Is that voice looping through your head at night doing any good?

Is that voice looping through your head at night doing any good?

The argument is over, apologies have been made, and the matter is considered closed. But when you lie down in bed, the scene starts playing again: who said what, what you said, what you should have said. By dawn, not a single new sentence or decision has emerged. Only exhaustion remains.

The most insidious thing about the voice is how it makes itself seem useful: I'm thinking, I'm weighing things up, it says. Yet thinking deeply and turning the same thought over and over are not the same thing. The latter is called rumination. A foundational review in the field reports that rumination exacerbates depression, increases negative thinking, impairs problem-solving, and predicts the onset of depressive episodes (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008).

So is the solution to stop thinking? In a classic psychology experiment, participants were asked not to think of a white bear; the bear came to mind more often (Wegner et al., 1987). A meta-analysis combining thirty-one studies also found that thoughts rebound after suppression (Wang et al., 2020).

What works is not driving the thought away, but creating some distance between ourselves and it. In an analysis combining data from one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight patients across nine studies, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy reduced the risk of relapse (Kuyken et al., 2016). In a meta-analysis of thirty-six studies, rumination-focused therapy proved more effective than general cognitive behavioral therapy at reducing repetitive negative thinking (Spinhoven et al., 2018).

The everyday strategy has three steps: notice it, reframe the question, and if there is no answer, take charge of your attention.

A short film I made based on the second chapter of my book Az Bilinen Doğrular. The voice-over is mine; AI was used for the visuals. Full references are in the first comment.