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Ahead of Mind Drama ‘s publication, science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa sent a copy of the book to someone working on a similar topic. The person betrayed her trust by later attempting to publish several key findings under their own name. Although the situation was eventually resolved, Jackson Nakazawa’s mind kept replaying the upsetting incident. Falling prey to a “lifelong tendency to get sucked into a vortex of obsessive thought,” she found herself “trapped in [her] own head, and it was a bad neighborhood to be in.”

Jackson Nakazawa is hardly alone in this regard. In a 2010 study , Harvard psychologists found that people spend as much as 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about things other than what is happening to them in the present moment, and this “mind-wandering” is a strong predictor of unhappiness. Other studies indicate that the percentage has continued to grow, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a problem because ruminating about what has been or could be isn’t just bad for our mental health. It’s bad for our physical health, too.

“Each time your mind relives a stressful scenario,” Jackson Nakazawa explains, “your body relives it, too.”

When we relive stressful situations from the past — or imagine stressful situations in the future — we activate our acute stress response. As part of this response, our bodies produce cortisol, a hormone that helps regulate arousal and reduces inflammation. While some inflammation is perfectly healthy, chronic inflammation has been linked with memory loss, as well as an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer. And the more cortisol our bodies produce, the less our cells respond to it, leading to an overabundance that can limit the hormone’s anti-inflammatory effect.

Of course, not ruminating is easier said than done. Many people ruminate without realizing it, while those who do often may not seek help because of fear or shame. But even if you are aware of the problem — and willing to address it — the road can still be long and arduous.

Jackson Nakazawa would like to say she can “slam the brakes on [her] escalating mind drama.” But despite everything she knew as a science journalist and the “meditation and yoga [she’d] stacked into [her] days for decades,” she couldn’t. Fortunately, she discovered several science-based techniques to help.

Ruminating on rumination

To draw the curtains on your inner monologue, you first have to understand what rumination is and where it comes from. Talking to Big Think over Zoom, Jackson Nakazawa called it a kind of “survival response gone wrong” — an evolutionary adaptation that remains as potent as ever despite not being as useful as it once was.

As she writes in Mind Drama : “The human nervous system evolved long before conscious, logical thought, so it maneuvers within a significant margin of error when it comes to assessing how much danger you face.” In prehistoric times, ruminating on danger kept our ancestors alive. Today, when genuine life-threatening encounters are few and far between, it tends to prevent us from living well.

Rumination arises from a network of brain regions collectively called the default mode network (DMN). “It’s actually three areas,” Jackson Nakazawa explains: one in the front of the head, one on both sides, and another on the back. “For a long time, we thought this network was a big nothingburger — an idling station, like when your car idles in the driveway.” Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that the DMN is responsible for daydreaming, recalling memories, imagining future scenarios, and reflecting on social scenarios.

Put differently, Jackson Nakazawa writes, it’s the “seat of your sense of self […] your brain’s storyteller, where you spin stories about who you are, how you got there, what’s happened to you in your life — and who you can become.”

Through the mental MIST

When people seek professional help for their mental health, they’re often introduced to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Dubbed the gold standard of psychotherapy — or, in Jackson Nakazawa’s words, the “first line” — CBT can be loosely described as trying to improve your well-being by interrogating your thoughts and changing your behavior. It’s effective for many problems, from OCD to eating disorders.

However, according to a 2024 systematic review , CBT doesn’t always work for rumination. Instead, the review’s authors found preliminary evidence that rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (RFCBT) — a form of CBT that focuses on changing the process of thinking rather than the content of individual thoughts — was more effective at treating depressive symptoms, especially in people who tend to ruminate.

For her part, Jackson Nakazawa recommends the MIST approach. This approach works by addressing three distinct experiences generated by the DMN: M ental imagery, I ntense emotions, and B odily sensations. (The T , if you’re curious, stands for “tie it all together.”)

There are two steps to MIST. The first is describing. By putting the images, feelings, and sensations generated by your DMN into words, you’re able to step outside the aforementioned vortex and see the things you’re ruminating about more clearly. Asked about the science behind this process, Jackson Nakazawa points to the research of UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, who found that simply describing an emotion causes the amygdala — your brain’s threat detector — to relax.

MIST takes this a step further: By doing the same for the physical sensations we feel and the mental images we conjure, we are better able to stop our ruminations in their tracks.

“The language you come up with for your own experiences,” the author tells Big Think, “is the language your brain will pay the most attention to.”

The second step of MIST is to listen. When we ruminate, it’s tempting to try to ignore or suppress intrusive thoughts. However, Jackson Nakazawa argues we should do the opposite. Because while rumination “feels like an immersion into our suffering, it’s actually a means of avoidance.” As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.”

When we ruminate, we don’t face our problems so much as we run away from them. But if “properly heard,” Jackson Nakazawa writes, “our ruminations are an invitation to tend to the fearful, anxious, grieving, angry, unheard parts of ourselves.”

Ultimately, she tells Big Think, “we all ruminate about the same thing, and get stuck in storylines that share a common denominator: Do I feel I matter to the people who matter most to me? The stories we’re getting caught in are stories which tell us that in some way we are not feeling that sense of matter that we long to feel.”

And once you’re able to listen, you can formulate a plan to address what’s wrong.

Don’t feed your mind drama

Mind Drama explores many other techniques to deal with rumination, as well as the science behind them. Cyclic sighing, for example, “signals the respiratory system it’s okay to calm down,” while self-distancing, or talking to yourself as you would to another person, has been found to help people “regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences,” as one study notes.

Other techniques, like journaling, daydreaming, and MIST itself, aim at treating rumination by stimulating creativity. That’s because creativity and rumination are associated with increased activity in the DMN. The difference, Jackson Kanazawa explains, lies in how this network operates:

“When we are thought spiraling, the DMN is firing on a closed circuit. It’s not interacting with the rest of the brain, kind of like a shut-down airport. But when we are being creative, the network goes from being the villain to the hero: Instead of a closed circuit, it’s interfacing.”

This helps explain why rumination loops in on itself. When we ruminate, we look for an answer to our problems, “but the answer never comes because we’re locked out of the areas of the brain responsible for problem solving.”

“The default mode network,” she summarizes, “gives rise to [those] horrible lost hours of negative overthinking and to the best ideas we have ever had. It’s like the word itself. In the dictionary, rumination means both recursive, unrelenting thought spiraling, and to muse, to ponder, and ideate. The difference? We exit the storyline emotionally. We stop the mind drama.”

And by stopping the drama, the rest of the brain opens back up.

Like any thoughtful book on therapy or mental health, Jackson Kanazawa’s concludes with a number of caveats. Getting better is a matter of practice and dedication, and techniques that work for one person may not work for someone else. But while therapy isn’t a quick fix — Jackson Kanazawa speaks of healing rather than curing — there are many reasons to be hopeful, not least our constantly improving understanding of the brain itself.

“Early in my career,” she reflects, “we were told the brain is only neuroplastic until the age of 5, then until 18, 25, and 28. Now, we’re seeing the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus throughout life. Your ruminations are nothing more than neural grooves through your default mode network that were laid down early in life, and that’s reversible.”

This article Why your brain gets hung up on troubling thoughts — and what to do about it is featured on Big Think .

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