Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

By E. Watkins. Evidence-Based Treatment for Anxiety Disorders and Depression, 2016

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

thinking and Not Connecting with Experience Both rumination and overgeneralization contribute to not being able to connect directly with experience. When someone is ruminating, her mind is full of thoughts going round and round about her problems, and she is not really attending to what she is doing. Likewise, when someone is jumping to conclusions from an event and thinking about what it might mean about his future and himself (overgeneralizing), he is moving away from the direct experience of what is happening and moving into abstract thoughts about the experience. Too much abstract thinking can stop you from connecting with experience and prevents the benefits of directly connecting with the world around you. Avoidance and Not Connecting with Experience We can also lose connection with our direct experience because we are trying to avoid thinking about upsetting or emotional events, trying to avoid unpleasant feelings, or avoiding new challenges or risks. By trying to avoid threats or possible failure, we often reduce our activities, resulting in fewer positive experiences as well. To avoid any risk of failure, you might also stop doing things where there is at least a chance of success, or of learning something new. Therefore, avoidance can increase until there are very few activities where there is any chance of feeling alive or fulfilled, further fueling the depressed mood. Avoidance can close life down, shutting out the chance of fully experiencing life. While this might be a way to reduce the risk of experiencing more pain, it also makes it hard to fully connect with all the good things in life. To reduce depression, you need to open up your options and possibilities and introduce the chance of doing exciting and rewarding activities—avoidance prevents and limits this. Reconnecting with Experience The way to reconnect with experience is to directly attend to what you are doing and to the world around you. A good way to do this is to focus your attention on an activity that you find interesting and in which you can become completely absorbed and immersed. You can do this via a mental exercise that re-creates the experience of being absorbed in an activity. You can also reconnect with experience by deliberately increasing the activities that you find interesting and absorbing. When they are depressed, people often drop the activities that excite and absorb them, while carrying on with the chores and duties they feel they should do. The consequence of this is that you can end up doing all the dull and effortful activities that you find tiring and draining but not doing any of the interesting and fun activities that make you feel better and give you more energy. It is important to get the balance between chores and duties and positive activities right, because the former drain your batteries while the latter recharge your batteries. This means that if you are doing too many chores and not enough fun, engaging activities, you are going to wear yourself out. Absorbing Activities The kinds of experiences we are looking for are those where you feel completely absorbed, immersed, or caught up in the process and details of what you are doing; where you lose all sense of self and time; where you experience things coming together naturally without much conscious thought; where there is a deep and effortless involvement in the activity, a merging of action and awareness and a sense of being completely focused in the present moment. Such absorbing experiences are sometimes described as “flow” experiences or peak experiences—people who play sports refer to being “in the zone.” Critically, such experiences involve concrete thinking, since attention is focused on the details of the task and on sensory experience, as you concentrate on the process and sequence of what is happening. Even more important, such experiences are a very strong antidote to rumination, overgeneralization, and inactivity, and act as a powerful antidepressant. Different people find different activities absorbing. Absorbing activities can include doing something creative, musical, or artistic, focusing on the natural world, participating in sports, dance, or other challenging physical activities, and taking part in activities that involve intellectual stimulation and learning. Specific examples include sensation-seeking, high-adrenaline activities like rock climbing, scuba diving, horseback riding, surfing, or sky diving, where you are completely focused on the experience of what you are doing (e.g., focusing on where to put your hands next when rock climbing). Or absorbing activities could be creative activities like painting, where you are focused on the patterns of light and dark, the differences in color and texture on the canvas, and where you sense you should put the brush next. Activities You Find Absorbing There is no right or wrong way to become absorbed. Try and think of memories of when you have been completely absorbed in an activity. Use the lines below to write down several examples of times when you have been fully absorbed in what you are doing. Try to be as specific and detailed (concrete) as possible: 1. _________________________________________________________________________________ 2. _________________________________________________________________________________ 3. _________________________________________________________________________________ 4. _________________________________________________________________________________ 5. _________________________________________________________________________________ 6. _________________________________________________________________________________ Common Themes in Absorbing Activities As you look at these different examples, you might find that there are some elements in common between them. Positive absorption is more likely to occur under particular conditions, many of which are under your control: • There is a balance between the challenge (difficulties and opportunities) of the task and your skills—if the task is too difficult, it is hard to get absorbed, but if it is too easy it will be boring. Ideally, you need to try tasks that are within the reach of your skills while slightly stretching you. • Your attention is focused on the task at hand—the more you attend directly to what you are doing, the more absorbed and connected you become. • The activity involves a narrow temporal focus—your attention is focused on the immediate, present moment, on what is happening in the moment right now, rather than on the past and the future. • There are clear goals, rules, and immediate feedback. It is easier to get absorbed when you know what you are trying to do and for every action you take there is an immediate and direct response—for example, when playing a musical instrument, you immediately hear what note was played; when painting you can directly see the effect of the brush on the canvas. • The activity is rewarding in itself—what you are doing is valued as an end in itself because the process of doing it is interesting, rather than because of what you might achieve as a result of doing the activity. For example, playing a sport might feel good as you are doing it because of the feeling in your body, whether you win or lose. • There is a focus on discovery, learning, growth—you are doing the activity out of curiosity, to see what happens or to learn and improve. • The activity is consistent with what you value—it reflects what is important and meaningful to you. For example, if you appreciate the natural world, then you might find walking in the country and paying attention to nature absorbing. If you value learning and curiosity, you will be find activities that involve learning more absorbing, for example, learning to play a musical instrument. Your Examples of Absorbing Activities Are an Important Starting Point The examples you listed above provide memories you can use for the mental exercise of imagining and re-creating absorbing activities. During these mental self-help exercises, you will imagine one of these absorbing situations as vividly and as concretely as you can. You imagine that you are there right now, looking out onto the scene, seeing through your own eyes, experiencing the sensations of being in your own body, using all of your senses to become fully aware of your experience in the moment. You can use these exercises to get yourself into a frame of mind where you are more directly connected to experience, in order to practice this skill and as a means to fully experience what you are doing. In addition, the state of mind you have when you are absorbed makes you more motivated to do things and makes it easier to fully experience what you are doing and get more enjoyment from it. It can therefore be helpful to practice the absorption exercise to get yourself into the right frame of mind before starting an activity, to increase your chance of getting started and to increase your enjoyment of what you are doing. Your examples give you clues as to activities that you can find absorbing and beneficial. Take a look at the examples you listed. How many of these activities have you stopped doing or are you doing less frequently? Write down which of these activities that you would like to do more often below: 1. ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. ___________________________________________________________________________ Choose one of these activities and plan how you would start doing it again over the next few weeks. Note down the steps of your plan here: Step 1. __________________________________________________________________________ Step 2. __________________________________________________________________________ Step 3. __________________________________________________________________________ Step 4. _______________________________________

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9398000ad72d597565273cec683bdb046d4a0688

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In Clinical Psychology

  1. Vladan Starcevic
  2. Joël Billieux
  3. Tim Dalgleish
  4. Adriano Schimmenti
  5. E. Lee

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

  1. Joël Billieux
  2. D. Johnston
  3. Tim Dalgleish
  4. Anna Bevan
  5. Melissa J Black

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