This Is What Happens to Your Mind When You Focus On the Negative

Ever wondered what your wandering thoughts throughout the day say about you? Turns out they can actually tell researchers a lot about your mental health.

Researchers at the University of Arizona sought to understand the mental health implications of negative rumination. 

“So in our study, what we were interested in is the extent to which we would be able to see individual differences between people who display trait rumination, based on the questionnaire that we had, and people who display very little trait rumination,” Quentin Raffaelli, PhD, candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona and the study’s first author, tells Verywell. 

The researchers found that individuals with increased negative rumination also experienced more negative thoughts and had a tendency to focus on the past.

“We’ve found that individuals with stronger rumination were more likely to have longer and longer negative thoughts,” Raffaelli says. 

The September study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Negative Thoughts Can Lead to a Pattern

For the study, researchers asked 78 participants to speak their thoughts aloud for 10 minutes while sitting in a room without electronic devices. They then analyzed more than 2,000 thoughts for rumination.

They followed some thoughts over time. People who ruminated had negative thoughts that persisted for longer than positive ones. Those thoughts also became narrower in scope.

There is one potential theory that explains why negative rumination leads to even more negative thoughts, according to Jessica Andrews-Hanna, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Arizona and the study’s co-author. 

She says that one of the predominant theories in psychology literature, known as the broaden-and-build theory, focuses on positive moods, which allows people to become more exploratory and think outside the box. 

Broadened mindsets that arise from positive thoughts can promote creativity that contribute to successful coping and survival. For example, joy might spark the urge to play and interest can spur a desire to explore.

Whereas if an individual is in a negative mood, the scope of attention and focus may become narrower, trapping a person in negative thought, Andrews-Hanna tells Verywell.

“So you’re trapped in this negative space, and it’s hard to get out of that negative space,” Andrews-Hanna says. 

Breaking Through Negative Thought Patterns

Andrews-Hanna says that examining idle thoughts can give a glimpse into how thought processes can speak to a myriad of mental health conditions. For example, negative rumination may signify that an individual is expressing a maladaptive form of coping. This can lead to the onset of depressive symptoms.

“And so these periods of downtime and breaks, for people who have poor mental health, may create a condition that is facilitating some of these unproductive thinking styles,” she explains. 

If people self-observe their own thoughts and patterns, they may be able to potentially break through these negative thought cycles.

“There is extraordinary potential for people to learn to appreciate the importance of allowing ourselves to both take breaks throughout our day and also gain a little bit of practice in checking in with ourselves,” Andrews-Hanna says. 

If you feel yourself falling into these ruminating patterns, some ways you can help yourself include:

• Meditating
• Taking small actions to begin solving problems
• Reappraising negative perceptions of events and high expectations of others
• Letting go of unhealthy or unattainable goals and developing multiple sources of self-esteem

The researchers look forward to expanding the findings of this study to explore how thoughts and the content of those thoughts differ across age groups. Andrews-Hanna says that as people get older, well-being tends to improve.

“We think that by being able to quantify not only what older people think about during these break periods, but maybe we can extract a cognitive signature of people ruminating in action,” Andrews-Hanna says. This could shed light on how rumination impacts mental health across age groups.