t’s been two days since
you asked a co-worker to look
over your draft, but you haven’t
heard anything from him yet.
If you find yourself starting
to anxiously obsess, thinking
“He thinks I’m dumb” or “My
drafts are always bad and never worth reading” or
“He’s not responding because I’m a horrible em-
ployee who’s about to get fired,” your self-talk has
become self-destructive.
This obsessive kind of negative thinking is called
rumination. It happens when our minds wander to-
ward the negative events in the past or the possi-
bility of negative events in the future. Rumination
shouldn’t be confused with healthy reflection, dur-
ing which we analyze specific elements of a problem
to better understand it. When we ruminate, we’re
not focusing on solutions but instead fixating on the
problems (or potential problems) themselves.
Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth
and Daniel Gilbert estimate that we spend only
about half of our time focused on the present. Why
does that matter? We’re happiest when we live in
the moment, no matter what we’re working on. In a
study of 2,250 people (which is still ongoing through
the Track Your Happiness app), Killingsworth and
Gilbert found that a wandering mind is usually an
unhappy mind.
The good news is that you can learn to bring your
mind back to the present and stop ruminating. The
first step to feeling better is to notice your cognitive
distortion—the dirty tricks your brain plays on you.
Psychologist Martin Seligman identified the “three
WHEN DOUBT
BECOMES
DESTRUCTIVE
Obsessive negative thinking can
sabotage our ability to focus on solutions.
Here’s how to reframe your attitude
BY LIZ FOSSLIEN AND MOLLIE WEST DUFFY
THE SCIENCE OF STRESS HANDLING STRESS
I
