How to Stop Ruminating

All right, and welcome back. Been a minute here since my last episode as I just completed a cross country move and I'm very much still settling in.

But I really wanted to dive in here to talk about today's subject because it's been very up in my life and in particular, the life of many clients I'm currently working with. And what we're specifically going to talk about is how to stop ruminating. So rumination, right, is the process by which we keep running the same thoughts through our minds over and over, often compulsively and often with a focus on some kind of negativity.

Now, in the work I do, I want to expand rumination a bit to also include not just thoughts, but also feelings. I work deeply with men on the Enneagram in one of the courses I run, which is a personality type profile which loosely breaks down most personalities into either head based, heart based, or body based. And we all have access to all three of these. But just as often as I come across and work with men who are mental ruminators, there's many of us that are also emotional ruminators, meaning we keep bringing ourselves back to some kind of intense feeling over and over.

So rumination is this process by which either our heart or our mind keeps cycling a thought or feeling over and over. And, you know, it's actually related to this idea of cows chewing cud, right? They just sit there and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew. And it kind of never ends, right? I mean, it eventually does for cows, but it's a lengthy process.

Many men I know get stuck in this loop and don't know how to get out. So today I want to share three very specific techniques and strategies to help move you out of rumination, whether it's mental or emotional rumination. So strategy number one, and these are in no particular order, co regulation. So what is CO regulation?

This has been massively up in one of my coaching groups regularly. CO regulation is the process by which one nervous system helps another nervous system feel. Okay. CO regulation is something we are wired for as human beings. We are social creatures. In fact, we have an entire bundle of nerves that go from the base of our brain all the way down our spine and and are actually the highway that connects our body to our brain and vice versa.

And this connection of nerves is called the vagal nerve. And there is a lot of research from polyvagal studies now that show it is really the nerve of co regulation. And in particular, as humans, there's many things we offer each other to co regulate each other, to basically help each other feel okay. And co regulation as a concept is not something we often think about as adults. But if I ask you to think of a baby, it's pretty immediate, right?

So a baby starts crying, is in distress, mother, father or the caregiver come and try to soothe that baby, help that baby feel okay. So food is obviously one of our first primary mechanisms for soothing ourselves. But beyond that, CO regulation is the process of my nervous system connecting to yours. So how do we do that as human beings? A couple of key things. Eye contact, face to face eye contact.

This is one of the quickest hacks to to feeling okay. It's making deep and sustained eye contact with another human being, breath, syncing up our breath, slowing it down and deepening it with each other. So if we're hyperventilating and someone else who's not comes up and co regulates us, they're going to make eye contact and they're going to slow down their breath as an invitation to slow down ours.

And as we slow down our breath, we downshift out of this more hyper aroused sympathetic state where rumination often occurs to this more co regulated ventral vagal state. Which means I'm here, I'm present, I'm connected sound. This is a big one. The sound of another human being's voice directly hits our vagal nerve and tells it to down regulate.

Obviously not all sound, but in particular the soothing sounds that we can make as human beings. There's a reason parents do that kind of infant baby talk. Oh, you okay? Hi my friend, how you doing today? That sing songy voice actually send signals to our nervous system that we're okay. It's pretty fascinating. They've actually done some research here and it turns out that the particular vocal range that is the most soothing to us is the one that caregivers use with their kids when they're young.

We often use this with our pets as well and it often plays out in common folk music. Right. So songs by folk artists, which has a have a long standing tradition and in different cultures, I'm sure this would map out to other traditional music. These are songs that trigger that vagal nerve inside of us. So one of the reasons we turn towards music communally is because it soothes us. Singing, humming also soothes us because we can activate those sounds inside ourselves.

Now, last part of CO regulation is touch. This is a huge one, is just touching another human being and being held, being touched, being consoled with the hand on the shoulder. That all signals to our nervous system it's okay to downshift and feel you are safe right now. So CO regulation might look like making some eye contact, breathing deeply, maybe exchanging some sounds or words and then involving some touch.

The thing about this is you can't fake it, right? You actually have to connect with another human being to get this CO regulation. And it is absolutely shocking to me how many men are completely malnourished from this type of CO regulation because of the patriarchy, because of the man box things I've talked about before. As men, we in particular are guided away from CO regulation As we grow up, right as boys, it's open to us and then at some point we get disconnected from it and we're taught, no, you got to be tough, you got to be the lone wolf.

Figure it out yourself. Why CO regulation is so important is part of what. What I've seen show up as the most challenging rumination of thought for many men is the way we beat ourselves up, our inner critic. And the thing is we can't get ourselves out of that. So we set a goal. There's something we want to do, we're feeling dysregulated, we don't do that goal that feeds our beliefs about ourself.

And I, I am increasingly convinced one of the most successful strategies for accomplishing and moving towards what you want in life is making sure your nervous system is regulated. When our nervous system is regulated, which means we're relaxed, we're alert and we're able to put our attention on what we want it to be on. AKA we're not ruminating. We get more done, we take more risks, we have more energy available for forward facing action.

So for many guys, paradoxically, the thing is get regulated first and then action is going to come to you naturally. But so many of us, because of the way our culture is set up, we are fried, we are burnt out and we are constantly in a fight or flight or shutdown state. So getting CO regulated with, with another human being is one of the keys to stopping rumination. Now next up, here's another huge one time in nature.

This is a really important one and I see it show up and it's a big part of the Men's work I do, and most men's work out there right now, it's slowing your nervous system down and getting the fuck offline, right? So not being plugged in every moment, which often keeps us in that agitated, hyper aroused, ruminating state. Now why this is so important and this is just a theory, so I'm going to share that.

But it matches with my experience here. I heard the iceman Wim Hof talking about it once. And so we have the amygdala, right, which is kind of one of the oldest parts of our nervous system and brain that alerts us and is constantly scanning the environment for threats and danger. This is what it's meant to do. And he had a theory that in our modern world, where we're kind of buffered by culture, society, civilization and safety, that amygdala doesn't have a whole lot to do.

In a large part for most of us, not all of us, the world is much safer than it's ever been before. So we're sitting in our office on our computer all day and our amygdala kind of has nothing to do. It has all this energy, right? We're sitting in a plain room or in our apartment or whatever that might be and there's not too much to scan. So the idea is it gets over energized and so it starts to get anxious and it starts kind of looking for threats because it has nowhere to channel that energy.

Wim Hof considers, you know, both breath work, which is another tool here for co regulation and self regulation that I'm not going to talk about so much today. But he considers working out the amygdala just like you would work out a muscle, one of the ways you can relax it. So what does this have to do with nature? Well, when you get into nature your amygdala has plenty to do. There's lots of sights, there's lots of sounds, there's horizons, there's plants, there's movement all around you.

You are having to track so much more in space. And so that amygdala, which had all this energy and nothing to do with it before, suddenly it's being used as it's supposed to and as it is used correctly, it calms down. You know, I think of it was the first time coming out of the pandemic, I had really been back out in the world. Plus I just had a daughter a couple year before, so I'd been very insulated. But point being, with one of my men's groups, a shadow Work group I meet with twice a year.

We went on a river rafting trip in southern Oregon and it was stunning, absolutely beautiful. One of the most wild stretches of rivers left in the United States, meaning people don't tend it. It's wild, it's chaotic. As I was floating down the river, looking, just gazing, I realized there is so much visual, aural, so audio information here that I can't possibly comprehend it.

Right. I was looking at some rocks which had like a fractal pattern in the sky behind them and some trees and there was so much sensory information there that it was captivating to me. But it really struck me, wow. I'm sure some computer scientist or someone here could figure it out and actually calculate the actual amount of information in one snapshot of whatever I was looking at compared to a snapshot of what I'm looking at in my office at home.

Way more information, way more stimulation in nature gave my amygdala a lot more to do. In addition to just being outside the sun, the breeze, the temperature fluctuations, the movement of creatures, I had to be on an alert. And even if it's just going for a hike, in nature, you are exposing your amygdala to a lot more information. Right. There's a lot of articles these days about in Japan they call this flight forest bathing.

So you actually just go for a walk in the forest and it's refreshing. It's like taking a nice warm bath for your nervous system. And I think this is why it's regulating our amygdala by actually exposing it to a proper amount of stimulation so it doesn't have all this access energy, which when it has nothing to do with it, gets turned into mental and emotional rumination. So co regulation time in nature.

And now the last one. Just talking about this on a call with some of my members of my Pillars community last night. This is filling your life up. So a lot of the work I do with men is around dating and relationships in particular. And I'm very fervent and against this whole idea of playing games. Right. One particular place we see this is creating artificial scarcity. This sense and belief men sometimes feel like they have to do.

Oh, I don't want to seem too eager, I don't want to seem too available to her. So I'm going to wait this many days to text her or respond or ask her out again or whatever that might be. I don't believe in that bullshit because I think it's inauthentic. You're trying to pretend you're something that you're not, you're trying to pretend you're not having a certain feeling that you are. What I say is the best way to work with that. Because there is such thing as having too much energy or coming in too strong or feeling too needy, in a sense is fill up the rest of your life.

What does that mean? It means instead of artificially creating scarcity around your attention, commit to more things so you have less free available attention. Time and energy. One of the most powerful ways I often talk about this is get involved in a men's group, bring some of that energy to other men, check in with them, be plugging in with them constantly, daily, weekly in your meetings, whatever that might look like. But this also goes beyond that, to fill your life up with things that are meaningful, that you are passionate about, that take time on your schedule.

So this is one of the paradox, or not a paradox, but one of the cool things I see in the program I do run for dating and relationships just by committing to the program, which comes with homework and calls and stuff you have to do every single week. Men's attention becomes less free in a sense that they're focusing on the course. What that often does is for people in their lives, it shifts how they're experiencing them because they're less available. They're more on purpose and direction, focusing on themselves in a healthy way, not a selfish way.

But so suddenly it's like, no, I can't do that Tuesday night because I got this call or I got this men's group, or I'm checking in with this buddy here. That is a meaningful, powerful way to use your time taking care of yourself. What I call the kind of shit work this is, the unsexy work that makes us present powerful, purposeful men is building a life and schedule. Or as my friend and mentor, Dr. Glover puts it, you know, making your cake.

And then a relationship becomes the icing on top. But the more committed we are, so the more we're taking and committing to some kind of responsibilities in our lives, often the more fulfilled we are and the less time for rumination we have. I can tell you as a father, I had to shift a lot in my behavior when I became a dad. I didn't. I haven't had the time to ruminate nearly as much.

Here's my day. This stuff has to get done. Here we go. Becoming a parent has been amazing for me and actual my health and well being and mental state because suddenly I need that energy for meaningful things in my life. But it doesn't have to just be parenting, right? Joining a club or a group or a dance class or a men's group. Getting on the path of mastery.

Something I'll be talking about in a couple weeks here. The process by which there's something you feel deeply engaged by and you have a natural drive and impulse to become a master of it. That can take up our time and energy. Investing in your physical health, working out, getting enough sleep, dialing in your diet. These are all things that are going to take that energy. So filling your life up. For someone like me that lives really off of my calendar, this is quite literal in that what am I filling my calendar up?

If my calendar is empty and there's nowhere for all this energy to go, I'm often going to end up ruminating unless I'm taking care of myself and getting co regulated and going into nature. So this isn't about getting so busy or ignoring parts of your life. It's creating things that you are deeply engaged with in life. You know, we often talk about this in the productivity space as the flow state. When you get so connected to something, your thoughts are fully one with that activity, time completely disappears.

It's a intensely pleasurable state for most human beings. To find that flow state which is really just engagement. Create things in your life that you are engaged by watching tv, scrolling social media. These things don't really count, they're faux versions of that. Often it involves some kind of creativity or learning or service in the process. So we have co regulation with other human beings time in nature to regulate our amygdala and filling your calendar up with engaging things that provide you meaning.

If you start to weave those three things together, you will find your tendency to ruminate, whether that's mentally or emotionally, will drop drastically. And the thing is when we're not ruminating, we're actually more present in the moment. So really important for relationships. If the brunt of your attention is on your thoughts or your feeling state all of the time, that's attention that's not on whoever you're with.

All right. If you want some help getting over ruminating, reach out. There's many ways to work with me. You can do a live retreat and co regulate yourself with other men, your amygdala in nature and in fact you're committing to something powerful. You can do a breakthrough coaching group with me. You can do the pillars of presence, dating and relationship program. This is all available on my site.

You can't do this all alone, so reach out looking forward to it. Until next time. If you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men. Apply.