When You Can’t Stop Thinking About Something, Here’s What To Do. | Donna Jackson Nakazawa

There is something your brain is spinning right now, that you may never have been given a name for or a way out of. The thought you keep replaying. The conversation you keep recasting. The reel that loads up again and again without resolution, making you feel worse each time and no closer to clarity. That is rumination. And according to the neuroscience, it is the single greatest pre-diagnostic factor for depression and anxiety we have identified, and we are all doing it more than we ever have.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science writer whose work sits at the intersection of neurobiology, emotion, and mental health. Her new book, Mind Drama, is the most rigorous and humane investigation of rumination yet written: what it is, why your brain does it, what it is actually trying to tell you, and how to use a specific neurobiologically grounded framework to loosen its grip.

In this conversation, you will explore:

Why rumination is a survival response gone rogue, and why knowing that changes how you relate to your own spinning thoughts What a brain scan of Donna’s own ruminating mind revealed, and what those red swirls in the default mode network actually mean for your daily life Why midlife may be the season when old ruminative patterns return with the most force, and what that signal is asking you to hear The research showing that women ruminate at significantly higher rates than men, why this is, and what the neuroscience says about the acting-in pattern and its link to depression The MIST framework: a four-step neurobiological practice for naming the mental movies, emotions, and somatic sensations underneath your rumination so the brain can actually let go Why rumination is never random, always circling the question of whether you matter to the people who matter most to you

If you have ever told yourself to stop thinking about something and found you could not, this conversation is for you.

You can find Donna at: Healing Together Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we are sitting down with Candace Dellacona, a trust and estates attorney who is also personally in this season, to talk about the caregiving years, and what it costs you when you are pulled in every direction at once, not just logistically but in terms of who you are and who you thought you would be by now. If you are caring for an aging parent, a younger dependent, or both at the same time, this one was made for you. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you do not miss any upcoming episodes.

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photo credit: Marshall Clarke

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So have you ever gotten stuck in a thought loop that just won’t let go? Scientists call it rumination. We call it suffering. And most of us believe we can kind of think our way out of it. The science says otherwise. The relief never arrives because the area of your brain running those loops is a closed circuit, locked away from the very regions that produce clarity and insight and relief. So how do you break its grip? In this episode, you’ll discover what a brain scan of a ruminating mind actually looks like and what it predicts about your long term mental health. Why midlife is often when old ruminating stories return with the most force, and how to tap a groundbreaking four step neurobiological practice to break the cycle of rumination. Our guide is award winning science author Donna Jackson Nakazawa, whose new book, Mind Drama is a powerful window into the examination and relief of rumination. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We’ll jump right in there after this short break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:06] I want to start with the scene that opened your book, Mind Drama. Um, because I think anyone listening is going to recognize themselves in it in some way, shape or form. You’re sitting in a car in a parking lot. Um, I think in Optometrist’s office, you’ve just gotten a phone call. Um, take me there.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:01:30] Well, um, like a lot of writers, I finished my book a long time before it comes out. Right. Like 8 or 9 months, sometimes a year. And then it goes through the whole publication process. And early in that process, we have trusted readers. You know, I might show it to. I have two very close friends who are very well known, um, nonfiction female journalists. And we read each other’s work. But in this case, a British researcher whose work I respected Asked if he could read it. And what science writer doesn’t want a very famous researcher to read their work and say, you know, good job. Or maybe you got this one little thing wrong. As careful as my fact checking is, it never hurts to have another read, especially at a very high level. So I had sent him my manuscript, which is kind of something we don’t do. But I thought, all right. Very, you know what could go wrong? And I was sitting in my doctor’s office and I got a call and he said, um, that he was going to use several pages from the manuscript, sort of what we call my nut graphs that, you know, real heart of my argument in a paper that would come out in a couple of months, about six months before my book.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:02:49] And he knew I wouldn’t mind because, um, he was, you know, he knew that I wanted to get my, these ideas out there and that it was very, very important that they get out there sooner rather than later. And under his name. He could do a lot of good for this, this new argument that I was making, and it was not this book. It was another book. And I started shaking. My whole body started shaking. I literally became almost voiceless. And I said something to the effect of, you can’t use my work without my permission. And he said, But I’m doing you a favor. It’s I’m trying to help you, and I know you want this. And like this cold sweat went all the way down my body in the way that it does sometimes when we’re rendered voiceless. I left the doctors. I could not have my appointment. I drove home, my husband happened to be home. The dogs could tell that I was very upset.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:44] And the dogs always know.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:03:46] The dogs were like, you know, really barking and like, what is happening? And my husband was working from home that day. He came running down the steps. He said, My God, your whole body is red. You’re shaking. What’s happening? And I told him, and he just happens to be an attorney. And he said, call your editor. This is crazy. Call your editor. I did my beautiful random House Penguin Random House team got involved. Within an hour, the attorneys got involved. They shut the whole thing down, but I couldn’t shut it down in my head. It went on and on. Replaying it went from fear and to self-loathing. Like, why was I so stupid? How could I have done this? Why did I think he was such a nice guy? To thinking about him and judging him harshly. Like, what kind of creep does this? And I couldn’t get out of the story. Spinning the thoughts spiraling, the recasting, replaying the future, casting the drama, the mind drama in my head. And about two weeks into this, I said, this has got to stop. Clearly, after.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:54] I want to pause there for a second. Yeah. You didn’t say two minutes. You didn’t say two hours. You didn’t say two days. You just said two weeks. So this is still spinning in your head in.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:05:03] All my free moments. Because the this is the thing about rumination. It’s so seductive. It dangles before us, this false promise that if we just keep thinking about this thing, the answer is right there. It’s right there. It’s always a little bit further ahead and the answer will come. But what a great deal of recent science shows us is that the answer never comes. The relief never comes. We lock down the areas of our brain that keep us from the kind of clarity and and flow state and problem solving and cognitive, um, you know, awareness and the light going off in our head that tells us, here’s what I actually need to do about this situation.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:50] So I want to make sure I get this clear. You’re saying then basically one of the reasons we keep spinning this in our head over and over and over. And this has nothing to do with how smart or how this everybody. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Like we can literally be telling ourselves in one breath, I’m spinning this thing maniacally in my head. And then the next breath, you know what you’re doing, right? You know this isn’t helpful. And then in the next breath, again, you’re back spinning and spinning and spinning. It’s like, it, it’s it’s a really strange cycle, but shared by so many people.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:06:23] Oh. Studies show that we’re all ruminating more than we ever have before. And that’s a problem, because at the same time, one third of us don’t really understand what the word rumination means or what it is. And it’s also linked to it’s the greatest pre-diagnostic factor to depression and anxiety. And so here we are with a problem we all share. We’re doing it more than we ever have. We don’t talk about it because we’re ashamed of it. We’re embarrassed to how easily we get sucked into our thoughts spiraling and our story spinning. And yet, you cannot solve a problem you have not named.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:05] I want to drop into more what we’re talking about when we talk about rumination. But before we get there, you know, a lot of times when we think about this phenomenon, we think about it on a behavioral level or on like a like, how are we feeling level? Mhm. You took it a step further, um, and said, let’s actually look inside the brain, starting with you.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:07:27] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:28] So, so tell me what you discovered when you finally went to get your own, literally getting your brain scan that you didn’t genuinely expect to see.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:07:36] Yeah. I decided this is something that I, of all people who literally my niche as a science writer is neuroscience, emotion and mental health, right? So written quite a few books and I thought, if I can’t get this those 30 years of yoga and meditation and research and figuring out, you know, all kinds of different areas of neuroscience and lecturing at universities and schools. What am I missing? And so I like to dig deep. I’m very nerdy at the heart of my writing. Um, drive. And so I went to a neuroscience neuroscientist slash psychologist to find out what was going on. And he did a scan of my brain with, um, a type of thing called Q, E, G, and AI, which looks like an fMRI scan. And there were these ominous red swirls in my brain. And I remember sitting there in his little dark office looking at my scans and just kind of go, what are those red blobs? They looked like a bad hurricane on a weather, you know, a weather map when you’re watching the news. And he said, oh, those are earthquakes of rumination erupting all the time in your brain. And then he took his cursor and he moved it around and he said, oh, and right here I can see there’s some kind of really long standing emotional stress or, you know, some, some type of traumatic incident, uh, that’s triggering rumination still. And it’s been going on for a really long time across your lifetime. Then he went to another area that gives rise to rumination. He said, wow, this is an area where you would be ruminating a lot about, um, chronic illness. And I was like, what is even going on here? How do we know so much about this area of the brain and not know how to solve the most common human problem we share? So to get a little nerdy, this is an area of the brain known as the default mode network.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:09:53] Jonathan. For a long time it was thought to be a kind of nothing area of the brain, like a car engine idling in the driveway. But more recently, we’ve come to understand that it is the seat of our self-referential thoughts, and those are often our ruminating thoughts. What do they think of me? What did I say wrong? What did I do wrong? You know, you leave a lunch and you’re like, well, I kind of didn’t feel right. Something went sideways. Like, what are they saying about me? All of that is happening in the default mode network. And it’s really three areas the brain, one area in the front, one in the side and one in the back. And one area gives rise to mental images which emerge with our ruminations. One gives rise to our intense emotions and one gives rise to our physical sensations. So he was looking at these three different areas and telling me basically, that these areas of my brain, when they became hyper primed, and this is true for all of us and caught story spinning, I couldn’t toggle back out into my creative thought, which I feel healthy and sane and alive and involved in my work. And that is true for all of us. Because when we’re thoughts spiraling, replaying the past, spinning into the future, caught in self-referential thought. Guess what? The default mode network goes into lockdown. It is a closed circuit. We do not have good skills to get out of.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:28] Mhm. I think so many of us have experienced that, right? It’s sort of like we’re just we feel like we’re stuck in the loop, you know. Um, and we can look at it rationally and, and literally look at ourselves and say, like, I can even acknowledge that I’m stuck here and I keep spinning this thing over and over, and I can acknowledge that I can probably look and say, this is hurting me. Yes. Like this is stopping me from doing this thing over there, or being with this person, or being present or coming up with these cool new ideas for this project I’m working on. Like, we can feel that. And what you’re saying, if I’m getting tell me if I’m getting this right is you can actually see that you can visualize that happening in the brain.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:12:04] And it’s happening to all of us. But I also want people to understand this is so important, Jonathan. It is, you know, this, there is nothing wrong with you. If you are listening to this and you’re thinking, oh my God, I, you know, was I’m listening to this podcast. This is me, I totally relate, but gosh, you know what’s wrong with me? I spent three hours this morning, you know, driving to this big meeting in Pennsylvania. And the whole time I was story spinning something that happened two weeks ago, that is not a personality flaw. There is nothing wrong with you. This is part of the nuts and bolts of being human. It is part of what separates us from animals, in fact, and it makes us human. It is simply a survival response gone wrong. Your brain is trying to protect you. It just doesn’t know when to stop. And this really goes back to our evolutionary biology when just sitting around the communal fire, if people were whispering or elbowing each other and laughing at you across the communal fire, that was a very dangerous proposition. Why? Because across evolutionary time, social ostracizing was a predictor of physical, physical harm. You could be set at the edge of the tribe. You could be harmed by marauding tribes. You and your gene pool, which we care a lot about, might not receive the good meat or the good tubers, or you could be at the mercy of the elements. So over time, our very sophisticated immune systems evolved alongside the recognition of social threat, so that when there is social threat, our immune systems prick up and fill us with this cascade of hormones and chemicals to prepare for physical harm. That is why when we ruminate, we feel so terrible.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:02] Mhm. Yeah. Because those are the chemicals that are intended to help us mobilize to change the state. But when we’re just sitting in it, we’re kind of stewing in it and feeling awful and never actually dissipating those things that aren’t supposed to become chronic.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:14:16] That’s right. And our brain has a survival response to protect us. As I said, it just didn’t develop along the way. Very good strategies for getting out of it. That is not something our brains developed with over time. It’s something that we have to teach ourselves and work on ourselves. I wish it were otherwise. We humans developed all these great survival responses, but not very good ways to exit that survival state.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:47] Right? So if I understand correctly, you’re saying. We pretty much automatically know how to turn this on now, but we really don’t. We’re not very good at turning it back off.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:14:57] Very well said.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:59] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Yeah. You made another really interesting statement a little earlier in the conversation, which is and tell me if I’m getting this language right. It is one of the rumination is, is one of the single biggest. Is it predictors or forecasters of things like depression or other struggles for mental health? Take me into that a bit more.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:15:22] Yeah. So the person who did this research is really the scientific mother of the study of rumination, and her name is Susan Nolen-hoeksema, and she was at Yale. She died in 2013. And her research just kind of went away. And when I was diving into this, I found that she, as early as 2013, had found that the degree to which we ruminate more than any other mental act, is tied to our likelihood of developing depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, um, uh, eating disorders. It’s just crazy how how predictive it is. And yet we don’t really teach people at all in any way, shape or form how to manage this very human tendency that we have. At the same time, I found out that more recently in my research over the past 3 to 4 years, neuroscientists have proven Susan Nolen-hoeksema absolutely right. They’ve been going and looking in kids brains, adults brains, and finding that when the default mode network gets stuck in this ruminative pattern, it is predictive of developing anxiety within the next year or so, and it’s predictive of cognitive decline. This is the same area where we begin to see the greatest loss of synaptic connectivity, of robust connectivity in Alzheimer’s. So we really want to be talking about rumination and thought spiraling. We really want to be talking about our sticky, icky thought loops that we can’t escape and how we can get out of them. It’s important.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:11] Yeah. It makes so much sense. Let’s get really clear on on terminology here too. So so we understand and our audience can understand what we’re really talking about. So when you talk about rumination, you’re using it in a very specific way. That may not be how some of us really understand the word. What’s the technical thing that we’re actually naming here? Like what’s actually happening in the brain? And I think importantly, also, how is this different from from you just use the word anxiety. And some people may think, well, isn’t that the same thing? Or overthinking or vigilance or hypervigilance. Like, how is it different from these things? Or is it just the same? The same thing with different language?

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:17:51] Anxiety is a little different. I want to be clear about that. So we all ruminate. We all thought spiral. We don’t all have anxiety disorders.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:02] Okay.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:18:03] That is a very different thing. So an anxiety disorder may be the outcome of a chronic ruminative state. But and it may be a signal that you do not have the mental flexibility yet, yet to note and exit your ruminations and your thoughts spiraling. That is a slightly different thing. That said, ruminating makes people feel anxious. But that is not to say that it is a mental health disorder of, you know, generalized anxiety disorder. It can become that, but it doesn’t have to. And we actually know that when people are working with generalized anxiety disorder and are doing cognitive behavioral therapy, there are types of CBT that are specifically for rumination to help people recover from anxiety. So they’re related, but they’re not the same.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:04] How do we then? I mean, you just made a really interesting point also, which is that, um, and tell me if I’m getting this right. There’s kind of a fine line between thinking deeply and repeatedly in the direction of a problem that needs to be solved in a constructive and healthy way. Right? And overthinking. And I’m wondering if sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:19:28] Well, so I actually, um, developed a kind of a checklist, a cheat sheet, so to speak, on how to tell the difference. And in that cheat sheet, the questions that we can ask ourselves are. Have I been thinking about that? Have I thought about this thing? Repeatedly, over time, without any solution. And usually that’s a sign that you’re ruminating. Because when we’re productively thinking, we usually get some kind of insight. We all know that feeling like, you go take a shower, you stop thinking about it. You’re like, I should call this book X, right? Like we all have those creative moments of aha! Or, well, you know, this is what I need to say to my teenager or I bet X is y. You know why this is happening. However, um, you know, when we’re caught in this ruminative lockdown state and you can see as on my brain scans these areas of the brain swirling in red on a scan, you want to see those areas in blue and green, right? You don’t want to see them swirling in red. And when this area of the brain is locked down, it does not hook up to the areas that allow for those light bulb moments. It does not play ball with the other areas of the brain. And. And the more we know about the brain, the more neuroscientists refer to the whole brain as the connectome of the brain. And I love that idea and that image, because it isn’t just about what’s happening within one area of the brain and how those neural synapses are wiring and firing. It’s how they’re all talking to each other as well. And you can think of it that way, that if the brain is a giant connected network, when we’re ruminating in a negative way, it’s not it’s not interfacing with the areas that we need for the productive, insightful thinking that we want to be doing in our lives.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:29] Yeah. So it sounds like what you’re describing is it’s actually, it’s almost blocking. It is blocking the ability to interface with those things which will come up with the solution. So yeah, So if I have this, this right, then it would it be right to say something like, if you find yourself repeatedly thinking about something and continually finding yourself getting no closer to resolution, that that is probably a strong sign that this is this is tipping into overthinking and not just thinking constructively towards like some sort of resolution or solution.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:22:03] Yeah. So we all know we have those reels that we load up over and over again. We all know what they are. We all recognize that idea that here’s this old reel again. And it could have been something that happened last week when you were, you know, at a family reunion, or it could be something that happened 15 years ago that you just really have never spoken up about or dealt with in a, in a way that you maybe wish you had. Um, but yes, absolutely. So I think one thing that I really want to say here, in addition to how we can tell the difference because we can tell the difference also, Jonathan, because of how it makes us feel. If you go in and you know how after you’ve been caught ruminating, you feel contracted, your body is responding in a negative way. You might feel a sense of fight, flight, freeze, but you are definitely shrinking down into a somatic state that doesn’t feel good. Your heart may be racing, and you generally feel as if you have gotten nowhere at all. Another good question to ask yourself and I, I do this, I do this all the time. Am I choosing to do this or is it kind of like a runaway car? I’m trying to put on the brakes, but I can’t. And you said this earlier, right? Oh, I tell myself, this is not good. Stop thinking about what Sally said at dinner last night.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:23:31] But you can’t. And so if you ask yourself that one simple. Am I choosing to think about this? Or is this like a car without brakes? I just can’t, I can’t stop it. You are definitely ruminating. So another question you can ask yourself is, is this going to matter five years from now? Like, you know, and generally that is a good indicator. One thing I try to remind people of when they’re ruminating is we can no more go back and change the thing that happened an hour ago or ten minutes ago. Then we can go back into the time of the Romans, right? And change what happened then. So so if you’re repetitively thinking about it with no solution and no insight, or if it is something that you truly cannot control at this point, but you keep going back to it, you are ruminating. If you feel worse instead of better, you are ruminating. So those are just some of the things to help you, um, understand that you’re caught in a ruminative cycle if you’re replaying the past in a negative way. And here’s another really shorthand way to figure out if you’re ruminating, you’re judging yourself harshly in a self-referential way. I shouldn’t have, I should have, I suck, I did this, you know, you’re an idiot and you’re judging others harshly. That is a really clear sign that you’re ruminating.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:58] Yeah. And then there’s the meta judgment. Then you start judging yourself for judging yourself harshly.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:25:03] Which we don’t want to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:04] Do, right?

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:25:04] Like, you know, because we’re all doing it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:07] Yeah.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:25:07] Right. This is so human. It would be like judging yourself for feeling tired at night and wanting to go to bed. This is just part of being human. And rumination isn’t random. It is always, always, always linked to whether we feel we matter to the people who matter most to us. And that is a tender thing. Underneath all the noise that I want everyone to remember, there is a deeper longing here. It isn’t just a survival response. It’s a deeper longing, an invitation to sort of hear, reckon with, tend to the unheard parts of yourself, whether it’s fear or grief or exile or anger or sense of being dissed or dismissed or denigrated or hurt in some way. It’s about belonging. It’s about mattering to the people whom we want to matter to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:04] Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. You, um, which makes me also really curious. A lot of our folks in our community sort of in the middle season of life and they’re thinking about this. Me too, me too. Raising my hand to and like, and also thinking about, you know, like the next season of life. And, and, and I would imagine if you asked a lot of them, they would respond in some way to tell you that it feels like this is a part of their daily experience on a more regular basis than maybe it used to be. You just mentioned, and you write about this longing to belong. Um, is midlife, um, in, in some way a moment, a season when things emerge, when old things maybe come back online where like, everything around us is so big and complicated and swirly that we’re more likely to drop into these loops than in different seasons of life.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:26:59] I think it is. I have not seen an exact study on that, but I know it to be true for myself. And I think you’re actually touching into something that prompted me to write the book, because not only did I realize I’m ruminating more and I and I realizing my pattern that this is happening, you know, I’m recognizing that it happens, which is kind of a wisdom, right, to see that this is happening and you don’t want to be spending life, your precious life this way. But I was seeing that many, many of my acquaintances and my colleagues when I started to talk to them about rumination. Were ruminating more than they had in the past, which is true of all of us across all age groups. But they felt that it was especially prevalent as they came into midlife. So I think there’s a PhD student out there, maybe somebody, if everyone’s in their 50s, somebody’s kid is in grad school. I think it’s a really interesting area to study. Like we know we’re ruminating more. Are we ruminating more in midlife? I’m going to say yes, although I don’t have a study to back it up. And I’m going to say the reason is this because as we get older, we start to almost have we have more insight in the mirror, so to speak, right? Like, like we go, okay, I’ve raised a couple of kids.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:28:20] I know this thing that comes up, whether it’s with my kids or my friends or my family, it really gets to me like it spins me into this Story telling in a self-referential way, and things start that might have seemed different when you were younger. Start to seem more similar as you get older because you know your own patterns, right? You can be 20 and be like, oh, or 25. And oh my, you know, grad school advisor is such an asshole because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you notice at 55 weight, the same kind of situation when it arises. Spins me out, I spin out and you get more curious. And also life is shorter and you think, well, do I really want to let this kind of situation, maybe in my family life or my work life or my friend life trigger me. I don’t really love the word trigger because it’s so overused. Let’s say activate me. Do I always want to get activated and lost in my head because it’s a bad neighborhood to be in when I go into this place? So I think it’s a combination of patterns because we’ve lived long enough to see our patterns in the mirror more clearly. A combination of seeing time passing and not wanting it to pass this way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:43] Do you have a sense for whether there’s a difference in tendency towards rumination based on gender?

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:29:51] Yeah. So Susan Nolen-hoeksema, who I mentioned before, she actually did some very fascinating research on this before she passed away 13 years ago. And she found that rumination affects women more than men. And in fact, I think her statistic was 57% of women routinely ruminate, um, compared to 43% of men. And the gender difference starts early in adolescence and continues all the way through adulthood. And I had reported on this actually in my last book, girls on the brink, which was about gender differences in mental health. And we understand that now based on recent neuroscience, which I reported on in this previous book, we understand why this is. And it’s pretty fascinating. So in the female brain, when there is emotional distress or emotional stress, chronic emotional stress, which is often what triggers rumination, we actually see an area of the brain light up in a female brain that does not right light up in the male brain. I want to be clear for anyone listening, we have no idea how this applies to gender fluidity. We only started looking at the female brain under stress a few years ago. Before that, neuroscientists only looked at the male brain. So I know that people always want to ask me, well, what about, you know, what does this mean in terms of gender fluid individuals? We don’t know. We just figured out that the female brain responds to stress differently than male brain. So when the female brain is under chronic stress, an area of the brain lights up in what’s called the left amygdala.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:31:37] The amygdala is kind of an alarm center in the brain. It gets perfused. It gets very active in a way that we don’t see in the male brain. And this area of the brain is actually associated with self-degradation. What do I mean by that? It’s just a fancy term for I’m no good, you know, I don’t matter. People don’t care what I think. I’ll never, you know, be able to do this in, in the female brain, we also see a kind of global network effect, kind of like climate change across an entire globe in which lots of areas of the brain are affected by chronic stress, including this tendency to ruminate and act in on ourselves. So this is an old saying in neuroscience and psychology, women act in, men act out. And in fact, we see that in the male brain. We see areas that are activated into and linked to aggression. Um, you know, verbal being more verbal in a negative way, uh, focus, anxiety, uh, attention and behavior start to become more active. So that probably plays into the fact that women are more likely to be what Susan Nolen-hoeksema called immobilized by rumination. Because of that acting in. And men are more likely to act out. But what’s what’s interesting about this is that immobilization, that immobilization, that’s silencing is predictive of depression. And this, she believed, is why women experience depression at three times the rate of men.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:20] That’s a fascinating connection. Um, yeah. I mean, as you’re teasing that out as well. Um, I’m thinking of a conversation that I had with James Pennebaker a couple of years back.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:33:31] I love him, right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:32] Who became very well known for his research on what is now often called expressive writing, where and but the core of the research, a lot of people focus on the intervention. You like write for four days or for four weeks or four times. And it has profound, profound effects. But but the core realization in his research, which is why I’m bringing it up here, I’m curious about it. What your take is, was that we always thought that there was an initial trauma that was the cause of the pain or the suffering or the harm. And what he showed was it’s it’s the stifling of it.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:34:07] Exactly.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:08] And which it feels like it’s tying in with what you’re saying here. Does that land at all?

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:34:13] Yeah. No, it really does. And so I think that, um, really takes us into the heart of what I fell in love with in doing this research, which is and I mentioned it earlier, but our ruminative, ruminative stories, those reels you load up over and over again. They are a signal fire from your past. Asking you, inviting you to tend to that which has been left unsaid and which is not yet emotionally processed. It is literally your brain asking you to process that emotional hurt or loss or grief or feeling of non-belonging or not mattering. That is old and that is you have probably carried for way too long and probably isn’t yours to carry anymore. So that led me in my research to come up with ways to unburden the story. And what I found in working with many individuals was that once we could do that, once, we could unburden the story that our thoughts spiraling, was begging us to take seriously, begging us to listen, to, tune in to, and turn to tenderly. The story went away.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:39] Let’s dip into that then. Okay. You have a protocol that you shorthand as missed MIST, which I think really takes us into like, because probably a lot of people joining us now are like, okay, nodding along part of my life.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:35:52] What do I do?

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:53] Part of my experience, right? Like tell me what to do. Yeah. Take me into this and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:36:03] So I developed what I call the missed framework. And I chose miss because first writers love an acronym. And second of all, it really fits because when we are thoughts spiraling, we are lost in a fog. As I’ve explained all the areas of the brain that give you clarity and insight, they’re offline. And also because we want to clear the mist. And so to explain, the acronym Mist stands for M is for mental movies and mental imagery, and I is for intense interior emotion because these mental movies give rise to emotion. S is for somatic sensations or those physical sensations that arise in our body when we are caught in a ruminative state. So T is for tying it all together. So I will give you an example from the book of a woman I worked with who, um, had she was in midlife. She had decided to build her business out, go back to work like harder than she ever had before. Her daughter was of the age where she could do that and, and really pour herself into she was a costume designer, set designer, and her husband was older and kind of retiring. And so she was working really long hours. And her daughter was, as teenage daughters do, kind of distancing from her and getting a little bit remote. And she was feeling a really keen sense of kind of coming in the house after being away on a business trip, and her retired husband or her teen daughter were getting very close and sharing a lot of stories together that seemed to exclude her.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:37:47] And so she went through the process, the miss framework and her miss looks something like this. M for mental imagery was okay. Here’s my old story of how people always leave me out and dismiss me. And when I asked her, okay, so great, so what are the intense emotions? And it sort of looked like this. Like, here’s my old story of how people leave me out and dismiss me, which makes me feel small and afraid. And each time she began to name these things by using language that she generated. And I want to say this the language you generate as you go through the mist process is the most powerful language you have, because it is the language your brain will pay attention to. It’s not going to pay attention to any language that I give you. It must be generated by your own neural networks. So for her, M was. Here’s my old story of how people leave me out, abandon me, dismiss me, and I intense emotions, which was which is what made which makes me feel small and afraid and alone and somatic sensations. S was which makes my heart pound or my gut churn. And when we tied it all together, it was really profound for her because it was. Here is my old story of how people dismiss me or ignore me or abandon me, which makes me feel small and afraid and alone. And my heart pound and my gut churn. And as soon as she did that, as soon as she was able to name the story and the experiences that her default mode network was asking her to pay attention to the intensity of it, the story went away.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:39:42] She got a little space between what was happening in her head and her metacognition. Not only this is what I’m doing. I don’t want to be doing it, but a space outside of it. It seemed 20ft away instead of turning and turning around in her head. And this is what I find, is that when people practice the mist framework, suddenly it’s not so painful anymore. It’s almost like your brain is saying, yay! You finally got it. You finally see me. And that ability to see our patterns of rumination and see them clearly. That is that first step to emotional clarity and and emotional freedom. And these tools are not just positive thinking. Jonathan. This is neuroscience. We can see on fMRI scans that when we do this naming of the, of these different emotions and sensations and storytelling that are being generated by this area of the brain, the brain calms down, it physically shifts our brain activity so that we can link up to that whole connectome and start to say, okay, what do I what am I feeling? Here I am, I’m feeling something I have not allowed myself to feel, which is Pennebaker, right? I am feeling and acknowledging something that I have not allowed myself to note. What does this mean for me? What do I need right now and what do I want to do about it? That is a very different place than being lost in brooding and dark recursive thinking.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:27] Yeah, and it’s also a very different place than being in fix it mode. So I want to make sure that I’m clear on this. What you’re saying is, from what I hear, is that the move, the intention behind the mist framework is not to fight the thought. It’s not to suppress it. It’s not to replace it with positive affirmations or positive thinking. The the intention here is to look directly at the thought to, to, to name what’s underneath it in multiple layers. You know, like what is the movie? What is the, the felt sensation of it? What is the somatic experience of it, the emotional experience of it? And then let the act of naming and acknowledging do the neurological work of loosening the grip.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:42:10] Because it does, because it does the neurological work, because it does it, the brain says. So Combination is actually a way of fighting what you really feel. It’s actually something that we do to prevent ourselves. We do it because we want control over our situation, but we’re also doing it to prevent ourselves from feeling what we feel. And so what the missed framework does is it takes us into a very powerful area of neuroscience, which allows us to face the unfaceable. The thing we may have been sitting on across a lifetime, or across a friendship or across a marriage, or across all our experiences of parenting or across our entire career. And to hold it tenderly and look at it and ask ourselves, well, what does this mean for me? Because rumination is actually an effort that you. It’s a survival response, and it’s actually trying to get you to not feel something. Because remember what we said earlier, it is a survival response gone rogue. It wants you to fight. It wants you to act. Because across evolutionary time, when you had a sense of non-belonging, it was a biologically dangerous proposition. We don’t have a way in modern life to respond to our ruminating, dark, recursive thoughts in a productive way. We don’t want to get up and go slug somebody because they made us feel bad, right? We don’t want to fight it out. We need to tenderly look at what our brain is asking us to finally, at last, hold and process.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:05] Mhm. I mean, that lands really powerfully for me. I often wonder whether a very Western mindset listens to that and says, well, okay. Like now I see it more clearly and I see how it’s affecting me. But what do I do? And what you’re saying is that is the doing.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:44:24] It is the first step of the doing. I would love to be able to tell you that all you’re going to do is in this framework, and you’re never going to remedy it again. But the truth is that usually these stories we carry are very, very old. They originate in our early sense of belonging or non belonging. We have excellent evidence for this. Over 2000 studies which show us that this is true. But these stories, because we they they are inculcated in us often before we had the neural development to reject them or question them, especially if they happened early in life. Those stories of, you know, needing to please the adults around us or silence ourselves to be loved or perform in a certain way, or accept a certain level of criticism or humiliation, or deal with a sense of emotional neglect or non mattering. There’s a you know we have big T of course big trauma which you know, everyone’s talking about trauma today. And of course there are all kinds of trauma. But really if we boil it down to one simple idea that you had a need to be seen and to belong and be held and feel safe with an adult who was safe and for whatever reason, you needed to turn to an adult with something and feel safe. And we’re not able to do that for whatever reason.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:45:53] I mean, parents are doing their absolute best, right? Like we’re all parents, we’re doing our absolute best. But if that is a chronic experience of growing up, that is an experience of non-belonging to feel that you could not turn to someone to articulate what you were experiencing or feelings of non-belonging, or of being humiliated or neglected. If there was no safe conversation, no safe place to go, no one to turn to with that longing. That is a that is a type of experience that leads to these early beliefs about ourselves, that we’re not worthy, that we’ve done something wrong. Little kids tell themselves stories. If we aren’t clear with kids, when there is family tension, when there’s psychological distress in a family, when there’s hardship in a family, if we aren’t clear with kids that it isn’t their fault, they will make it their fault, right? We know. That’s why, um, in divorces, kids have to go to see a therapist because it’s not their fault that mom and dad are divorcing, but they will make it their fault because the child’s brain can’t make that essential leap between. This is something that’s happening outside of me, and it’s not my fault they can’t make that leap without our help. And that’s why ideas and stories from early in life that we did not sign on for become stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:47:25] For me, I’ll be personal. I lost my father in a family tragedy when I was 12. It was very sudden, it was unexpected and it was horrific. And I was the youngest and the only girl. And I had a lot of responsibilities at 12 that I was just not prepared for. My mom was widowed with four kids to take care of, three of whom were teenage boys, and I truly could not turn to anyone with my grief. And it’s understandable, right? Like, you know, my mom. I love my mom. We’re super close. She’s just doing everything she could to just, you know, figure out how to keep a roof over our heads. And we all turned out fine. And we went to, you know, we put ourselves through school and we did what we needed to do in the world. But during those years of silencing, I really developed an inner story that stuck with me for a very long time. And it came out when I was dealing with the British researcher who wanted to use my work. And that old story was, you know, here’s my old story of how no one wants to hear what I have to say. My voice doesn’t matter, I don’t matter. Which makes me feel ashamed and like curling up in a ball and pounds through my body until I want to curl up and not get out of bed.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:48:48] And it was a very old story, and once I could see that and use the missed framework and name it, I could see why I could not let go of that for two weeks, because it was asking me to hear my own inner voice. And the beauty of practicing the missed framework is when I have found in watching individuals, is that they’re able to speak up for the first time about the things that are still trailing after them, like so many small ghosts, and that makes them more able to speak up in their current life when similar things happen and activate them. By doing this work, I can tell you that the people around me have noticed that when something replays these old stories, that my voice doesn’t matter or that I’m being taken advantage of, which makes me feel ashamed and want to curl up in a small ball. I, I, I speak up. It’s a little shocking for some of the people around me. They’re still adjusting, but it changes us. It gives us agency. It gives us voice. Your story of whatever large or small adversity you’ve had will be very different than mine, but the need to tend to the story is probably the same.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:13] And that actually feels like a good place for us to come full circle. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Donna Jackson Nakazawa: [00:50:24] I, I would say that for me to live a good life and, and to be in a good life with others, because that is the most important thing to me with my family, my husband, my children, and my mom is 93 and, and my friends, I think it is to give each other the space and the tenderness for the unsaid. That I think to me is a good life, because it is in those moments where we exchange and sit with and receive the unsaid and offer the unsaid that we experience that sense of Biological sinking and safety that makes us sing with being alive.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:16] Mm. Thank you. So let’s talk about some of the big actionable takeaways from this conversation. One thing that I’m really sitting with from the conversation is Donna’s framing that rumination is not a flaw or failure. It’s a survival response gone rogue. Your brain is trying to protect you. It just never really developed a reliable way to stop. A few things I want to take away from this as well. The default mode network, that’s this area of the brain where you’re self-referential thoughts, your ruminative loops, and your sense of belonging all live together when it’s locked down in a thought spiral. It’s not talking to the areas that give you clarity and creativity or insight. This is not a character problem. It’s not something you can fix by being a better person. It’s just a circuit problem. The signal underneath the loop Rumination is never random. Donna really said this clearly. It’s always circling the question of whether you matter to the people who matter most to you. That is the tender thing underneath all the noise. If you can hear that, you’re already halfway through it. And her missed framework, which she gave us as a practice to actually use naming the mental movies, the intense emotions, the somatic sensations and tying them together into your own words, not to analyze or fix them. The act of naming is what actually shifts the brain. So the next time a thought loads up and will not let go, notice which reel it is, ask what it is actually about and see whether naming it out loud, even just to yourself, gives a little less weight.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:53] And hey, before you leave next week, we’re sitting down with Candace Dellacona, a trust and estates attorney who is also deep in what you would call the season of midlife or the sandwich generation to talk about the caregiving years and what it costs you when you’re pulled in every direction at once, not just logistically, but in terms of who you are and who you thought you would be. Now, if you’re caring for an aging parent, a young or dependent or both at the same time, this conversation was made for you. So be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a quick favor, share this with just one person who you think could use it. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you’ve not already done so, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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