Disrupting Rumination with Recursion
The Clown in the Bathrobe
I still think about the first-grade talent show at school. I had signed up to be a clown and came in with a bathrobe and giggles, but no jokes. Instead, I asked the kids to rhyme words with me.
I’m fifty.
This way of thinking is known as rumination. It happens when your mind will not stop replaying something awkward, impactful, or painful. Conversations, decisions, mistakes, and embarrassing moments circle endlessly as if the right angle might finally make it make sense.
It is not reflection. It is repetition. And for a long time, it ran my life.
When Thinking Becomes Survival
I used to ruminate all day, every day. The kind of looping that left me exhausted and no closer to understanding. I would replay conversations word for word, analyze every silence, every tone, and sink into the shame, guilt, and embarrassment that came up. I would lie awake wondering what I could have said differently, or what was wrong with me for still caring.
People called me an overthinker. They were not wrong. But what they did not see was that my overthinking was not vanity or control. It was survival. I was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense.
Raised in the Catholic Church and in a difficult environment, nothing made sense. Growing up in chaos, my brain learned to run every scenario again and again, hoping that one day the pieces would click into something safe.
Learning to Interrupt the Loop
Then I started practicing self-compassion. Where I would once just replay the rumination, I began to notice that it was happening. With practice, I started interrupting my inner dialogue and adding care and curiosity to the pattern.
Not the unanswerable questions I had been asking myself for decades. Not Why did this happen? or What is wrong with me? But gentler, more useful ones:
What am I noticing this time?
What still does not make sense?
What might I be trying to protect?
That small shift changed everything. The thoughts still came, but instead of spinning, they began to move. I realized rumination was not my enemy. Unstructured rumination was. When I started asking new questions, the same old memories began offering new information.
Disrupting Rumination with Recursion
I did not set out to find a system for rumination. Like most people, I started with the looping, constantly replaying moments, conversations, and choices that left me raw. I was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense. For a long time, it felt like punishment.
I did not know it then, but rumination was how my nervous system tried to protect me. It kept me close to the pain, as if maybe this time I could fix it.
Over the years, with therapy, self-compassion, and a lot of curiosity, I began to notice something. Every time my mind circled back, it was not always the same. There were small shifts. A new angle. A softer question.
That was when I realized I could actually work with it instead of against it.
Later, when I learned about recursion in AI, I discovered that it is the process of systems revisiting their own steps to refine and improve. I cannot tell you how excited I was to find language for something I had already been doing instinctively.
That was when I started calling it Recursive Rumination.
I did not create it. I learned it by living it.
Now I share it so others can see that there is a way out of the loop. I did not do it by fighting my thoughts. I did it by learning to engage with them differently.
Welcoming the Return
It felt good to give it a name. Each return of the thought became an opportunity for another layer of learning, but also room to let it go if there was nothing new there.
Eventually, when I get to the thing I need to learn, the rumination stops. Learning this has taught me to welcome my rumination instead of dreading it.
Ruminative thoughts still visit me daily, probably hourly. When they do, I do not panic. I listen. I ask. I take what is being offered. And if there is nothing new, I can gently redirect and let it go until it has something different to teach me.
I did not stop ruminating by silencing my mind. I stopped by teaching it to embrace curiosity without judging the pattern.
The pattern makes sense. So does disrupting it.
Progress, Not Overthinking
It took time to get here. I did not stop ruminating by silencing my mind. I stopped by teaching it to ask better questions.
So yes, I still think a lot. I still circle things. But now, I do it with purpose. I call it Recursive Rumination. To me, that is not overthinking. It is progress.
Reflection Prompt
When your mind revisits a moment you thought you had already healed from, pause and ask:
"What is different this time?"
"What might this loop be trying to teach me?"
Sometimes, thinking again is not the problem. It is how you think the second time that changes everything.
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