Burn Bright

Practical ideas for doing great work without burning yourself out.

I first learned about rumination firsthand in my 20s, when I got cancer. That was bad. Then it came back twice more, in my liver. That was worse.

I got stressed. Seriously stressed.

What saved me happened almost by chance. I picked up a small community newspaper and read an article about a stress neuroscientist named Dr Derek Roger. It described my situation perfectly. I tracked him down, and we spent two hours together in a café in Christchurch.

I'd assumed that if I was facing my own mortality, stress was simply inevitable. Derek had spent 30 years studying why some people get stressed by a situation and others don't. He made me think again. 

Here's what he taught me.

Pressure is not stress. Pressure is the external demand. Everyone has it. Not everyone gets stressed by it.

Rumination is the bridge. To turn pressure into stress, you have to ruminate, replaying the past or rehearsing the future with a heavy dose of negative emotion attached. People who don't ruminate don't stay stressed, even under real pressure.

To stop ruminating, wake up. Rumination is a thought running quietly in the background. The moment your attention comes fully into the present, it fades. You can't ruminate while you're wide awake.

Practice non-attachment. The less you need things to go a certain way, the less you catastrophise,  and the less you ruminate.

My own rumination score went from 10/10 to 0/10. It took time. But the change was permanent. When the cancer came back a third time, the event was identical. The stress wasn't there. Same situation, different response.

So how do you actually do this?

Two practices Derek and later researchers taught me. Both work on the same problem from opposite directions.

1. Wake up

Two quick techniques for pulling yourself out of the rumination loop and into the present, because you genuinely can't ruminate while you're wide awake.

Name it. Say to yourself, out loud if you can, “I'm ruminating about the meeting tomorrow.” UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman found that simply labelling a feeling measurably calms the part of the brain driving it. Noticing is most of the work.

Use your senses. Stop and notice five things you can see. Then four things you can hear. Then three things you can physically feel, your feet on the floor, the chair against your back, the air on your skin. Your senses only exist in the present, so tuning into them wakes you up and breaks the rumination loop.

2. Cognitive absorption

This one works from the opposite direction. Instead of pulling your attention into the present, you fill it completely with something else, something demanding enough that there's no bandwidth left for rumination.

Researchers have found that it is almost impossible to ruminate while playing Tetris. The visual, fast-paced, closed-loop nature of it occupies exactly the part of the brain that rumination needs to run. Anything with a similar shape works: gardening, a repetitive task like washing the dishes, an absorbing novel, a jigsaw puzzle. The common thread is a task immersive enough that your mind genuinely has nowhere else to go.

Waking up works by grounding you in reality. Cognitive absorption works by crowding rumination out. Different mechanisms, same result.

Why this matters for sleep too

It also explains something we kept hearing in the research: most people who wake up a lot at night don't have a sleep problem. They have a stress problem. If your brain is ruminating between 9am and 5pm, it's highly likely to keep doing it between 10pm and 7am. The people who slept best in our study weren't the ones with the most rigid bedtime routine. They were the ones who'd learned to close out the day's stress before their head hit the pillow.

What I see in workplaces

I have now run workshops teaching about rumination and how to decrease it to 1,000’s of people in workplaces. And I see people running the same stressful patterns I lived myself. As people build awareness of when they're ruminating and start applying the strategies above and others we teach, their stress drops. Not overnight. But it drops, consistently, the same way mine did.

Pressure is inevitable. Stress is optional.

If you want to explore workshops to bring these practices into your workplace, send me a message.

More on the research and other tools at www.nicholaspetrie.com.

That's it from me this fortnight. More in two weeks…

Nick