Sometimes they come for you in your dreams.

I recently had a session with a therapist where we went over the concept of rumination. Over the years, I've come to learn that a bad habit of mine is to overthink, to ruminate over a subject in perpetuity in a subconscious attempt to solve whatever is troubling me. The implicit theory behind the rumination is that if one thinks about a subject enough, they will find some conclusion or path of action to solve it. The problem can be "figured out" and therefore can be solved if one simply thinks long and hard enough.

A wider perspective from a therapeutic lens might shed a different light: rumination is an avoidance strategy to protect oneself from the pain of reality. Rumination allows one to live in a space where the problem might be solved — there is hope. For example, one may ruminate on a loved one's chronic illness or over a breakup. The overthinking convinces oneself that there has to be a solution, that thinking and spending cycles will open the door to a path forward.

Often, however, there is no path forward besides acceptance, the final stage of grief, through the four others of denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. Rumination hosts these other stages, though its most frequent visitor is the implicit bargaining behind it.

The therapist I spoke to had a valuable distinction to offer. The ruminations, the thoughts, they are not things that happen to us but things we do. There is no blame to the fact that we do these things. They are often founded in a reasonable survival story. However, they are behaviors, not phantoms. The reasoning behind this distinction is primarily to offer us agency and control over the behaviors. Though we may be stuck in a pattern of replaying a scenario over and over again, ruminating on what happened and what could have or could be, we are still in the driver’s seat and can take back the wheel. Awareness is the first tool we can deploy to turn off the autopilot and bring control back into our own hands.

I resonate with the approach for agency. It feels more liberating. And yet, there is still a gap.

Sometimes I wake from a troubling dream. The dream is often about something that I have a habit of ruminating on. Just this morning, I woke up at 4 a.m. from a troubling dream. It was not a nightmare to jolt me out of sleep, but enough unpleasantness to bring me to consciousness. The half-awake state is a vulnerable ground for rumination. In a fully conscious state, I am better able to employ awareness or tools of distraction to pause the overthinking. In a sleeping state, there is little I can do.

This may be a result of certain ruminations having been so habituated that they are now reflexive. When thoughts are exercised enough, they become part of our subconscious. Perhaps then it is also possible to rewire the mind to habituate itself to thoughts that are euphorigenerative.

Curating our information diets and habits of the mind may be the key to rewiring harmful mental reflexes, the ones so deep they come for us in our dreams. Like some diseases, they cannot be attacked directly because they are not accessible in a conscious state. Perhaps then the only path is in tending and cultivating the garden of our unconscious.