Most people who come to see us have already tried hard to stop the thoughts that keep them up at night, and usually that effort has made things worse. It helps to understand why. A good place to start is that worry and rumination, which tend to occur together, are two different things.

Worry is about the future. It rehearses things that have not happened yet and often never will. Rumination is about the past. It goes back over a conversation or a decision that is already done and keeps turning it over. The two can feel much the same, but they are not, and what helps with one will not always help with the other.

It is worth being clear about what worry actually is. The psychiatrist Judson Brewer makes a useful point: worry is not a feeling, it is a habit. The feeling underneath is anxiety, the unease you notice in your body. Worry is what the mind does with that unease. It can feel productive, as if going through every bad outcome were a way of preparing for them, but it never actually prepares you for anything. You just end up worrying more. The brain notices that worrying gives a brief sense of control, decides that is useful, and reaches for it again the next time something feels uncertain. This is why willpower works so poorly here. Telling yourself to stop worrying works about as well as telling yourself not to think about a white bear.

Force does not work, and most of us cannot empty the mind on command either. Having somewhere better to put your attention does help, and this is where worry and rumination part ways, because each one needs something different.

 

Worry and curiosity

Worry treats an uncertain future as a problem you can solve by thinking about it hard enough. You cannot, because the uncertainty is real and no amount of thinking makes it go away. Curiosity takes a different approach to the same uncertainty. Rather than running through the worst thing that could happen, it asks a simpler question: what is actually true right now, and what, if anything, would help. This is not positive thinking, and it does not pretend the situation is fine. It just changes how you handle not knowing.

Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo you feel looking at everything you might do or become. He did not see this as a flaw to be fixed. It comes with being a creature that has a future. Curiosity does not remove that openness, but it changes how you stand in it. And there is a simple reason it helps: it is hard to be curious and afraid at the same time. The two get in each other’s way, and the more you practise the curious one, the more room it has.

 

Rumination and absorption

Rumination is different. It is not reaching forward into an unknown future, it is going round and round a past that is already settled, and it is fixed on the self. The mind watches itself and circles the same ground. More thinking about yourself will not shift it. Being absorbed in something outside yourself will.

The philosopher Iris Murdoch described this better than most, and called it unselfing. She gives the example of standing at a window, anxious and resentful about some slight to her pride, when a kestrel appears outside, hovering. For a moment there is nothing in her mind but the bird. When she turns back to what was bothering her, it has shrunk. Nothing about her situation had changed in that minute. She had simply stopped being the centre of her own attention.

This is why we do not think of absorption as just distraction. Distraction is a way of not feeling something. Absorption is being properly caught up in something outside you, whether that is your work or the hills around us on an ordinary day. It does not get you away from the problem. It puts the problem back in proportion, by reminding you that the world is bigger than the part of it you have been brooding over.

 

What the work looks like

None of this works the first time you try it. You will still wake at 4am with your mind already going. The old conversation will still start replaying before you catch it. That is not failure, it is just what an old habit does. The work, as we see it, is less about stopping the thought and more about learning, slowly, that a thought is not an order you have to obey, and that you can put your attention somewhere else.

What helps is different for each. With worry, it is curiosity about what is actually in front of you. With rumination, it is being absorbed in something outside yourself. In both cases it comes to the same thing: turning your attention away from the loop and back towards the world.

If any of this is familiar, and you would like somewhere to think it through with someone, we would be glad to hear from you.