Thinking in Circles

Overthinking, rumination and the evidence

What researchers mean by rumination and why it’s much narrower than “overthinking,” what it predicts and what it doesn’t, why the way you think about a problem matters more than the problem itself, why it feels like work, what has helped in trials, two findings that go against the usual advice, and what it does to the hour before you fall asleep

17 minute read  ·  3,897 words

You’re rinsing a mug at the sink, still on the question that’s been going around since lunch. You’ve followed it to the end a dozen times, and every time you’ve landed back at the start. Some tiredness comes from thinking like this, and it’s nothing like the good tired after a hard problem: it uses up everything you had, gets you nowhere, and the next morning you begin again.

Much of what gets written about overthinking still leans on one paper from 1991. In the years that followed, the researcher who wrote it went on to correct several of its central claims in print. Those corrections are some of the most useful things in this article, and the popular versions rarely mention them.

So this article follows the corrections. What the research can back up is narrower than the everyday word suggests and less certain than those versions make it sound, but in one way it’s much kinder to you.

The word is much bigger than the thing

When you say you overthink, you probably mean one of several things. Replaying a conversation from four hours ago. Not being able to choose. Running the worst version of tomorrow. Turning a small decision over until it’s smooth and featureless and still undecided.

Researchers study something much narrower, which they call rumination. The original definition, set out in 1991, describes repeatedly focusing on your own low mood and on its possible causes and consequences. That’s it. Not decisions, not the future, not other people, not work. Your own low mood, and why you have it.

That matters for two reasons. First, if what you mostly do is replay social situations or get stuck on decisions, most of the studies below aren’t really about you, or only about the part of you that also dwells on feeling low. Second, the bad outcome is built into the definition. If rumination means dwelling on your own distress, then finding that people who do a lot of it tend to be distressed is less surprising than it sounds.

The scale was partly measuring the thing it predicts

There’s a catch in how this has been measured, and it changes how to read everything that follows.

The standard questionnaire asks people how often they do things like think about how sad they feel, or think about how tired and achy they are. Those are really questions about depression wearing a different hat. So part of the famous link between rumination and depression is a questionnaire measuring depression twice and finding, reasonably enough, that the two halves agree (who would have thought).

When researchers later took those overlapping questions out, something useful appeared: the habit split into two different kinds.

Brooding, and the kind that was supposed to be healthy

Brooding is the moody, self-critical kind. Why can I never handle this? What is wrong with me? Reflection was the other kind, a more purposeful turn inward to work out what’s going on, and it was supposed to be the healthy one.

Brooding behaves as you’d expect. It goes with depression, and in the original study it predicted more depression a year later.

Reflection hasn’t fully lived up to its reputation. In several studies, people who reflect a lot are also more depressed when both are measured at the same time, although in the original study reflection went with less depression a year later. But when the questions were rewritten to take out the self-critical, judging tone, the new version stopped being linked with depression at all.

That may be one of the most useful findings in this article. The difference between the harmful kind and the harmless kind may not be whether you are analyzing. It may be whether you are judging yourself while you do it.

Is it even separate from worry?

Worry looks forward and rumination looks back. That distinction is real, it’s useful, and the article on this site about setting aside a time to worry goes into it properly.

Still, the line between them is blurrier than the two words suggest. When people described one of their own worries and one of their own ruminations, the two felt different, one about the future and one about the past, but the thinking itself looked much the same. And when researchers looked for what the two have in common, they found a shared habit underneath both that predicted depression and anxiety months later.

So there are two words for what looks like one underlying habit pointed in two directions, with a few features of its own on each side. That’s roughly what most people would have guessed.

It predicts getting low more reliably than staying low

Here’s the correction, and if you take one thing from this article, it should probably be this one.

The original 1991 theory said that rumination makes depression last longer. If you’re low and can’t stop going over things, that’s a frightening idea, because it suggests the thinking itself is what keeps you stuck. Maybe you’ve even worried about your worrying.

When researchers tested it by following people over time, that isn’t quite what they found. Among people who were not depressed at the start, those who tended to ruminate were more likely to become depressed. But once people were depressed, rumination did not reliably predict how long it lasted.

By 2008 the researcher who had proposed the theory wrote the correction into a review of her own work: rumination appears more consistently to predict the onset of depression rather than its duration (correcting your own famous paper, in print, takes some nerve. Respect).

That points somewhere kind. There is one exception: in people who also tend to see bad events as permanent and as saying something bad about them, rumination did go with symptoms lasting longer. But if you’re low right now and you also think in circles, the research does not say that the circling on its own is what is keeping you there. Please hold on to that!

The strongest evidence came from an accident

Studies like this are hard to do well, because you have to measure people before anything happens to them and then wait for something to happen.

In 1989, researchers in California happened to have measured the mood and thinking style of a group of students. Two weeks later, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. The students who went in with a more ruminative style had more symptoms afterward, and those who ruminated more about the earthquake in the ten days after it were still more distressed seven weeks later.

It’s a small study of students, and everything in it is self-reported. But nobody could have known the earthquake was coming, so their thinking style was measured before anything happened, and that makes it worth more than a bigger study that asks people to look back.

What it travels with

The original theory was about depression. Since then, rumination has been linked with a lot more: anxiety, binge eating, binge drinking, self-harm, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and poor sleep.

That breadth suggests the habit is not only a feature of depression but something that sits underneath several conditions. If you’ve noticed the circling shows up in more than one corner of your life, that fits. The caveat is that most of these links were measured at a single moment, so they can’t tell you which came first.

On self-harm and suicidal thoughts, the picture is mixed. There’s some link with self-injury, but in people who already have a mood disorder the link with suicidal thoughts is too uncertain to put a number on, so this article doesn’t.

The same problem, held two ways

One idea in this field has real experimental support behind it. It has less to do with what you think about than with the altitude you think at, meaning how high above the details you are.

Abstract thinking is high up and general: why am I like this, and what does this say about me? Concrete thinking is low down and specific: what exactly was said, in what order, and what’s the next small step?

In one British study, researchers managed to separate two things that usually come tangled together: how much people focused on themselves, and the style they were thinking in. It was the thinking style, not the self-focus, that made depressed patients’ memories vaguer and more general.

In another study, depressed patients who were guided to think about their symptoms in a concrete, specific way were afterward better at solving everyday social problems than patients guided to think about the same symptoms in the abstract way.

So dwelling on yourself is not automatically the problem. The altitude is. That’s good news if you’re someone who thinks a lot, because you don’t have to stop thinking. You can change where you’re standing when you do it.

The limits of that finding

Here’s what the research behind it can and can’t show.

Almost all of this work comes from one research group, with small numbers of people, in single sessions in a lab. It shows that the way you think can shift your mood and memory in the moment, not that anyone’s life got better.

When the idea was turned into a treatment, the results were mixed. Training people to think more concretely helped their depression compared with usual care from their doctor alone. Compared with relaxation training, it did not help depression any more; it only changed the thinking habit itself.

So the shape of the thinking is a real lever, better supported than most of what’s written about overthinking, but nobody has yet shown that teaching someone to ask how instead of why treats depression better than a credible alternative does.

Three explanations, and they are not equally supported

Circling doesn’t feel like a bad habit while it’s happening. It feels like diligence. It feels like the responsible thing to do about a problem, which is why stopping feels careless rather than restful. If you’ve ever felt guilty for not thinking about something enough, this is why.

There are three main ideas about why it keeps going. One of them is a good idea that hasn’t been tested yet.

The avoidance account

The oldest idea is that going over something in words keeps you at a distance from actually feeling it. In one small study of people who were anxious about public speaking, those who worried first reacted less, in their heart rate, to a frightening image afterward, even though they said they felt more afraid. So the worrying seemed to dull the body’s reaction, though not the fear itself.

Other research points the other way: going over and over things seems to keep the body’s stress response switched on for longer than the original event required. Both can be true at once: a duller reaction in the moment, and a body that stays on alert for longer across the day. Neither one on its own is the whole picture.

The beliefs account

The second idea is that people ruminate because of what they believe about it: that it will produce an answer, that it’s a way of preparing, that not doing it would be careless. The model adds a second set of beliefs, that the thinking is out of your control and dangerous, and says the two together keep it running.

It’s a sensible model and it matches what many people describe. Its evidence is the weakest of the three. Most of the studies behind it measure everything at one moment, so they can show that the pieces fit together but not that one came before the other.

The habit account

The third and newest idea is that the thinking gets tied to certain situations because it has happened in them so many times, until a place, a time of day or a mood sets it off before you’ve decided anything. On this account it keeps going out of habit rather than because it pays off, which fits the common feeling that it’s something you have to do, not something you chose.

It’s a framework rather than a finding, and no trial has tested it yet.

You’ll sometimes read that rumination is rewarding in some way. But there is no good evidence that rumination is rewarded, in the sense of being followed by something that makes it more likely next time.

The prevention numbers are the best in the field

The most encouraging result here comes from a prevention study rather than a treatment.

In the Netherlands, young people who already had a strong habit of worrying and ruminating were randomly given either six weeks of training aimed at that habit, in a group or online, or a place on a waiting list. Over the following year, about 15% of those who were trained developed depression, compared with about 32% of those who waited.

Taken at face value, that is roughly one case of depression prevented for every six people trained.

It shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value. Comparing with a waiting list tends to make a result look better than it is, most of the participants were young women, and the diagnoses came from questionnaires. The effect is likely to be smaller in the general population, possibly much smaller. It’s still the most hopeful finding in this area, and it means this habit is something that can be worked on, not something you’re stuck with.

A later trial offered 365 young people the same kind of training as a self-help app, and it did no better than a waiting list, most likely because people used the app too little. So how the training reaches you seems to matter, not just what it teaches.

Two trials that came apart in opposite directions

The results for treatments built around rumination itself are less tidy.

In a Danish trial, a therapy designed specifically to target rumination did a little better on depression than ordinary group therapy by the end of treatment, but it didn’t reduce rumination any more than the ordinary therapy did, and six months later its advantage was no longer clear. The concreteness training from part three did the opposite: it reduced rumination more than relaxation did, but not depression.

So in these two trials, rumination and depression didn’t move together. Neither therapy should be written off for that, but it’s a good reason to be careful with the tidy story that says find the cause, target it, and the symptoms will follow.

What the big review does not say on the front

A large 2025 review concluded that treatments aimed specifically at repetitive thinking reduce it more than general ones do. After another researcher pointed out that some treatments had been put in the wrong group, the authors corrected their numbers and said their conclusions still stood.

What the headline leaves out is how much the studies inside it disagree. The range of results you could expect from the next study like these runs from a large benefit all the way past zero into a small harm, although the authors judge real harm unlikely, since only two studies pointed that way. And most of the studies were about worry rather than rumination.

This is a field that corrects itself in public, which is to its credit. The corrections just tend to arrive after the headline has already traveled.

Distraction is better than its reputation

Distraction has a bad name. It’s treated as avoidance, the short-term fix that stores up trouble. If you’ve felt guilty for putting on a TV show instead of “dealing with it”, you may have been told something the evidence doesn’t back.

In the short term, at least, distraction holds up. Across hundreds of experiments on handling difficult feelings, distraction worked modestly well. Concentrating on the feeling came out slightly worse than doing nothing (a rare win for doing nothing), and trying to push the thought away didn’t work either. In laboratory studies, a spell of distraction brought the problem-solving of people in a low mood all the way back to normal.

In people’s actual lives, though, rather than their laboratory afternoons, using distraction hasn’t consistently gone along with less depression. Put the two together and you get something useful: distraction is a good move for the next hour and not a plan for the next year.

The healthy kind may not be the healthy kind

The other finding runs against the advice to stop brooding and start reflecting: think it through properly instead of just churning.

As part one showed, reflection as it’s usually measured still goes with depression until the self-critical, judging tone is taken out. Going over what happened is not the problem. Going over what it says about you is.

That’s a smaller, more specific and more usable idea than the usual one, and the evidence, though thin, points toward it. You’re allowed to think things through. You don’t have to put yourself on trial while you do!

A note on stopping thoughts

Two more things deserve correcting here.

The famous white bear experiment, in which people told not to think of a white bear thought about it more, is real. But when later studies were pooled, the rebound turned out to be modest, not the dramatic boomerang of the retelling, and no bigger in people with mental health difficulties. So the popular idea that pushing thoughts away is what makes intrusive thoughts worse is not well supported (and now you are thinking about a white bear. Sorry about that).

Thought stopping, the technique of deliberately interrupting yourself, is a different case. It was never properly tested in modern trials. A review of the research on self-talk in sport advises against it, but being advised against is not the same as being tested and failing. The fairer statement is that it was quietly dropped rather than disproved. If the unwanted thoughts are frightening and come with rituals or reassurance seeking, that’s a different pattern, and our article on OCD covers it.

It predicts a slower start to sleep, not a shorter night

You know the moment: lights off, and your mind picks this exact time to replay the day. Most findings in this article rest on questionnaires. This one rests on a device worn overnight, which is why it gets its own part.

In one American study, people gave a five-minute speech in front of a panel of judges, which is a reliable way to upset somebody in a laboratory. That night they wore wrist monitors. Those who tended to ruminate took longer to fall asleep, measured by the device rather than by their own report, and it took longest for those who also kept going over the speech afterward (a speech in front of a panel, then a wrist monitor to bed. Science is not always kind to its volunteers).

The useful part is how specific it is. Rumination wasn’t linked to how long they slept or how often they woke. It was linked to getting to sleep, and only that. That puts the problem in the stretch between lying down and falling asleep, which is a much smaller thing to work on than “my sleep”.

And the size of it

Other studies agree that rumination goes with worse sleep in the weeks that follow. When researchers pooled eight long-term studies of worry and rumination, this kind of thinking went with later sleep trouble to a small-to-moderate degree. The same review also asked how much of stress’s effect on sleep comes through this kind of thinking. That part was very small, and it shrank further once they allowed for how well people were already sleeping at the start.

That is a real effect and a modest one, and neither half of that sentence should travel without the other.

What follows from all of this

The best-known technique for this, giving worry its own set time of day, has its own article on this site. The ideas below are smaller, and mostly about what to do in the moment the circling starts.

And if you’re low right now, here’s the most evidence-based thing in this article: the circling on its own is not established as the reason you’re still low. It predicts getting low more reliably than it predicts staying low. If the low has lasted for weeks, or thoughts of self-harm have started to show up, a doctor is the right next step rather than more reading, and our helplines page can point you to the crisis lines and emergency numbers where you live. Reaching out isn’t overreacting!