Ruminate vs. Contemplate
What are you chewing on?
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Ruminate vs. Contemplate
“The Self-Brain Surgery Sunday™ letter is the best five minutes spent on the Internet all week.”
1. An insight from me
When you grab a candy bar, rip open the package, and devour it, it’s inside you. It’s going to be digested, absorbed, and turned into chemistry that affects your energy, your metabolism, and your body.
At that point, you don’t get a vote anymore.
Better hope it was good for you.
But what if you paused first and read the label?
Calories. Chemicals. Artificial ingredients. Dyes. Things you can’t pronounce.
Maybe I shouldn’t eat this.
This is the same choice we face with automatic thoughts and feelings.
We can:
• Ingest them automatically: react, spiral, and then be forced to live with their chemistry and consequences
OR
• Biopsy them first: take them captive, examine them, and decide whether there’s something better to chew on
As I wrote in The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery:
“Now that you’ve slowed down and zeroed in on the internal chatter and sensations that are making your life more difficult, the biopsy will allow you to assess the nature, origin, and impact of your thoughts, separating fact from feeling so you can follow up with constructive action.”
You don’t have to swallow every thought your brain hands you.
2. How the Neuroscience Works
Humans have the remarkable, God-given ability of metacognition, the capacity to think about our thoughts instead of simply being driven by them.
That pause is powerful.
Research on worry and rumination shows that most of the things we mentally rehearse never actually happen. In one well-known study, more than 90% of the things people worried about did not come to pass.
That’s a lot of candy bars to eat without reading the labels first.
When we ruminate, we repeatedly “chew” the same negative thoughts, reinforcing the neural circuits tied to fear, stress, and hopelessness. But when we contemplate instead, examining a thought, questioning it, reframing it, we engage the prefrontal cortex and strengthen circuits involved in regulation, perspective, and wise decision-making.
Rumination is mental junk food.
Contemplation is nourishment.
3. The Truth
The Bible warned us about this long ago and gave us a prescription for getting our minds back in charge of our brains.
We are not told to never have difficult thoughts. We are told not to automatically partner with them.
“...we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”
II Corinthians 10:5 (NIV)
It’s not suppression, it’s investigation.
God prescribed the Thought Biopsy long before I ever gave it a name.
4. Reinforcement: This Week’s Visiting Professor
Even brain imaging research supports the idea that chronic rumination isn’t just unpleasant, it may be harmful over time.
Here’s how my friend Dr. Daniel Amen explains it:
“Your thought patterns can also have long-term effects. Repetitive toxic thinking may promote the buildup of the harmful deposits seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. It may also increase the risk of dementia, according to a 2020 brain-imaging study in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
For decades, experts have known that negative thinking is also tightly linked to other mental health disorders, such as clinical depression. Research shows that the reciprocal connection between ruminating thoughts and depression leads to a vicious cycle that prolongs and intensifies symptoms.
Automatic negative thoughts also fuel anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), grief, and other mental health issues.”
What you repeatedly chew on, you wire in.
🧠 Paid Subscribers: Click here for this week’s video self-brain surgery training. This week’s video is a powerful look at the practice of investigating our thinking, so make sure you watch it. If you’re not a paid subscriber, this would be a good week to start!
You can get the training you need to master self-brain surgery in my new book. You can go even deeper in The School of Self-Brain Surgery.
The good news is, you can start today.
Reply and let us know if you’re ready to stop letting your brain boss you around!
Be sure to check out the archive of previous posts if you missed last week’s letter.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
II Timothy 1:7, “For you were not given a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.”
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
Disclaimer: This letter is for informational purposes only. It contains general information, drawn from my experience, research, and best practices. It is not health care advice, and is not intended to replace the counsel of your health care provider. Consult your provider before starting any new treatments or making changes to your health routine. This message does not constitute a doctor-patient relationship between us.
