I'm Alison Beard.

And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi, do you know the origin of the word ruminate?

I actually do. It comes from ruminants, those animals we love who chew their cut all day.

Yes, exactly. Giraffes, cows, camels. And I didn't always know that, but once I learned it, I couldn't stop thinking about how it so perfectly describes what humans are doing when they ruminate. We're taking

our worries about making the right decisions or replaying past mistakes, and we just continue

to chew on them over and over in really unproductive ways that diminish our focus and ultimately at work hurt our performance.

So I assume a lot of our listeners, a lot of leaders, you know, struggle with this kind of overthinking, whether or not they talk about it publicly.

I mean, think about you get an evaluation and your boss tells you six positive things

in one area that needs work and you can obsess on that one negative, maybe even slightly

negative thing because we have trouble letting go of them.

Yes, exactly.

And wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

So our guest today is going to explain how to break out of this cycle.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a journalist and author of the book Mind Drama,

The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist.

I spoke with her about what's happening in our brains when we get stuck in this type of thinking,

how it plays out at work, and most importantly, concrete, practical things that we can do to stop and even shift negative thoughts to positive ones. Here's our conversation.

How do you define rumination? And how do you see it negatively affecting our professional lives?

Well, it's interesting because when we look

at the research on rumination, we find that a third of people don't really know what the word

means. And this is kind of an issue because we're ruminating more than we ever have before.

...