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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I will add:

Hydrate, have a bite to eat, rest or nap and tend to any known health issues.

Water, Food, Sleep, Sun, Exercise about in that order counter most mental issues.

We're talking about the kind of individual who, for example, got a bad review from a manager years ago and can't let it go. This person thinks about it on the bus, on the toilet, at dinner, when they should sleeping. Hydration is not the issue.

I'm that person.

Health stuff is almost always the issue.

Interesting. I have the propensity to be that person too even when I'm well hydrated and healthy. I agree with focusing on getting the basics like food, exercise, and sleep right first though. If you can't get that right then you got not hope of sorting anything else out - necessary but not sufficient.

For me, it frequently means I'm running a fever. Adequate hydration can help break a fever.

It also helps to consciously decide "Yesterday was a bad day. I'm feeling better today. I'm going to let all that nonsense go. The stuff I was thinking yesterday wasn't rational. It's not worth pursuing further."

Problem is such stuff does not work if your brain circuitry is impaired for those instructions to just work. Rumination is a tricky thing and we all do it now and then so for those folks its easy to control like you do and its only bad when you are low mentally or physically. For others its really hard to get rid of and is a constant thing they can't just decided to switch off.

You are mistaken about me.

I'm very seriously medically handicapped. Managing the somatopsychic -- aka mental health -- side effects of my incurable, deadly condition is a very large part of my life.

I struggle with dark rumination a lot, and I think the parent commenter’s advice is helpful as a practice, not as a quick fix. My understanding is that brain circuitry is sorta like paths across and uneven field: it’s always easier to travel across the established path than it is to chart a new one, but if you forge a new path and make an effort to travel it every day eventually it will become smooth and easy to travel, and the old path will grow over.

> We're talking about the kind of individual who, for example, got a bad review from a manager years ago and can't let it go.

I’m not that person, but I have had something similar happen to me in an altogether different way. Instead of ruminating on an event like you describe, I will have very minor episodes of spontaneous, percolating memories—very old memories-that come out of nowhere like Proust’s madeleine moment, and it’s incredibly off-putting. Does anyone else experience these random memories popping up out of nowhere in the middle of their day?

That happens to me all the time. For me, it’s almost like deja vu, where small combinations of what I’m currently doing causes a memory to pop into my head. Sometimes it seems to happen with no external stimuli.

Honestly, what I’ve found helps is to embrace it and consciously focus on the memory. Try to stop thinking of it as off-putting and let your brain explore the memory and really think about it. I see it as a cool sort of gift where you can relive things to ponder them further, even when the memories aren’t the happiest.

Something I learned in therapy: if you push it off and try to ignore it, it will keep coming back. It’s like your brain has unfinished business, and when you push it away and say “don’t think about that”, your brain starts associating whatever that thing is with negativity. I’m no therapist, and you and I are different people, but it’s possible this is why you see it as off-putting and I don’t.

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