Sunday, August 9th 2026
Before publishing her new book, Mind Drama, science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa sent a copy to someone working on a similar topic. This person betrayed his trust, later trying to publish some key findings in his own name. Although the situation was resolved in the end, Jackson Nakazawa’s mind continued to relive the bitter incident over and over. Falling prey to a lifelong tendency to get absorbed in a maelstrom of obsessive thoughts, she found herself trapped inside her own head — and, as she says, a bad neighborhood to live in.
Jackson Nakazawa is by no means alone in this regard. In a 2010 study, Harvard psychologists found that people spend up to 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about things other than what’s happening in the present moment, and this “mind wandering” is a strong predictor of unhappiness. Other studies show that this percentage has continued to increase, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a problem, because ruminating on what has been or what could happen is not only harmful to our mental health. It’s also harmful to physical health.
Whenever your mind relives a stressful scenario, explains Jackson Nakazawa, your body relives it too.
When we relive stressful situations from the past, or imagine stressful situations in the future, we activate our acute stress response. As part of this response, our bodies produce cortisol, a hormone that helps regulate alertness and reduces inflammation. While some inflammation is perfectly healthy, chronic inflammation has been linked to memory loss, as well as increased risk for cardiovascular disease and some cancers. And the more cortisol our bodies produce, the less cells respond to it, leading to an excess that can limit the hormone’s anti-inflammatory effect.
Of course, not ruminating is easier said than done. Many people ruminate without even realizing it, while those who do often may not seek help out of fear or shame. But even if you are aware of the problem, and willing to deal with it, the road can still be long and arduous.
Jackson Nakazawa would like to say that she can forcefully curb the dramas of her mind when they take off. But despite everything she knew as a science journalist and the yoga meditation she’d layered into her days for decades, she couldn’t. Luckily, she discovered some science-based techniques that help.
To close the door on your inner monologue, you first need to understand what rumination is and where it comes from. Speaking on Big Think via Zoom, Jackson Nakazawa called it a kind of survival response that has gone missing, an evolutionary adaptation that remains as powerful as it once was, though no longer as useful as it once was.
As he writes in Mind Drama, the human nervous system evolved long before conscious, logical thought, so it operates with a significant margin of error when assessing how much danger it faces. In prehistoric times, ruminating over danger kept our ancestors alive. Today, when true life-threatening encounters are rare, it tends to prevent us from living well.
Rumination originates from a network of brain areas collectively called the default mode network (DMN). There are actually three areas, Jackson Nakazawa explains: one at the front of the head, one on both sides, and one at the back. For a long time, this network has been considered a big nothing, a waiting station, like the machine running idle in the yard. Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that the DMN is responsible for daydreaming, memories, imagining future scenarios, and reflecting on social situations.
In other words, writes Jackson Nakazawa, it is the seat of your sense of self, your brain’s narrator, where you weave the stories of who you are, how you got here, what happened to you in life, and who you can become.
When people ask professional mental health help, often known as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Considered the gold standard of psychotherapy, or, in the words of Jackson Nakazawa, the first line of treatment, CBT can be roughly described as the attempt to improve well-being by questioning thoughts and changing behavior. It is effective for many problems, from obsessive-compulsive disorder to eating disorders.
However, according to a 2024 systematic review, CBT does not always work for rumination. The review’s authors found preliminary evidence that rumination-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (RFCBT) — a form of CBT that aims to change the thought process rather than the content of particular thoughts — was more effective in treating depressive symptoms, especially in people who tend to ruminate.
For her part, Jackson Nakazawa recommends the MIST approach. This approach works by addressing three distinct experiences that the DMN produces: mental imagery, intense emotions, and bodily sensations. (The T, if you’re curious, means tie it all together.)
MIST has two steps. The first is the description. By verbalizing the images, feelings, and sensations that your DMN produces, you can step outside of said vortex and see more clearly the things you’re ruminating about. Asked about the science behind this process, Jackson Nakazawa points to research by UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, who found that simply describing an emotion causes the amygdala — your brain’s threat detector — to calm down.
MIST takes this a step further: by doing the same for the physical sensations we experience and the mental images we create, we’re better able to put our ruminations on hold. place.
The language you find for yourself about your experiences, the author tells Big Think, is the language your brain will pay the most attention to.
The second step of MIST is listening. When we ruminate, we are tempted to ignore or suppress intrusive thoughts. But Jackson Nakazawa argues that we should do the opposite. For although rumination may seem like an immersion in our suffering, it is actually a means of avoidance. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, every fear is worse when you don’t face it.
When we ruminate, we don’t face our problems, we run away from them. But if listened to properly, writes Jackson Nakazawa, our ruminations are an invitation to attend to the parts of us that are afraid, anxious, sad, angry, and unheard.
Ultimately, she tells Big Think, we all ruminate about the same thing and get stuck in narratives that have a common denominator: Do I feel important to the people who matter most to me? The stories we get stuck on are the ones that tell us that somehow we’re not experiencing the sense of significance we long for.
And once you can listen, you can come up with a plan to address what’s wrong.
Mind Drama explores many other techniques for dealing with rumination, as well as the science behind them. Cyclic breathing with sighs, for example, signals the respiratory system that it can calm down, while self-distancing—talking to yourself as you would to another person—has been found to help people regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences.
Other techniques, such as journaling, daydreaming, and MIST itself, aim to treat rumination by fostering creativity. This is because both creativity and rumination are associated with increased activity in the DMN. The difference, explains Jackson Nakazawa, lies in the way this network works:
When we are in a thought spiral, the DMN works in a closed loop. It doesn’t interact with the rest of the brain — like a closed airport. But when we’re creative, the network turns from villain to hero: instead of a closed circuit, it’s interconnected.
This helps explain why rumination turns in on itself. When we ruminate, we search for an answer to our problems, but the answer never comes because we’re locked out of the areas of the brain that are responsible for solving problems.
The default mode network, she summarizes, produces both those awful wasted hours of negative overthinking and the best ideas we’ve ever had. It’s like the word itself: in the dictionary, rumination means both an unstoppable and repetitive spiral of thought, but also to contemplate, ponder, create ideas. Where does the difference lie? We come out emotionally from the confession. I stop the drama of the mind.
And by stopping the drama, the rest of the brain opens up again.
Like any well-thought-out book on therapy or mental health, Jackson Nakazawa’s closes with a few words of caution. Improvement is a matter of practice and dedication, and techniques that work for one person may not work for another. But while the therapy isn’t a quick fix — Jackson Nakazawa talks about gradual recovery, not a cure — there’s plenty of reason for hope, not least thanks to our ever-improving understanding of the brain itself.
Early in my career, she reflects, we were told that the brain is only neuroplastic until age 5, then 18, 25, 28. Now we’re seeing the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus throughout life. Your ruminations are nothing more than neural loops through your default mode network, engraved early in life, and this is reversible.
Taken from Bigthink.com. Brought to Albanian Tesheshi.com
Tim Brinkhof is a journalist of Dutch origin, living in New York, who writes about art, history and literature. He studied early Dutch painting and Slavic literature at New York University, worked as an editorial assistant for Film Comment magazine, and has written for Esquire, Film & History, History Today, and the History News Network.
Source: prizrenpost
