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It’s often difficult to tell the difference between healthy emotional processing and rumination.

Overthinking and rumination can keep us stuck instead of helping us take constructive action.

A self-check-in checklist can help distinguish healthy reflection from unhealthy thought spirals.

One of my neighborhood friends, whom I’ll call Paola, has always seemed to be in a remarkably simpatico marriage. She and her husband, Will, cook, hike, and garden together; they laugh easily and root for the same teams. I’ve long thought of them as inseparable.

One afternoon, though, I spotted Paola walking alone. When I asked where Will was, she gestured toward her driveway. There he stood, hands on his hips by the trash cans.

“He’s being a big jerk,” she said.

I laughed, telling her how much I admired their closeness.

“Oh, I do love him,” she sighed. “But the things that come out of his mouth would astonish you. He’s a grey-haired teenager—with no filter.”

A week later, we ran into each other at our local post office. She apologized for her earlier venting.

“Sometimes I get so annoyed at the things he says to me, I start replaying the scene ad nauseam and cataloging all the times he’s been a jerk. Or I fantasize about what I should have said, or what I’ll do next time. My mind just can’t stop spinning,” she admitted.

I told Paola about my research on rumination. We’re all getting caught up in thought spiraling a lot more than we used to. It turns out the number-one thing we all ruminate about is our relationships and whether we matter to the people who matter most to us. Even though it’s part of the nuts and bolts of being alive, most of us don’t talk about our very human tendency to get stuck in thought loops.

When........

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