Rumination is repetitive, unproductive mental processing of worries about decisions and replaying past mistakes. The term connects to animals that chew cud, reflecting how people repeatedly “chew” on negative thoughts. Many people ruminate without fully understanding the concept, and rumination occurs more than ever. In professional settings, rumination can be triggered by feedback, such as focusing on one area needing improvement despite multiple positives. It can lead to obsessing over perceived negatives, including waking during the night to think about them. This cycle diminishes attention and ultimately undermines performance at work.
"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 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 and 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."
"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"
Read at Harvard Business Review
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]