Dwelling Dangerously

by Vela Kaluderovic

A conversation with my mom repeats in my head for hours. Details remembered, facial expressions burned into memory. I said things I shouldn’t have, I didn’t think fairly, I wasn’t kind enough to her. In the past few months this repeats itself over and over again, and I can’t make it stop. I feel guilty, horrible, angry at myself, for a fight my mom has forgotten about almost as it was happening. I dwell, uncontrollably. A study conducted at the University of Liverpool identified rumination and self-blame as the biggest predictors for the development of depression and anxiety.

Rumination, or dwelling, can be beneficial –when we reminisce about causes of life-affirming emotions, for example. Short-term negative rumination, such as worrying a lot about a test, thinking about an impactful conversation, is usually used to gain new insight about problems we face and is reflective, brooding in nature. It is only when this negative rumination becomes frequent, that it becomes depressive. It starts to interfere with the day-to-day goals we set for ourselves, makes it hard to experience positive emotions and takes abnormal and overwhelming amounts of time to get through. We feel like we’re on autopilot and have no control over feeling low, we believe we deserve it. There may indeed be a physiological cause for this, and a way out.

A meta-analysis conducted by Zhou et al. suggested that the default mode network –DMN, is involved in depressive dwelling. It is an interconnected series of regions in the brain which become active when we daydream or lose ourselves in thought. The study found that people who are dwelling on autopilot show a significant increase in DMN activity, making it far more difficult to pay active attention to our surroundings. However, correlation is not necessarily causation.

It is still not clear why we dwell, but current consensus is that it may simply be an unsuitable strategy to try and cope with certain emotions. Again, reflecting on our past choices can be good, if we do not harbor too much guilt towards ourselves. Depressive dwelling is a punishment undeserved and unnecessary. Whatever the purpose, consequences of it are negative. It has been found to affect memory and information processing. Negative memories are more likely to be remembered long-term and memory is overgeneral – we will remember a period as being inherently negative, instead of one event which caused those negative ruminations in the first place. I may have bitterly fought with my mom for a few hours, but this did not lead to anything traumatic or negative in the hours following it. New information is more difficult to deal with – a ruminator will not be able to forget or ignore information they learned recently, even when told it is of no importance.

Our autopilot rumination is a cyclical punishment no one deserves, so how can we help ourselves out of it? Marcus Aurelius’ advice to ‘dwell on the beauty of life’ may not be too helpful, as it can be read as the equivalent of ‘dude, just look on the bright side’. If you and I are alike in our dwelling disasters, then these seemingly silly solutions may have an impact: Distraction and Meditation (oh yeah, and maybe therapy). Do something with your hands: cook, sew, bake, paint. Derrida and Heidegger wrote their ruminations down and found the pen to be a vessel that let those thoughts exit without damage. Meditation has been proven to decrease DMN activity and may help you regain control over time. Communicate your dwelling to someone, in whatever capacity you can: outside perspective can be healing when our self becomes an unreliable narrator.

Putting one’s self under scrutiny is an important part of growing up. But it has its limits. Being kind to yourself, having empathy through your own misdoings, is vital, especially in the world we’re in today. Remind yourself of your strengths, realize that the dweller in you does not seek growth; it seeks unreasonable punishment. To grow is to accept that, well, of course you are not infallible, and that mistakes are to be let go of once the consequences fizzle out.