The Science of Rumination, with Donna Jackson Nakazawa

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Rural Britain, you've suffered too long. Your days of sluggish broadband are over. We're connecting rural homes to full fiber with thousands more joining every month. T minus five. The gigaverse is expanding before my very eyes. Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds per month. We have lived off. T's and C's apply. 18 month contract. Prices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lam. Today I have a special interview to present you with. I recorded this last week. And it is going to be a discussion of mind drama, the science of rumination or how to outwit your inner defeatist by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. I'm going to hold the book up here for folks who are joining us on video on Netflix. You can find this book wherever you get your books right now. And as you'll see, I highly recommend it. I thought this was a terrific read and it is a very important topic. Donna Jackson Nakazawa is the author of five books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, stress and emotion, including Girls on the Brink, which was named one of the best health books of the year by The Washington Post. The Angel and the Assassin named one of the best books of the year by Wired Magazine and Childhood Disrupted, a finalist for the books for a Better Life Award. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Health Affairs, Stat, Psychology Today and Psychotherapy Networker. She has appeared on Today and NPR and is a regular speaker at universities and organizations, including Child Mind Institute, Harvard Science, ULCA Health and Rutgers Health. It was a real honor to chat with Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Donna, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Rob, and looking forward to it. The new book is Mind Drama, the Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. And when I saw the title of this book, when I saw who had written it, I knew that we had to have you on the show. This is something that I struggle with a fair amount in my life. And according to your book, a whole lot of us do. So to start off, would you mind just defining what rumination is? Absolutely. So rumination is kind of an interesting word because if we think of it in the common vernacular, right, it's those thoughts spiraling, those thought loops that we get stuck in and they feel so terrible. Sounds like, you know, what I'm talking about, and we can't get out of them. We load the same reels over and over again and we want to get out, but our brain is really terrible at helping us exit them. But when you look at the word rumination itself, something I love about it as a writer is that it has two meanings. There are a few words that have two meanings in the dictionary, like cleave. You can cleave to something or you can cleave it and cut it away. Rumination is very similar. It can be, and most often is for us as humans, negative, recursive, brooding, overthinking, replaying, rehashing, future casting, judging, self-criticizing and judging others. But it also means to ponder, to muse, to ideate, to inspire. And so really I wanted to dig into that. So what's actually happening in our brains when we are ruminating, when we're caught in this loop? Well, it's pretty bad. And problematically, one third of us don't even know what the word rumination means, and yet science shows we're doing it more than we ever have before. Probably not a surprise to any of us, because we're experiencing it in real time. And that's really a problem because you cannot solve a problem. You've never named. Meanwhile, science has been plunging ahead, which is one of the things I love about writing about science, right? Because you get to close that gap between what neuroscientists are doing in the lab and what we're able to use in our living rooms. So when scientists have been looking into where rumination happens in the brain, it happens in this one area known as the default mode network. Now, probably a lot of your listeners have heard about the default mode network. It used to be thought of as kind of this nothing burger in the brain that it really didn't do very much. It was just kind of think of your car idling in the driveway, not really in gear, not true. FMRI scans show that the seat of our ruminating thoughts is the default mode network. And as the word implies or the same, the title implies, it's a network of three areas. One is in the front of your brain. One is in the side and one is in the back. When you're a ruminating Rob, this area, this network is a locked circuit. It closes down. It spins and spins like a top. That's really what it feels like, right? And one area is serving up a lot of mental imagery. One area is serving up a lot of intense emotion. And one area is serving up that clutch sort of contracted feeling that we get when we're caught in our icky sticky little thought loops. And the problem is that this is a survival response gone rogue. Your brain's trying to protect you. It just doesn't know how to stop. And we have to actually use tools to intervene and get out of it. Our brain is terrible at it alone. So it's kind of like a like a cycle and a dryer, except it's not actually going to ever finish the load. Right. I'm going to steal that one. I think of it as like an airport on lockdown and the planes can taxi around and around, but nothing can fly in and nothing can fly out. And that's really not healthy for us because rumination and the degree to which we get stuck in those thought loops is the biggest pre-diagnostic factor or risk factor for everything we don't want to have in life. Depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, lack of focus, forgetfulness, substance use, eating disorders, and that work has been done in clinical populations for a long time. What's new is that we can see where it's happening in the brain. We can see how the brain, this area of the brain becomes locked down and unable to interface with 267 other areas of the brain that we need for the kind of creativity you bring to this show for the rapid thinking that we have to bring to important conversations to the ideation for what do I want to do next with my life to like, what do I need to say to my teenager or my girlfriend or my spouse about this tricky thing that we're going through? Those areas are offline and we know it, right? Don't you know it when you're ruminating? Can't you feel it? Like I can't get there. It begins to, yeah, it feels like a cage. You know, it doesn't feel like a productive process, but, and that's one of the things that I thought was so amazing in the book was like really like defining it as what it is, this loop that you're stuck on. And then on some level, you still keep engaging with it because it feels like you're solving the problem, right? Yeah, it's a false, what researchers call effort, false, effortful control, right? Like it's a seductive thing. I mean, sometimes it's almost like chewing on a tooth, right? If they got pulled out yesterday, it's like you keep going there in your mouth because it's like, wait, you know, I'm sure that if I just keep looking there, I'll be able to get this to heal. But in fact, the very opposite happens. We're exerting control over our environment by thinking about it. We never get to a solution because we've literally shut down the solution task positive areas of our brain and we're seduced over and over into thinking that, you know, another hour on the couch, another half hour in the rabbit hole will be drive to go pick up our kids or, you know, do the laundry. We're going to get somewhere, but the relief never comes. We actually just fill our body with these terrible hormones and chemicals that are really bad for us over time and keep us locked in the stress response. And we do something else. We throw down more neural tracks so that we're likely to fall back into the same thought loops tomorrow and the next day, like a bowling ball going down, you know. So, yeah. So everyone struggles with this or, or, or I guess the better way to ask this question is what is it like to not struggle with rumination, at least on some level? Are there people out there conceivably that, that do not? Well, we don't really know the answer to that. What we do know is that we're doing it more than we ever have before on FMRI scans. Neurotoxic scientists can show that these areas of the brain are active in an unhealthy way more of the time and also correlate to the higher levels of distress that we're feeling and that show up on all the epidemiological studies that are being done about our current state of well-being. And it kind of makes sense, right? Because we're just out there being blasted with this fire hose of fear and outrage all the time. More of our lives are online, even at work, like things are on slack or email. And we don't get the human context for what's really happening here. So I do just for a second when I talk about evolutionary biology. So a little nerdy, but there's a reason why this is a survival response gone wrong. And we have to kind of step way, way, way back in time through evolutionary biology. So a long time ago, when we were sitting around the communal fire, if people were poking fun at you or rolling their eyes at you, Rob, or elbowing each other and giggling, this was like a really dangerous proposition because it meant that you and not only you, but your gene pool, which we care a lot about, could be set at the edge of the tribe. We could be not the first to get the good tubers or meat on the fire. If you're set all the way outside the tribe because you've been socially or emotionally ostracized, you are in big trouble. You'll be picked off by, you know, a predator, a Maraudian tribe, or at the mercy of the elements, the snow, the rain, the sun, you and your gene pool are gone. So here's the thing. And I love this about evolutionary biology. Our immune systems evolved over time to see the most threatening type of interaction as one in which we are socially or emotionally dismissed or dist or disregarded or given a sense that we do not matter and we do not belong to the people who matter to us. As soon as we get those signals, our immune system goes into overdrive to fight and to prepare for physical harm. That's why when you get caught in your thought loops, do you feel like, oh, I'm getting more contracted? Like, do you feel the tension in your body? Yeah, absolutely. That's why, because we are primed to go into the survival response. And you probably know from interviewing so many interesting people, we are really good. Humans are really, really good at going into threat responses. What are we terrible at? We're just terrible at getting out of them. Now, I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier about how we're ruminating more now than ever. And to be clear, like you're, when you say that, you mean not just like, oh, in our modern age, but like in the last few years, correct? Like, like fairly recently, we've seen this uptick. Yeah, that's right. And so people started looking at the default mode network more closely, sort of before and then during and then after the pandemic. And people weren't looking for rumination. They were looking for distress levels, right? Because this is a real public health crisis, but also a terrible mental health crisis. We saw people's mental health really deteriorate across all age groups in the in our population and globally. So researchers were looking at this and one of the byproducts that they found was that they were seeing notable alterations in the function of the default mode network over this five to six year span. And so that other researchers were running studies to see if this over activation of the default mode network was tied to rumination. And the answer was yes, it was also tied to poorer mental health outcomes and higher levels of reported distress. So it makes sense, like look around us, right? We're facing climate change, school shootings, like I said, political, you know, political chaos, online outrage. And you spend a lot of your time online. I have to spend a lot of my time online. It's literally rigged to make us feel this sense of social and emotional threat and fear. So it's wrapping us up into a state of rumination while we remove the face to face time that helps to reassure us and tell us neurobiologically that we are safe and connected. So it's really no surprise that we're in this state. It's just, I mean, look at one of the things I looked at when I was researching the book was road rage. Road rage is a sign of rumination, like what's that asshole doing over there in that lane and not being able to let go of it. Traffic fatalities are at their highest rate in 20 years. So we see signs of this everywhere. And I really argue in the book of what a different world it would be if we weren't stuck in our thought loops, if we weren't stuck in the same story lines, and we could come out of that rumen of the state and go into the upside of rumination, which were more that creativity and connectedness that we all long for. Yeah, in the book, you, you of course, walk us through a number of different techniques and different methods, physical and internalized to help deal with this, to spiral out of it, as you put it. And I know that you yourself are a yoga practitioner and you practice meditation. Like one thing that I was thinking about, especially when reading the earlier portions of the book was more about sort of outlying the problem. I was thinking about like when I go into a yoga class, you know, when I get away from a screen and, you know, getting away from news feeds and getting into this place that I see as a safe space among, you know, people that I feel comfortable with. And yet I'll spend like maybe half the practice turning things off. Like it's, it's like it's still sort of like the loop is still cycling down for like half the class. And it almost always, the class is almost always effective in calming things down and clearing the mind, but it can be like looking back on it. It's like it really, I guess, speaks to the strength of, of rumination that it, it takes so much effort at times to just actually turn it off. Well, that makes all the sense in the world because you're trying to apply a skill through your body to get into a place non-riminative or to use the language I use in the book, instead of spiraling down to spiral up, right? And you're using your body to do that. But one of the things that I found in, in researching rumination is we need to use our brain and our body together. So it's kind of like when the body and the brain agree that we're safe, that is a much easier way to escape our thought loops. But the other thing I found is that, well, a couple of things I want to say, rumination is not a character flaw. It is truly a part of the human condition. It separates us from other animals. It is the higher order brain that can do threat detection, but unfortunately, in humans get lost in it and unable to escape. So I also found that about a third of us are kind of ashamed of it. Like we, and most of us, the majority of us do not talk about it with anyone. You don't stand in the kitchen making dinner with your partner or your friend going like, you know what? I like six hours got sucked out of my day to day because I could not stop thinking, you might say, this is bugging me, but you, we don't walk around admitting to the enormity of the problem. So it makes perfect sense that it would take you 25 minutes of a 15 minute yoga class to bring it down. We don't have tools. First, you have to go through kind of like the layer of self criticism about doing it in the first place. Like, oh my God, here I am in my yoga class and I'm still thinking about what so and so said at dinner last night. We can drop that because everyone in the class is doing it, right? Everyone around us is doing the same thing. And we're all ruminating about the same thing, Rob. And this is the tender thing beneath all the noise and between all the, you know, beneath the writing and the book publishing. This is the thing that struck me over and over. We all ruminate about the same thing, whether we matter and belong to the people and places that matter to us. And our ruminations are begging us not to just cut them off. And feel bad about them. Our ruminations, our signal fires from the past, they are asking us to see them, accept them, name them and to tend to those stories that are coming up for us over and over again, because we have not fully emotionally processed something that's coming up for us. So what I found is that you load the same reels and the same stories over and over again. You think you're getting somewhere, right? We talked about that earlier, but rumination is actually a form of avoidance. We are trying to exert control over situation or interaction or relationship or work issue or a sense of status or, or esteem or belonging without ever allowing ourselves to feel the emotions beneath the story. And so, of course, I had to develop a technique for that. Yeah, let's get into some of the techniques. You cover a number of these different exercises and methods to overcome or work through rumination to some degree. You know, we obviously can't roll through all of them here. This is my list. I should pick up the book, but I know you also deal with these in workshops. So I was wondering, what, what are maybe a couple of your favorites that you would like to share with listeners that you think can easily be shared through the, through audio? So I think that the most useful and helpful technique that I found working with audiences and individuals is the missed framework, which is based on our new understanding of how the default mode network generates these three distinct experiences when it gives rise to our most recursive and bothersome thought reels. And so, are you ever willing to be a guinea pig on your own show? Oh, absolutely. Okay. Excellent. I thought so. So I wanted to check. All right. So I guess what I want to ask you is, is there something and you don't have to share the details, but you're welcome to that's totally up to you. Is there something that's just been really sticky and a thought reel that just keeps loading up for you a lot in the last day or week or month? Oh, absolutely. Okay. I'll keep it to myself. Okay. You're so human. Yes. Welcome to the human race. This means you are not a cow. So, all right. So it's going through your head. And what we're going to do is we're going to practice the miss framework. So I mentioned earlier that the default mode network gives rise to our ruminations and one area gives rise to our mental movies and mental images. One gives rise to our intense interior emotions. One gives rise to our somatic sensations. And what we're going to do is we're going to go through the miss framework, which I called miss because of course when we're ruminating and we're lost in a fog and we want to get out, we desperately want to get out. And also because it works really well as an acronym and write our Slav acronym. So M is obviously for mental movies. I is for intense emotions. S is for somatic sensations and T is for tying it all together. Now I want to start with your mental movies, your mental imagery. Usually these are reels, as we've said, we've loaded many times across a lifetime. And they start to echo the same thing for most of us. And usually these mental movies tell us a little bit of a story about ourselves. It's usually beliefs or stories in which we're not coming out on top. Right. And so generally that the easiest way to get into the miss framework is to start with mental imagery and kind of start with a sentence like, hear the familiar reels. I've been playing a thousand times and naming them in this way. Here's my old story of how and it can be anything. And let me tell you this. I can give you examples that I will do, but the language that comes from your brain, Rob, is the language that your brain will pay attention to, to exit rumination. So it could start with, here is my old story of how people dismiss me or here's my old story of how my voice isn't heard or here's my old story of how no one listens to what I have to say or how I always screw it up or how I miss it or get it wrong. Doesn't matter what I say, it only matters what you say. Cause so can you start with them for mental movies? Okay. Yeah. And do I, I say it out loud? Yeah, you say it out loud. I'm sorry, but no one will know what you're ruminating about. And I guarantee you that you're going to sound just like everyone else who's ruminating and give them a lot of relief. Honestly. Okay. So, so yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm mentally picturing it right now. And then mentally picturing the, some of the images that have been playing through my head recently. And so start with, here's my story of how people X and that is the best way to start the mis-framework. Here's my old story of how people X. Okay. Yeah. Here is my old story of how, yeah, people, people view me. Yes. Okay. All right. That's a story. Probably not true, but this is what our brains do to us. So here's my old story of how people view me, which makes me feel now we're going to I for intense emotion. And if you want, it can be very helpful for your brain to actually name how you think people view you. And I, you might not want to do that in a public forum, right? So we'll skip over that. But if you're doing it at home in your own time, if I were doing it, I might say something like, here's my old story of how people view me, that my voice doesn't matter or something like that. So you want to be really specific because that granular specificity is going to really help your brain know that you're seeing the story. And that's very important here. So now let's go to intense emotion. So for you, here's my old story of how people view me, which is X for you, which makes me feel, and it can be a shame, scared, isolated, rageful, angry. So start from the top. Here's my old story of how people view me and then add in the emotion. And if you want, add in how it feels to be viewed the way that you feel you're viewed. Okay. Yeah. Here is the story of how people view me or how I think people view me. And it makes me feel anxious. Yes. Excellent. And now we're going to add an S for somatic sensations. So you're rolling, you're rolling the reels and you're acknowledging the anxiety. So now you're going to go here's my old story of how people view me. And there's a story in there. Make sure that you privately acknowledge that story, whatever it is, I suck or whatever, which makes me feel anxious. And my, what part of your body do you feel it in? You can start this by like scanning down from the top of your head. Some people feel it in the back of their head, their shoulders, their solar plexus, their gut churning, their heart pounding, their whole body contracting. You can feel it in your whole body. Okay. And I just identify where I feel it. Yep. And you're going to start from the top. Here's my old story. Here's my old story about how people view me. It makes me feel anxious. And I feel this kind of in the space between my stomach and my heart. Absolutely. Excellent. You just did the missed framework and you tied it together. So I want to ask you, and without any details, how old is the story? This, this version of, I guess, you know, like a lot of these things, we have different versions of this story. We have a hundred of these, but you're applying it to something that happened recently or that is kind of haunting you. And our ruminating story is that he's honest, kind of like little small ghosts, the trail after us, and you're trying to turn around and kind of hug the ghosts, right? Yeah. I'd say this is about a year old ghost. Okay. A year old ghost. Okay. And having done the missed framework, does it feel like it's a little less spinning inside the center of your brain and just maybe even two inches outside of you? It really does. Like it really kind of, you know, now I'm thinking of it as a ghost. So now I'm kind of adding that extra label layer of visualization to it, but I do kind of feel like it was in here and now, yeah, it's just a little bit outside. It, you know, may snap back in, but I'm a little bit removed from it. And you know, I saw you smile at the end of the missed framework. You went from anxious face, which is normal when we're trying to like thinking, you know, what is this inside me that I'm carrying and have carried for so long into you smiled at the end. And, and that is your brain. And what happened inside your brain on, this isn't just like motivational, you know, fluff people. This is neuroscience. What happened in your brain on fMRI scans is that you, you stopped the closed circuit, you stopped the storyline and your brain literally stopped its closed circuit, its lockdown loop. And now your brain is lighting up and interfacing with what we call the connectome of the brain, which is 267 areas that allow you to go into ideation and creativity and awareness. And you went, wait, I see this. I see this is a story I've been carrying. And maybe if we're lucky when we practice the miss framework, we not only exit the mind drama, set it outside of us just a little bit, but we also kind of go like, wait a minute, this is a story that maybe I don't want anymore. Maybe it's not mine to carry. Maybe it came to me externally at a time when I didn't have the flexibility to like question it or take it on, especially if it started when you were a child, as it does for many of us. And we get a moment where we get to hear how we truly feel. And from there, what I've seen in so many individuals is a kind of tender awareness, a sort of emotional compassion for ourselves and what we've been putting ourselves through. And when we practice this over time in different situations with different individuals or tricky people in our lives, what happens is we start to find our own voice. And I did not know this going into the book, but what I found in working with people for two years is that people who had not been able to voice themselves in these difficult interactions or in difficult relationships, they started to hear like, okay, what do I need? Like, what am I not tending to? What am I exiling here? What am I afraid to say? What am I afraid to do? And relationships got better. Some fell across the wayside because this process made it clear that they were returning to the same hurtful dynamic over and over and it couldn't be changed. But 99% of the time relationships got better because people found voice. And that is something I want people to remember. When you are in your thought loops, when you love the same reels over and over, you lose agency. You lose your voice. You lose your inner knowing of what it is that you really need. Wow. Yeah. There was one of the, uh, the list of questions that you, um, you outlined in the book, uh, one of them that really caught my attention when I was going through the book and, and, and, you know, part of it, I'm going through the book to, uh, you know, to make sure I have questions in mind and so forth. And then I'm prepared for the interview. But, uh, one of them was like, do I want to feel like this all the time? Uh, which is, uh, like just on its own isolated is such a, uh, an empowering little nugget, you know, that kind of like wakes you out and, and makes you realize, oh yeah, maybe I don't. And, oh yeah, I, maybe I do have agency over this. I, I don't have to just be stuck in this particular thought loop. Yeah. And, and maybe there's something that when I'm stuck in this thought loop, I'm actually repressing or avoiding about the agency that I do have. Like maybe this is going to be hard to, um, one woman and I interviewed for across a long period of time, because it's important to follow people so you can see how things help and change them and what works and what doesn't work. Um, her husband was incredibly picky in the kitchen. He just looked like, you know, you're cutting the carrots the wrong way. No, you know, you put the noodles in the water or two soon. Such a minute little thing, but for her, after many years of marriage, it was just very, um, you know, it was the proverbial water on the rock, right? And she was scared not because he was a scary person. He wasn't. He's a good man, good person, but she just couldn't find the voice due to her own very old stories from her own growing up childhood, how she'd been conditioned as a woman across her life to just say, you cut the carrots. Like that was scary. Now I watched her over time be able to articulate things about what she needed that were met by her partner was such grace. Sometimes the people around us are waiting for us to have agency. And when we have it, they grow as well. But when we're both ruminating in our separate corners, people, it can't happen. And nor can connection and nor can growth. It's very well put. One thing that, uh, that came to mind when I was reading the book and sort of reflecting to on, um, other exercises that I'd been exposed to or, you know, that I had come up in therapy and so forth was that, um, and I imagine you've, you've encountered this as well as like where someone is introduced to a particular technique and just being introduced to the technique, um, without necessarily doing it, it kind of gives you a momentary relief from, um, from the issue. It almost like you recognize that there's an off ramp and then you're like, oh, I can feel a certain amount of relief. There's an off ramp, but then you don't do the practice. You don't do the work. And then you wind up in the same loop again. So what you're talking about is locus of control. So there is research where, um, just talking about wanting to go to therapy and calling a therapist, even if you never go shows some appreciable change in individuals who say, Hey mom, dad, I want to see a therapist or to their wife, like, Hey, Sally, I think I need some help and making a phone call, but never making an appointment, make some change. And, and the thinking is, and I'm sure there's a lot of thinking about this and I'm sure people listening know more about it than I do. But, but one of the things, areas of thought about this is locus of control. So we have a lot of good research that, um, depression is often related to a loss of locus of control. So what you're talking about is like, Oh, there is this method that I can use that gave me this enormous relief. I don't know that we spent more than 90 seconds. We were taking our time. Maybe we spend two minutes. But if you do it yourself, you can do it in 60 seconds. I do it all the time for myself to catch myself. And we will avoid doing it, even though we know it gives us a locus of control. We might even go like, I could be doing that, but I really like just feel so seduced by wanting to go into my old neural trap. And there's a reason for that because we have a laid these neural networks. Over a lifetime. And we have good evidence of that. So researchers will take kids and they'll divide them into two groups. Which two groups? How are they dividing them up? Kids who are having more difficulty with family dysfunction or family tension or more distress for any reason, it might not be their parents at home versus kids who have very low levels of family tension or psychological distress or family. You know, they have high family connection and they'll separate them into two groups. And by the age of 12 to 15, the default mode network behaves very differently in these two different groups of kids in kids who are experiencing more family tension or bullying, maybe not at home, but at school. Any kind of situation in which they have had to question their mattering or their belonging versus kids who haven't had to question that. In the kids who have the default mode network goes into what's called spontaneous rumination because kids have had to lay down these neural tracks as children because that is a survival technique. Oh, if I just don't do X, but I do more of Y, I will matter more. I will belong more. I won't feel that I, you know, I'm not making my parents happy, right? It goes all the way back to the drama of the gifted child. It's that idea of needing to perform for love or shape ourselves in order to belong. And we get really, really good at it. It shows up in the brain. So in these two groups of kids, the kids who had this family tension or dysfunction, their brains not only went into spontaneous rumination very quickly while doing simple, simple tasks. Oh, what if I do this wrong? Oh, what are they going to think of me? Oh, I screw up. Oh, I mess up. They showed the distress also in questionnaires about how they were feeling. They performed more poorly on the tasks at hand. And here's what blew my mind. They ruminated not just about the task at hand, but they went into global rumination where every fear they'd ever had, everything they ever ruminated about, whether their friend at school liked them, whether their mom was mad at them, whether they were good enough on the soccer field, how they were doing in school all came in very quickly. We don't want that. We don't want that for our kids. We don't want that for ourselves. But many of us are still living that way as adults. In the book, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the many recommendations that comes up is, of course, walking in nature, which it's one of those things that we've, I think at this point, we've all heard it a million times. And maybe we're hearing it more and more often because of the sort of world we've built for ourselves. You know, the number of the different techniques that you focus on have to do with shifting sensory focus. And so does a lot of it kind of come down to the idea that, like, walking, just walking in nature is kind of more in line with what we evolved to do versus all of these other sort of distractions. Absolutely. And our brain is really, really good at hooking us up to nature very, very quickly because obviously in evolutionary time, it's only one billionth of a millisecond that we've had all these screens and digital devices. And our brains are changing to wire up to that and to interface with that in a way that isn't healthy for us. But our brains have had a lot longer to interface with the world around us. And it can, it's so, again, you know, it's almost terrible to write about nature as an answer because it's just really a reminder. We've heard it so many times, but we can see this in the brain. So we can see the default mode network starts to go very quickly into its interconnected state with the rest of the brain. It happens for us. Now, so there are lots of little tricks, not tricks, but things we can do even better than walking in nature is lying down on the grass. And what does that do? Well, it opens up all of our sensory portals very, very quickly, but it does something else and you could actually do it right now in your studio after we get off this, this wonderful podcast, Lie on the Floor. It breaks the default mode networks locked perspective. You're sending your brain a signal like what is happening here? You're looking at the ceiling. You're looking at the, you know, the sprinklers and the lights in the ceiling and you're in an unusual position. We ruminate in the same places, our bed, our chair, our kitchen, our car. We change the place even better if you're lying on the grass. There are lots of other quick things we can do. I talk about something called ballistic interruption and we talked about how we lay down these neural tracks over and over, which makes it more, you know, much more easy for our brain to slip into the overgills. We have to interrupt our entrenched neural wiring. And here again, and it sounds kind of hokey, so it was kind of hard for me to write about it, but we see it on FMRI scans. Language here too is our portal to escape. We can literally get in on our thinking, do the mis-framework, and then your brain can tell your brain to cut off the neural loop. I don't listen to these fear-based thoughts. Nope, not doing this. Not today. No thanks. And it sounds so silly, but this way of thinking is no longer welcome here. Forget about it. I'm closing the door on this. We're not going there. If you do the mis-framework and you allow yourself to kind of tenderly hold the emotions that you have not been allowing yourself to feel and acknowledge them and name them, and then you ballistically interrupt so that your brain doesn't slip, slide back into that pattern, you're getting even a little bit further outside of it. And then as I say in the book, you've got to get your body to agree, right? You can get your brain all online. You talked about earlier, Rob, like, oh, I can feel like, you know, my brain wants to go right back there. Like I got a little ghost outside of me, but my brain is going like, but we could go back, you know? And that's because your body hasn't yet agreed. And so that's why in MindDrop, I have a lot of mind-body practices that we can do again in like 60 seconds or less to try to get not only the right language happening and the right awareness and acceptance, but we have to bring our somatic state into agreement that we're safe and okay. There's one that you outlined that I actually tried out right before the interview here with the, I forget the name of it. I'm sorry, but it involves. Like raising your, your hand. Yeah. Yeah. I think the body's state breaker. Yes. Yes. That's the one. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy if we have time to walk people through it. It's up to you. Um, sure. Yeah. I think, I think folks would dig that. Don't do it while you're driving. Please don't do it while you're driving and holding a knife. Okay. So really what you want to do, and this is based on science around what's called cyclical sign, which is a type of sign that, um, literally helps bring our cortisol levels down and establishes more positive emotions and a sense of safety. So I'm sitting down, you're sitting down. I'm going to do it. You're not going to be able to really see me do it because it's, you know, it's audio, but I'm going to do it just because I can't just talk it. I have to feel it. So basically it's better if you stand up, but I'm sitting. So I'm going to just do it. So you're just going to take like a full slow inhale as you raise your arms up over your head. I love Rob. He's doing it with me and keep your arms up and like make tight fists and squeeze your hands and close and open your fists and vigorously, vigorously shake out your hands. So you taking this big breath, fist, shake your hands, let the breath out, but keep your arms overhead. Oh, keep your arms up. Inhale again. Pause. Take in a second breath. And now let it fill your whole body and your chest and your collarbone. And now let your arms come down your size all the way. Oh, let them fall. Feel better. That's good. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Like it's so I sort of took sick little sign and added a few little neuroscience beats to it. Um, another really quick thing you could do and add on at the end of that, which is pretty lovely is you could take your arms, cross them over your body and our arms, our hands and arms are just full of neuroceptors that signal safety. Think about it. It's the first thing that you did as a child when you needed something, you raised your arms to be picked up. So if you take your opposite hands, put them on the top of your arms, think of something that you really wish that someone who loved you would say to you. You don't have to say it out loud, but maybe it's like you're safe, you're loved. Use you or your name because when you use you or your name, your brain pays more attention and I would just go like smooth my hands down my arms and just keep going. Donna, you're safe. You're okay. Safe. You're okay. And if you do that at the end of the body state breaker, you're going to add a whole other layer of neuroceptor relief. If you do the miscramor, ballistic interruption and just that one exercise and they're like a hundred more in the book and you've got to grab what works for you, right Rob? Like, you know, if it resonates, I can see on your face, you like that. Like for some things we're going to try them and it's going to be like, there's a lot of different visualization techniques in the book. They can work for some people, but they won't for others. Make your menu. Make what works and stack it into your day because you're going to ruminate less and you're going to get back a lot of precious hours of your life. Excellent. Yeah. And it's so many of the, I guess some of the techniques that involve language, you know, it's on one level, like having grown up, you know, I was a child of the 90s and I ended up watching Saturday Night Live and there would be these segments with Stuart Smiley where they're making fun of like positive affirmations. And so like on one level, it kind of made me think for a very long time, like not even consciously that like there's something silly about positive affirmations. But, but, but really like, like that speaks to the power of language, you know, that so many of these techniques do involve some level of like talking to yourself, like you said, using our own name, saying it in a language that resonates with us. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you remember the Bob Newhart segment where I forget who the SNL actor was, came in and she's like, I have these terrible problems. He's like, I'm going to fix you in 60 seconds. She's like, really, really? And he just goes, stop it. It doesn't, it doesn't really work that way. But I know what you mean. And I say in the book, some of these techniques, I thought, let me look at the science here, because sure, that sounds really great. But, you know, I'm a science journalist. I don't know that I can, I feel silly. I feel silly using some of these, but they work for me. And so I'm going to keep doing them. I do want to talk about the power of visualization because for some people, it feels too silly to talk to yourself. And we just grew up with that same kind of coding that you did, that this is nonsense. So it just, it might not work because we feel that way. But visualization, I use a visualization technique in the book that is so powerful. And we see in the brain when you, you can skip the talking to yourself. It is what I'm trying to say. You can go right to visualization because what we see on fMRI scans is that visualization lights up even more areas of the brain than using language. And it makes sense because you're pulling in images. So I talk about something called the two roads technique. And it involves your physical body, but it also involves almost like creating your own internal computer game in which you could choose a right path and shift your body in that direction or a left handed path on the right handed path. You are going to build out the most beautiful world kind of like on a computer game of all the best experiences that have ever happened to you, all the things you wish would happen to you. Maybe people you love to have died. You can, my dad died when I was 12. So I would like put my hands on his face and, and hug him and keep walking. I'll see my kids, the hikes we've taken and the Tetons and keep going and all the most beautiful moments. The first time my children were laid on my chest, things my husband and I have done together and, and keep going even into things you dream in the future and hope for. But your brain is going to keep taking you to the left handed path. It's that neural slide back onto the left handed path. There you bring in the bad music. You go, Oh, I know it's raining. It's cloudy. It's horrible. It's a bad neighborhood to be in. I know I don't want to be on this path and you go ahead, let it populate with the things, the stuff that you don't want. Turn your body back to the right and go down the right neural path and keep building it out, make the flowers grow, the trees go, bring in the music, the birds, see the people that you long for. And that lights up your brain like nobody's business. We touched on this a little bit already for sure, but can you expand a little bit about how on one, on one hand, you know, the default mode network is tied up with this negative rumination. But then if we, if we spin it in the other direction, if we spiral up, this can also be an engine of creativity as well, right? 100%. So we talked about how the word rumination itself has two sides. It can have this dark, brooding, recursive, negative thinking. And it can also mean musing and ideation. What's interesting to me is the default mode network kind of echoes and mirrors this duality. So it is the seat. It does give rise to, it does generate this horrible self-referential thinking. What do they think about me? What did I do wrong? What did I say wrong? How did I flood that up? Which is really bad for our mental health. But it also, when we get it to interface with the entire brain, it is also the seat of our most creative imaginings, our most creative ideas. It interfaces with the prefrontal cortex and other task positive areas that give us the insight, those glorious lit moments of experience that we all long for in life, where we have the big idea, where we think as we look at our child across the kitchen table, gosh, I love this person so much and a thousand stories split through our head. It is the seat of both the darkest and the most transformative experiences that we have. So the idea is to use all that we have with the best of neuroscience and the best of our love for ourselves to flip that switch. And we can do it. I followed a lot of people over two years and it gets the more you try, the easier it gets. Well, that is inspiring. As is the book. I want to thank you for coming on the show here. I'm going to hold the book up for folks on video for anyone listening to the podcast on Netflix. But yes, the book again is Mind Drama, the Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatest by Donna Jackson Naga Zawa. By the time this episode is out, it should be available wherever you get your books. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks once more to Donna Jackson Naga Zawa for taking time out of her day to discuss this fabulous new book, Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination. You can find this wherever you get your books. And again, I highly recommend it. Thanks as always to the talented and excellent JJ Posseway for producing this episode. As always, if you want to reach out with questions, feedback, or if you have suggestions for future interview episodes of folks, authors, scientists that you think I should have on the show, just write in. I would love to hear from you. That email address is contact at stufftaboyourmind.com. Stufftaboyourmind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Looking for a gift to make Dad's Day special? Chopetsy for all his favorites, like personalised golf accessories, a handmade leather camping bag, or an original apron for summer nights at the barbecue. No matter if it's his first Father's Day or his 40th, gift Dad something as special as him. Because with Etsy, there's a real person at the heart of every piece. 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