Why is It Important to Practice Self-compassion to Overcome Rumination?

One of my patients says, “I can't do it right; I know I'm going to fail, and I can never do it right.” These harsh, self-directed thoughts that go along with them all the time provoke their inability to satisfy simple desires, such as hiking in the park, meeting a friend for lunch, or meditating. My patient, during her therapy sessions, repeatedly thought about worrying negative thoughts.

Note: This article is based on psychotherapist Linda Graham, who tells us about her experience helping one of her patients overcome rumination by practicing self-kindness.

But rumination is not a solution to our anxiety, as it causes us to enter a state of chaos that we can not get out of, and we may even get depressed so that events look worse than they are and our feelings about ourselves become negative. The actual effective solution is to focus on developing self-compassion. This means being vigilantly aware of the pain we feel during moments of failure, knowing that defects are part of human nature, and then arousing feelings of kindness and interest towards ourselves in those moments.

I started treating my patient as part of a five-day self-compassion workshop and asked her to support her daily practice with writing. This workshop helped her write her thoughts during our sessions, write a paragraph for herself practicing self-compassion, or take notes on things she found effective in changing her mood.

A new study suggests we were using a valid principle. Psychologist Natasha Odou and psychologist Jay Brinker of the Australian National University found that writing about a negative experience out of self-compassion significantly improves mood by allowing you to process negative emotions rather than avoid them. In contrast, the two scientists noted that participants in the same study who wrote about a negative experience in writing had a lower mood and symptoms of depression. While it is sometimes advisable to express feelings as a healthy response to passive events, doing so, doing so led in this case to an increase in rumination.

These findings support the growing realization that self-compassion practices generate positive outcomes, from improved wellness to increased life satisfaction, personal initiative, and social cohesion, and protect us from the passive effects of rumination, self-criticism, shame, anxiety, and depression. Brinker and Odou attribute these positive effects of self-compassion on mood in part to the fact that self-compassion is a tool for dealing with emotions rather than avoiding them, allowing participants to remain aware of, explore, and understand them. On the other hand, rumination is a type of emotional avoidance that prevents us from effectively addressing our emotions.

The scientists also found that practicing self-compassion for 10 minutes was enough to significantly improve mood, which means that people undergoing treatment or on their own can use this exercise to improve their mood soon after a sad event while maintaining awareness of their experience and being open to it in the present moment. They can also avoid falling into a depressive rumination spiral that causes their feelings to become more negative. That is, they can admit that they made a mistake but do not have to feel resentment about this common human experience.

A similar study by Professors Leah Shapira and Myriam Mongra in 2010 found that writing self-compassion letters once a day for seven days led to a higher level of happiness and reduced symptoms of depression in the next three to six month. Still, Udo and Brinker acknowledged that more research was needed into the effect of self-compassion on people already suffering from depression, as it involved factors beyond negative moods that needed to be taken into account.

Their findings are essential because practicing self-compassion and rumination is part of the hypothetical mode of processing events in the brain, where the mind is free to think as it pleases and form new communications and connections on its own. This study suggests that writing with self-compassion allows participants to remain open to and receptive to experience when the brain is in this mode of processing while writing with an emotion devoid of sympathy leads to rumination that makes the situation worse.

My patient often begins therapy sessions with disappointing and frustrating talk. Still, when we identified moments in her life that are going well, such as the joy of a real and honest moment of communication with her sick mother, and one time when she noticed herself about to fall into a negative rumination spiral, she put her hand on her chest, and said to herself, "I pray to the Lord to be safe, to be kind to myself, and to have peace of mind." She subtly expressed genuine concern for herself and managed to adjust, so she felt better.

One day, after three months of conscious and sincere effort, my patient walked into a happy session because, for five consecutive days, she had successfully ended rumination by steadily focusing on self-compassion, whether writing, talking to herself, or talking to a friend. She told me during that session: "I can do it. I do it successfully. I feel confident, happy and proud."