Happy bonus episode day, everybody. Today, it's about rumination and overthinking, an important topic.

Because research has shown that people with reactive depression that also ruminate over things,

they find that their depression turns into major depressive disorder four times faster than those that didn't ruminate.

And probably for a couple of different reasons.

Firstly, there's the old, the brain doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction,

thing that I keep waffling on about, which makes the brain react as if the problems that you keep

thinking about must be right in your face all the time.

But also because there is only so much that the brain can do,

which means that the rumination that you do,

that's likely actually going to impair any problem-solving skills,

which stops us from being able to see solutions to our problems

and making us feel hopeless.

If you've been doing it all your life, you might think that it's normal to overthink stuff, though,

because everybody worries, don't they?

But rumination differs from just plain old worrying, because ruminating is about the past.

Why did that happen? What could I have done differently? Why did

they say that? All that sort of stuff. They look at the past from different angles and find it

impossible to let something go, to just accept that something is what it is. Also, worrying might be helpful. To a degree, we don't want to

ignore our problems, and thinking about our problems can help us to make strategies. Worrying

about losing your job might make you look for another one. Ruminating is overthinking without any outcome. You go around in circles,

but never find solutions. So, if any of this sounds familiar and you'd like to prevent or

stop rumination, then there's a few things you might need to do. Firstly, learn to let go

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