Breaking Free from Overthinking…

Most people who struggle with rumination already know one thing for certain: telling yourself to “just stop thinking about it” doesn’t work. It usually makes the spiral tighter. The mind doesn’t respond well to force. Pressure creates resistance, and resistance feeds the very loop you’re trying to escape.

Rumination isn’t a lack of intelligence or insight. It’s a failure of distance.

When you’re ruminating, you’re too close to the problem. So close that the thought fills the entire field of view. There’s no perspective, no edges, no space to breathe. The mind keeps circling not because it’s stupid, but because it’s trapped at the wrong zoom level.

This is where psychological distancing becomes useful—not as a trick, but as a shift in stance. Research by psychologists such as Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk shows that creating space between yourself and your thoughts changes how the brain processes them. You’re no longer inside the storm. You’re observing the weather.

Psychological distancing doesn’t mean denial, avoidance, or pretending you don’t care. It means changing the position from which you relate to the thought. Instead of “this is happening to me and I’m stuck inside it,” the posture becomes “this is happening, and I can look at it.”

Rumination zooms in. Distancing zooms out. It’s a shift in your emotional intelligence from internal emotional focus to external observing attention.

Zooming out can take many forms. Sometimes it’s shifting from first-person to third-person language—moving from “why am I like this?” to “why is this person reacting this way right now?” Sometimes it’s time-based: asking how much this will matter in a week, a year, or five years. Sometimes it’s situational: placing the problem inside a wider context rather than letting it masquerade as the whole of your life... or the whole of ‘you’!

What matters isn’t the specific technique. What matters is the movement away from total immersion.

When distance appears, options appear.

And this leads to a counterintuitive truth that many people resist: control beats understanding.

Most people believe they need insight before action. They want clarity, certainty, and a coherent story about why something happened before they will move. But rumination feeds on this belief. The mind keeps searching for the “right” explanation, convinced that once it’s found, peace will follow.

Often, it doesn’t.

Understanding is valuable, but it’s not always the lever that breaks a loop. Action is.

There is a particular kind of power that comes from doing something—even something small—without full clarity. Acting shifts you from a passive, explanatory mode into an active, regulatory one. It tells the nervous system: I’m not trapped. And that signal alone can quiet the spiral.

This doesn’t mean reckless or impulsive action or pretending insight doesn’t matter. It means recognising that waiting for perfect understanding can become a quite sophisticated form of procrastination or even paralysis. Rumination feels productive because it looks like thinking. But it’s often just motion without direction.

Control, in this sense, isn’t dominance over your emotions. It’s the ability to choose a next step even while uncertainty remains.

That might look like setting a boundary before you fully understand why something upset you. It might mean changing your environment rather than analysing your mood. It might mean shifting your attention to something concrete and embodied when your thoughts are running abstract and circular.

These actions don’t solve everything. But they interrupt the loop. And interruption is often enough to restore some perspective.

Once you’re out of the spiral, understanding tends to come more naturally anyway. Distance improves insight. Calm sharpens thinking. The sequence matters.

In therapy circles my view would be controversial… that the way out of rumination isn’t to think harder so as to understand and therefore release. It’s to step back, widen the frame, and regain agency. Zoom out. Do something small but deliberate. Let control re-establish safety first. Understanding can follow later.

That’s not avoidance.

That’s regulation.

As always, please remember that this is just a glimpse into a subject that’s much bigger than this page. We are here to help should you want to explore further.

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