How to Escape a Thought Spiral
Rumination feels productive, but Donna Jackson Nakazawa says it's often a stress response that keeps you stuck in the same story.
The Big Idea: The endless replaying of conversations, mistakes, worries, and what-ifs isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival mechanism, but one that can become a trap.
Why It Matters: Many of us spend hours each week trapped in mental reruns, replaying old conversations, imagining future disasters, or searching for answers that never arrive. Research suggests that rumination is one of the strongest predictors of both mental and physical health. Learning to spot these thought spirals may be one of the most important emotional skills we can develop.
Try This: The next time you catch yourself replaying the same thought for the third or fourth time, pause and ask: What story is my brain trying to tell me right now? Naming the story often loosens its grip.
These ideas come from the new book Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Donna is a science journalist who has authored five books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, stress, and emotion, including Girls on the Brink, named one of the best health books of the year by multiple major publications. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today, among other outlets. Read on for five of her big ideas.
1. Being caught up in our mind drama is part of the nuts and bolts of being alive.
In researching the science of rumination—those sticky thought spirals we can’t escape—I discovered that most of us get lost in our mind drama far more often than we want to be, and more than is good for us. And according to recent indicators, most of us are ruminating more than we ever have before.
We often refer to ruminating as “thought spiraling” in our common vernacular—getting locked in a loop of negative, repetitive thinking you can’t turn off. Something happens, like a difficult conversation with a friend, a conversation with our partner that went sideways, or wondering why our co-worker made that snarky comment, and our mind goes off the deep end.
We replay past interactions or conversations, wishing we’d said or done something differently, or future-cast about what might happen next. We get lost in thoughts in which we judge ourselves and others harshly.
The world we’re living in doesn’t help! We’re living inside a perfect storm for thought spiraling: political chaos, a pandemic that’s barely in the rearview mirror, a loneliness epidemic, social media delivering an unending fire hose of fear and outrage. Our nervous systems are running hot all the time. Is it any wonder we can’t turn our brains off, or lower the volume?
Yet, a third of adults aren’t familiar with the word “rumination” or what it means. It’s very hard to solve a problem you’ve never named.
2. Thought spiraling is not a character flaw. It’s a survival response gone rogue.
Our very human tendency to get caught up in mind drama is our brain’s misguided effort to protect us. It just doesn’t know when or how to stop. We fall into the trap of overthinking and thought spiraling because our brains dangle before us a false promise: if you keep thinking about this, you’ll find the perfect answer. But the relief never comes, only more story spinning—and it feels dreadful.
You’re making dinner, or driving, and you get so lost in your mind drama—replaying that snarky thing your neighbor said, or the thing your sister did that was so upsetting—and suddenly you’ve lost whole swaths of time. When you’re caught up in ruminating, your brain’s story-spinning center goes on lockdown. It’s firing at full speed, but it’s cut off from the other brain areas that give perspective, creativity, and insight. Instead of solving the problem, you feel more tense, lonely, fearful, angry, and anxious.
“When you’re caught up in ruminating, your brain’s story-spinning center goes on lockdown.”
Getting swept up in rumination isn’t good for our mental health: your brain can’t tell the difference between something terrible happening right now in real life and you simply replaying it over and over in your head. Both have the same impact on your body and brain. You get caught up in a heightened stress response that ramps up inflammatory chemicals and hormones, which can be harmful to your health over time. This is why so many studies suggest that the degree to which we ruminate, more than any other mental act, determines our mental and physical health.
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3. We all ruminate about the same thing.
Whether it’s replaying that sarcastic remark your partner made, thinking about that critique from your boss, or looking at your phone 20 times to see if someone texted you back, rumination is always about our fear of not belonging and not mattering. This is why your mind loads up the same reels time and again, and why it can be so hard to get them to stop.
Your habitual patterns of rumination deserve gentle introspection and understanding rather than self-criticism or shame. That’s the tender thing underneath all the mental noise. When properly heard, our patterns of rumination are often a signal fire from the past, an invitation to tend to the unheard parts of ourselves: fear, anxiety, exile, grief, anger, hurt.
By listening to what our ruminations are trying to tell us, we can gain profound insights about ourselves that not only help us exit our thought spirals but also turn those insights into opportunities for growth. Yet most of us have never been taught a single strategy for getting out of it.
4. Scientists know exactly which part of the brain drives thought spiraling.
The most effective tool for exiting rumination is what I call the MIST Framework: It’s a tool I developed (based on the latest neuroscience) to help us quickly exit our thought spiraling by naming the experiences this specific area of the brain generates.
When we’re caught in our mind drama, we’re lost in a mental fog and can’t see clearly. MIST is an acronym to help us identify our recurring thought patterns with real specificity so we can see them and move past them:
M: Name the Mental Movies we keep replaying when we’re ruminating and the story that they tell us about ourselves. That might be something like, “Here is my old story of how people always dismiss me,” or “Here’s my old story about how I can’t speak up for myself when I need to.”
I: Identify the Intense Emotions our familiar mental reels trigger. That might be something like, “Here’s my story of how people diminish me, which makes me feel small and afraid.”
S: Name the Somatic Physical Sensations that accompany our mental movies and intense emotions, and also where we feel that tension in our body.
T: Tie It All Together. That might be something like, “Here’s my old story of how people dismiss me, which makes me feel small and afraid and my heart pound.”
When we use the MIST Framework, we see our familiar thought patterns spiral into new clarity. This is the first step toward emotional freedom. Suddenly, it’s not so painful. It’s as if our brain says: “Oh, you caught me!” This isn’t just positive thinking. It’s neuroscience. fMRI studies prove that naming your emotions precisely physically shifts brain activity.
5. “Rumination” has two sides.
Rumination can refer to our dark, brooding mental energy, but it can also mean “to muse” and to imagine and create. The goal is to exit the dark side of rumination and enter the upsides of rumination: creativity, insight, ideation, imagination, musing, and problem-solving.
The goal is to recognize that our thought spiraling is a signal fire from the past and to tend to those unseen parts of ourselves so we can see that hurt and pain—that old story—and emotionally process it at last. The goal isn’t to silence your mind. It’s to transform what you do with that energy so you can devote your precious mental energy to everything you love to think about and do.
Rumination isn’t your enemy. The things you ruminate on are messages. Learn to read them and you’ll find the path out.
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for highlighting Mind Drama!