay attention, and the more that we’re able to do this in a way that has landing power for us, the better it is. I was working with an artist and she was really caught up in her colleague’s ideas of her work and she’s quite talented, well-known artist. She could not get the things that other people were saying. So she actually came up with something where she painted the word rumination and then she crossed out the M and it said ruination and she keeps it up in her studio.
ALISON BEARD: That’s a good thing for all of us to remember.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: So that she can get to the creativity that fuels her work versus caught in the thoughts of what other people think about her work.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. That reminds me that journaling is another thing you recommend. Why does that help?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: It helps to get the experience out of our body and onto the page so that our brain feels a sense of release. And we have absolutely fantastic evidence from James Pennebaker that when we journal about things that are very difficult for us, it has a measurable effect on our bodies.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting. I don’t journal, but I do when I’m stewing over something tend to call one of my friends and go for a walk with them and then I just sort of get it all out. I’ve always thought of it as sort of like confessional. It’s something I’m feeling really bad about and so it’s really important for me to talk about it and get it out. Is that the same thing?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: I think it is the same thing that I want to pick up on that for a second because it’s interesting that when we share something that’s happening with a friend, usually that’s a good thing. It’s a good coping mechanism for rumination and women tend to do that more than men statistically and it’s called tend and befriend. It’s like, okay, you’re walking together, she’s listening to you, she’s helping you put it in perspective. You feel like I got that off my chest and I’m still loved and accepted by this person.
ALISON BEARD: And I should note that I do this at work too. I call my two best work friends and I vent to them and ask them what they think about how the situation played out and what I could have done differently and all of that.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: And you still matter to them. You still belong, you’re still accepted. But there is good research on what we call co-rumination and that’s a problem. That’s when you go to someone and you unload about the thing that your boss did and they’re like, “Yeah, I know. Here’s what he did to me last week.” And it goes on and on and then suddenly you might even get other people on it. Co-rumination can be really dangerous because people lose perspective. They’re not doing the MIST Framework. They’re not seeing, “Okay, what is my old story that’s showing up here?” They’re believing everything and they’re reinforcing others’ negative beliefs about a third-party or situation or person.
ALISON BEARD: A group negative vicious cycle.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Exactly.
ALISON BEARD: Can any new technologies, and I’m particularly thinking about gen AI chatbots help in all of this?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: It’s so funny because people do turn to AI chatbots for answers to problems, but I would go back to what we started with, which is that it’s so much better to get this face-to-face with someone you trust and care about. We have very good research from Ted Kaptchuk that heard that when we’re in the room with another human, neurobiologically relaxing about difficult situations, it gives us the same good feelings as the placebo effect, which are measurable. I don’t think we’re ever going to get that from chatbots.
ALISON BEARD: You also talk about the importance of rest, and I would say that when I’m ruminating, it’s most often at 3:00 AM in the morning when I’m woken up and can’t get back to sleep. So how do you solve the rumination problem when rumination is causing lack of sleep?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Well, so when I talk about rest, I’m not necessarily talking about sleep, I’m talking about deep rest, mental rest for the brain. And just to step back, yes, you are ruminating not only about the number one thing that we all ruminate about, whether we matter to other people who matter to us, but also at the most common time, 3:00 AM, that is it. Most of us ruminate in the middle of the night.
So if you want to get deep rest, which will actually help you to sleep better at night, the best way for the brain is not just sleep, it’s through doing techniques that allow the brain to turn down while you are still in a waking state. What does that look like? So deep breaths can look like doing body scans. My favorite is by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I can do it in my head now where we allow the brain to rest while we kind of turn on the body.
Yoga Nidra is another wonderful technique. If you can’t do Yoga Nidra, you can’t do body scans, go in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are terrific for turning off the brain and allowing the whole brain to sync up. So what we’re trying to do is reduce the stimuli that we’re constantly sending our brains that make us overthink and thought spiral, and up the sensations and awarenesses that make the whole brain productive.
So a body scan is pretty simple. It’s kind of like a meditation where you go through various parts of your body. Even the army uses these, by the way, the army uses these to help soldiers go to sleep very quickly after a day on a battlefield. It’s very effective for taking a brain offline and bringing your whole physical emotional system into homeostasis. Yoga Nidra is really great. You just spend a lot of time concentrating on fine points in the body like the inside of your cheek or the tip of your toenail until all your left and right hemisphere light up together. That’s really the goal here. And the Default Mode Network transforms from sort of our enemy to our friend because it’s the same area of the brain that gives rise to that kind of flow state that we’re all looking for.
ALISON BEARD: Well, that brings me to my next question because you do say in the book that it’s positive to flip negative thinking to positive thinking, which sounds related to that switch you just talked about with the Default Mode Network. So talk to me about how exactly that works because I am a little skeptical.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Yeah, no, I was too. I’m like, “Okay, this is getting too sort of motivational fluff for me versus neuroscience,” which I am a science reporter, but I take heart in the fact that I have used this with now a lot of people to good effect. So for instance, if you can allow the fear that is in your rumination to work for you and become your friend, it can be very, very helpful. So I’m going to use a non-workplace example here just because we all have lives, right?
ALISON BEARD: And rumination in our personal lives bleeds into our professional lives because we’re distracted and we can’t perform at our best.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: 100%. It might not be your colleague. It could be the snarky thing your husband said to you in the kitchen that morning is still with you in your 10:00 meeting. That is part of being human. So one person I worked with had that kind of a situation, kind of a perpetually cranky teenager-like husband who would say things that would stick with her for a very long time. So she started to beat up on herself a lot about why she couldn’t speak up for herself. She couldn’t come up with a good way to respond to him. And as she started to figure out what her rumination code was, the effect for her was she began to find her voice again.
And so one day we were sort of unpacking all that she had learned by using the MIST Framework and ballistic interruption and other techniques and she was able to take that situation of beating up on herself or having stayed silent for so long and turn it around and say to herself, “Okay, but actually being in this marriage allowed me to develop this voice.” And so that helped her find some peace with the situation that she’d been in. And I would say the same could apply if someone had a really difficult boss. Finding that ability to voice oneself, that is the thing that comes out of working with and recognizing our ruminative thought spiraling patterns. And when we find our voice we lose the fear.
ALISON BEARD: Do you know or have you worked with any business leaders who have been able to become more successful in their careers because they’ve tackled a really bad rumination habit?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Well, a lot of the people I’ve spoken with are at fairly high levels of what they do, and what I found is that when people are able to work through their ruminative patterns, they don’t react so much to the small things that are going on around them. They lose the reactivity that takes them out of the productivity and that is a really big deal. They’re also better able to reduce psychological threat for the people around them. So yes, I have seen people go from a state of more head spinning to an ability to bring people together that creates a synergy that’s better for the entire company.
ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like your view is that part of a manager’s job is to make sure that their team members aren’t given a lot of things to ruminate about, whether that’s because their psychological safety or great communication or sort of other leadership skills we count as important.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: Right. And they’ve trained themselves to recognize when they’re being activated and they’ve trained their managers to recognize when they’re being activated. And on the other end, from the bottom up, they’re offering the ability to allow people to ask for more clarity so that when things are really ambiguous, if you leave things in a really ambiguous way for your staff, they’re going to ruminate more. We cannot read into five words in an email all the things that we need to read into, and to allow people to ask the next person up, their manager or their boss, for more clarity, that is a two-way street to offer clarity and allow people to ask for more clarity. When we remove the ambiguity and we offer psychological clarity and support and safety, people perform better.
ALISON BEARD: Because you’ve been studying this for so long, are there any tips that you would give leaders for learning to recognize when other people are ruminating and could be helped with some of the techniques that you’re talking about?
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: I think the first thing is that when you notice that someone is being quiet or their responses seem overly charged to the situation at hand, or most commonly for managers, what I hear is that this team doesn’t want to play well with that team or this manager doesn’t want to play well with that manager. Those people are coding what’s happening through their thought patterns that have often been around for a really long time. But when managers are trained in a way to recognize their own ruminative patterns and to allow people to ask for clarity, a lot of that goes away.
I want to remind people here that a third of us don’t even understand the concept of rumination and yet we spend a good amount of at least four hours a day caught in a negative ruminative state. That’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of productivity. And sometimes just having this conversation around the fact that we’re doing it and it’s okay to talk about it and it’s okay to ask questions and it’s okay to make this part of the conversation can go a long way.
ALISON BEARD: Well, Donna, thank you so much for being with me. I really appreciate it.
DONNA JACKSON NAKAZAWA: It’s great to be with you, Alison. Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Donna Jackson Nakazawa, author of the book, Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist.
Next week, Adi speaks with Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup Methodology about how organizations can avoid becoming corrupt.
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Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
