Why You Can’t Stop Overthinking—and How to Break the Spiral

Have you ever replayed a conversation over and over in your mind?

Maybe it was something your partner said. A text that felt off. A moment at work. A look on someone’s face. Suddenly your mind is looping, analyzing, judging, and trying to solve something that never seems to resolve.

Today’s conversation with science writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa is about rumination—what many of us experience as overthinking, thought spirals, or getting mentally stuck.

Donna brings together powerful neuroscience, personal story, and practical tools to help us understand why our minds loop, what those loops are trying to show us, and how we can begin to interrupt them with compassion and clarity.

We explore:

• Why rumination is not random—and what it reveals
• The difference between productive reflection and a mental loop that leaves you feeling worse
• Why social media can trigger rumination so quickly
• Donna’s MIST framework for stopping the spiral

This conversation is especially for you if you’ve ever thought, Why can’t I just let this go? or Why am I still thinking about this?

Get Donna's new book, Mind Drama ⁠here⁠

Connect with Donna ⁠here⁠

⁠Preorder my brand new book The Secure Soul⁠

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Want to hear more episodes like this? Start here:

⁠Episode 158⁠:  Your Pain Has a Name: The Deeper Hurt Behind Distressing Thoughts with Therapist Monica DiCristina

⁠Episode 51⁠: The 12 Common Thinking Traps, Mind Reading, Mental Filters, and How To Stop Taking Things Personally

📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode⁠ here⁠

Connect further with ⁠@dralisoncook⁠ on Instagram

Join 80,000+ soul tenders in our email  community and receive weekly wisdom ⁠here⁠. 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Am I replaying scenarios? Am I replaying them without a sense of finding a resolution?

Is my brain loading up the same reels over and over but without the benefit of cognitive or

emotional processing? or an action plan that offers a sense of release relief and how to move

forward according to all indicators we're ruminating more than we ever have before one third of us

have never heard the word rumination or we don't know what it means you cannot solve a problem that

you aren't being honest about that you haven't named so let's name it frame it and let's do that

interior work with a sense of tenderness for our own story, because that's where the wellspring of

well-being begins.

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of the Best of You podcast. I'm

Dr. Allison, and I have such an exciting announcement to share with you today. So over the...

Past few years, I've been working on a project on the side, really quietly. It's a book.

It's the most personal book I've ever written. It's my own journey through healing the parts of my

own soul. And it is finally finished. It's off to the printer. It's going to be printed any day

now. It's actually terrifying to me. If you've followed my work for a while, I...

to be a little bit more comfortable in the expert seat, right? And in kind of helping other people

understand themselves and in helping bring language to some of these concepts and theories and try

to make them practical for others. It's a lot harder for me to write about my own story,

write about my own experience. So I'm definitely experiencing a vulnerability hangover as we speak.

And so I'm so thrilled to share with you all today, my podcast listeners in this community, you're

the first to know if you're listening right now. I have a new book coming out. It's called The

Secure Soul, How to Find Inner Strength and Connection When Trust Doesn't Come Easy.

It's different in so many ways than my past books. It's more personal. It's more honest.

It's less scripted. It's just my own perspective on what I believe are the three most important

ingredients to healing, attachment, parts work, and spiritual formation.

And I bring these ideas together using my own story as illustration,

right? So I'm sharing with you insights into how I did this work to heal parts of my own soul,

even as I'm trying to help you and me together understand how attachment wounds,

how inner parts work, and how spiritual formation is essential for all of us to develop a secure

soul. This new book, The Secure Soul, it comes out August 18th, and I wanted to share it here first

with you, my podcast listeners. I also want to share with you just honestly,

behind the scenes, if you've ever followed an author you love, you... likely already know this, but

when you preorder a book, it makes a big difference. It really helps support the authors you like.

It's one of the main ways that publishers and distributors pay attention to kind of what's

signaling out there that this is a message people care about. So when you preorder a book,

it helps people hear about it. So if you're listening to this message today and you think you're

gonna read the book or it's a work that you wanna do, maybe you've read Boundaries for Your Soul or

one of my other books or you've engaged with this podcast and you think, I wanna go deeper in this

work. I wanna learn more about how this actually works in my day-to-day real life. I'd be so

grateful if you consider pre-ordering it now. When you do pre-order the book now, we put together

some really meaningful pre-order bonuses. For one thing, you'll get the first couple of chapters

of the book. There's also a companion guide. This is the first time I've ever done a workbook. So

there's an accompanying workbook that goes with the Secure Soul. You'll get a few chapters from

that. We've also put together some webinars and masterclasses and workshops.

For those of you who are interested in pre-ordering, you can get access to those when you pre

-order the books. So we want to make it worth your while. It's also my way. I've been wanting to

create more resources out of this work. It's again, the most powerful way I've seen to kind of

engage this work of inner healing and this intersection of healing and spiritual formation,

because this is a, when we bring God into this work, we are reshaping our souls in partnership with

God's spirit. So please head over to my website. You can find everything there. You can go to the

secure soul book. That's where you'll find all those bonuses. You can order the book anywhere books

are sold. I'm so thrilled to bring this to you. I'm grateful that you've been with me for these

past four years on the podcast. I'm grateful for the messages you send me about how this work has

helped you. I'm praying and hoping that this new offering will truly be not only a teaching tool

for you, but a... a companion for you on the journey, something that says, I'm not alone in this,

right? That was my heart with this book. And I'm so thrilled to finally be able to bring it to you

today.

Today's conversation is so good. I have been thinking about it all day and there's just so much.

practical insight and wisdom and helpful tools. I cannot wait to share it with you.

My guest is Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She's an award-winning science journalist,

and she's the author of several groundbreaking books at the intersection of neuroscience, the body,

and emotional healing. You might be familiar with her previous books, including Girls on the Brink

and Childhood Disrupted. She has spent her career translating cutting-edge brain science into

language that actually changes. how we live in our newest book. I have it right here. It's called

Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist.

I cannot recommend it enough. Here's what drew me in. Donna opens by naming something that I think

most of us experience, but we don't always have the right words for, that spiral, right?

That loop that gets sticky, that place in our brain that just keeps going. It's the replaying of a

conversation you had three days ago. It's the middle of the night replay reel that just won't stop

no matter how hard you try. And she calls it rumination. And it turns out,

Most of us. are doing it without even really knowing there's a name for it and understanding how to

break that cycle. In today's conversation, Donna helps us understand that rumination isn't random

and it's not a flaw. It's actually a survival response that we have for a reason. It's been wired

into our nervous system. And she explains so beautifully how it's almost always rooted in our early

childhood wounds. These places in our stories where we maybe didn't feel seen or didn't feel like

we belong. or weren't sure if we mattered to the people who mattered to us, right?

These are the tender, unprocessed places from our past that tend to show up in these spirals.

Now, the spirals usually relate to different stories, but they're often linked. And how uncovering

that link can actually help us break free. And Donna actually walks me through this framework.

She calls it the mist. model in real time in today's episode. She helps me apply it to my own

ruminations. And it was really powerful. somewhere really specific and true and really helpful in a

matter of minutes. And it opened up something I hadn't quite fully been able to name for myself in

this same way before. I would encourage you to grab a journal for this one because you can do this

exercise right along with us. So if you're someone who lies awake at night running the same

scenarios on repeat, or you find yourself hijacked mid-afternoon by a worry spiral you can't shake

loose, or if you're just someone who thinks of yourself as an overthinker, this episode is for you.

And honestly, it's really for all of us. Please enjoy my conversation with Donna Jackson Nakazawa.

I want to open where you open, which is this idea that I think you say a third of Americans really

have maybe don't understand the word rumination, but absolutely are doing it and feeling it.

What do you... How do you define rumination and what do you, how do you understand it?

How do you experience it? Because you share also your own story in the book. Oh, sure. Right. I'm

not standing here in a glass house going, don't ruminate. I'm looking in the mirror and going,

what can we do to stop ruminating here? So really a very common vernacular way of thinking about

rumination is thought spiraling. You know, we are thought loops that are so sticky. We just can't

get out of them. We kind of know this isn't good. for us but we keep replaying the same

conversation or the interaction that we had maybe with our partner or teenager the night before or

a colleague or a parent a sibling you know fill in the blank and it can often in short form when

people are struggling like Is this rumination? We can ask ourselves, like, am I really judging

myself? Am I criticizing myself? Or am I caught in cycles of judging and criticizing others?

Am I replaying? scenarios? And am I replaying them without a sense of finding a resolution?

Like is my brain loading up the same reels over and over, but without the benefit of cognitive or

emotional processing or an action plan that offers a sense of release,

relief, and how to move forward. So technically,

in mental health circles rumination is worry about the past or projecting into the future so you

can use any of those but they're all a good way to frame the word rumination as you said one third

of us have never heard the word rumination or we don't know what it means so i'm kind of on a

mission to help us understand what it is And I have reasons for that,

which I'm sure we'll get into. And is it fair to say we all do it on some level?

It is because it's a survival response. It's built into the nuts and bolts of being alive.

It's part of our neural hardware. And it's a survival response gone wrong.

Think of it this way. Across evolutionary time. If you were sitting around the communal fire and

two or three people were elbowing each other, rolling their eyes or whatever people did a million

years ago to let you know that you were being dissed or dismissed or diminished in any way,

that was a dangerous proposition. Why? Because back across almost all of evolutionary time,

minus the past whatever hundred years, That was a sign that you and your offspring,

which we, our brains, our biological beings, we care a lot about our offspring, our gene pool,

we could be set at the edge of the tribe. And what does that mean? It means in a best case

scenario, you're not there for the good meat on the fire or you get the last little tuber that was

collected or buried. In a worse case, you're put so far outside of the realm of protection that

you're at risk of being picked off by marauding tribes or wildlife.

Wild animals, yep. Our immune systems are so sophisticated that across time,

our immune systems evolved with a sense of social threat. Social threat is clothed by the brain as

the most dangerous type of threat because it's really physical to us as beings.

And therefore, our immune systems, our stress chemicals, our stress hormones get really ramped up.

when we're ruminating because we're replaying social threat and that's a problem that's a problem

and rumination is is tied as the largest transdiagnostic factor to mental health so it's not just a

little thing that we're doing yeah it's a survival response gone rogue your brain just doesn't have

good mechanisms to stop and that's where my book comes in i'm trying to give people those yeah yeah

so if i'm and i'm hearing you correctly that it's most often we are ruminating about social threat

the threat of rejection the threat of isolation the threat of disconnection the threat of conflict

Loneliness. Not mattering. Yeah. Not belonging. The number one thing we ruminate about is whether

we matter to the people who matter to us. Yeah. In any aspect of our lives.

It could be in high school. I work a lot with high school girls. It could be.

That sense of your friend group. It could be a group chat. It could be the mom group. It could be

the neighborhood. It could be that thing your neighbor said over the fence. It could be,

again, anyone in your immediate or extended family. You're probably ruminating about one of them

right now. And I would guess social media could could trigger it.

Right. That's another era. It's a whole new thing we've introduced where suddenly, you know, I'll

notice that I'll be in a perfectly healthy. state mentally kind of thinking about the day in the

present. And then I'll see one thing and that spiral begins. It's just,

it's, you know, it's unbelievably quick and fast in that moment.

And it is. And, and that is one of the things that I work with parent and girl groups about,

especially girls, but also high schoolers and college age students. Because we see that social

media is turning on that fire hose of threat very quickly. Images do that much more quickly than

words. Videos do it more quickly than images. And most of us are using social media through video

imagery now, which means that we clock that sense of outrage or threat or loneliness or panic in a

much more visceral way. So you're absolutely right. I will add that according to all indicators,

we're ruminating more than we ever have before. And that is probably tied somewhat to social media,

to a pandemic just barely in the rearview mirror, to that just unending fire hose of rage and fear

and isolation from the news, from online life, from social media. from every corner that we turn to

is just amping it all up. So you're absolutely right. How,

in the book, you rely on your own mind as sort of your case study. One of them,

yes. One of them. What did you find that surprised you?

about your own patterns and tell us just a little bit about your own experience of realizing you

know it is to your point it's a helpful naming um and we'll get to what where there can be healthy

versions you know like i was mentioning there could be overthinking that can be healthy but but the

spiral the the negative spiral the rumination i bet you became very familiar with your own patterns

what did you notice Well, I noticed and I wrote very openly in the book that when I was very young,

my father died in a very freak overnight medical accident.

He went in for very minor surgery and he died due to a medical error.

And so it was the shock. that lives on forever. The reverberations will live on forever,

obviously. It's not something that you get up and shake off, you know,

as a kid of 12. And a lot of things changed in my family. Obviously,

my mom was widowed with four teenagers. I was the youngest and the only girl. My brothers were off

to the wind, girlfriends, colleges, what have you. And I really became my mom's emotional support

and just... everything that I could into protecting her,

taking care of her, worrying about her emotional needs. Was she okay?

Not okay. Coming out of her bedroom, not, you know, imagine being widowed overnight with four kids

and no way to support yourself. So my complete being went to that desire to care give.

as a child and make sandwiches for my brothers or whatever. So I never really processed any of that

until I began to report this book. And sure, I'd been to therapy.

I'd done all the right things. But as I was reporting this book, it really came about because one

day, and this is the opening of the book, you can read it for yourself. But I was coming out with

another book, not this book. And a researcher with whom I had shared the manuscript reached out to

me. I was at a doctor's appointment. And it was not the first time that something like this had

happened in my career where he told me he was going to borrow a bunch of it for a paper he was

writing. And he was doing me a favor because he was certainly more famous than me.

And it would come out under his name in a professional venue. And we would get it out there.

And he knew that I wanted that. And I had to leave the doctor's appointment.

I drove home. And I think most women could relate to this kind of a situation.

You know something has happened that shouldn't happen. You didn't have a voice for it. You weren't

able to speak up for yourself. And it's all trapped in your head and your body,

right? And so just talking about it, my heart still pounds a little bit.

I came home.

lawyer husband was here when I got home and he said, no, that's not okay.

You have to email your editor. I'm very close to my editor. We're very good friends. And she

immediately got the legal team on it and the whole thing disappeared. It disappeared. I didn't have

to solve it. They solved it, but it wouldn't stop replaying in my head.

And I kept saying to myself and my husband, It was three minutes of the worst phone conversation

I've ever had. But I'm not injured. Nothing happened. I can't get it out.

And that took me back to some of the patterns of voicelessness from my childhood and overdoing,

overgiving, and often in an atmosphere of male domination and male control in a big,

large... you know family so there were triggers that I had not attended to and we I'm sure can

break that down in the way in which naming the different images those movies the emotions and the

somatic sensations can help break our rumination and I have a an acronym for that writers love

acronyms called mist and i don't want to get into that now because it's based on the latest brain

science on where rumination is emanating from in our brain and how to work with that area of the

brain and we can get into that but i've already been talking for like three minutes no that i let's

get let's go there but i i just want to make sure i'm understanding you because this is there's so

much in what you're saying right as a as a I'm a therapist.

My listeners, this is why I wanted to have you on, right? We're always kind of trying to figure out

where are these triggers coming from. So I think what you're saying, let me make sure I'm hearing

you, that we ruminate for a reason, right? We're going to ruminate,

but what triggers a spiral is probably there for a reason and it's probably linked to some sort of

trauma or some sort of negative experience. from long ago. It's not unfamiliar.

It's not random. Is that, am I hearing you correctly? 100%. And to frame it through my lens,

we know that that area of the brain that gives rise to our ruminations for the nerds out there it's

called your default mode network and it's really three areas that we can work with discreetly to

unlock the brain from ruminations so we'll dive into that in a minute but first to address what

you're saying through my lens and the research that I did it's very clear that these patterns of

rumination in this area of the brain allison gets set up in response to events in childhood this

area of the brain is wired and fired in response to our early senses of mattering and belonging to

early caregivers and family members so rumination isn't random this is why it's almost always about

whether we belong or we matter to the people who matter to us but here's the tender thing beneath

all that mental noise Rumination is a signal fire from your past.

It is asking you to attend to those fearful, exiled,

angry, grieving, unseen, hurt parts of you that you have not fully attended to where emotional

processing still needs to happen. And so trauma is very much a theme through this book because

We've all had trauma. I wrote a whole book called Childhood Disrupted about the ubiquity of trauma

that we may not call trauma. Having parents who weren't present or having no one to really care

about you or think you were special or being put down or humiliated or critiqued all the time.

These are all classified by the CDC as types of childhood trauma. So our ruminations are...

encoded with information we each have a very distinct pattern of rumination we have things that can

happen to us in the world that will trigger this area of our brain to go into a kind of lockdown

that it's very difficult to get out of it's almost like an airport where airplanes are going around

on the tarmac in circles but they can't get out again Nothing flies in, nothing flies out,

and we have to be able to attend to those broken places and name them,

see them, and honor them for this area of the brain to let go again.

Gotcha. So part of, and I'm a big fan of naming, I'm going to use myself as a case study here for a

second. Good. That's okay. Yes. I think part of what you're saying is if we can find the underlying

pattern,

that's rooted in the past, it helps us access the path to release it.

So in my case, I often notice, and this is pretty new for me to notice this, but,

and this is kind of where social media comes in, especially in our polarized world. But in

childhood, I was shaped by attachment figures, all of whom I loved,

but who did not always know how to communicate with each other.

And they represented different, to use kind of your tribal, you know, different tribes, different

ideas, different ways of orienting to the world, whether religiously or spiritually or just the way

we are in the world. And I always found myself, where do I belong? I don't belong in any one group

because if I pick, I have to, and this is right in my own family,

right? I lose this person. Oh, my God. Right. So I don't want to pick this because then I lose this

person. So I have to figure out how to live coexist. So can you imagine? So that that is where

you're always under the threat of the possibility of loss of loss by any attachment.

And so it makes it nearly impossible for me to to this day.

I've had to figure out how. And so, again, I think there and this is where I want to get with you.

I've learned that there's as with anything. There's beauty in that because I've become something of

a translator, of a bridge builder. And also where I can spiral is I don't belong anywhere.

And if I choose this side, I lose this side. If I, you know, and, oh,

I don't belong in this side. That hurts. You know, it's always kind of comes back to that sense of

where do I belong? I'm just always sort of holding a lot of other people's belonging. Is that kind

of, but that's taken me a while to realize that's almost always where the. the spiral starts

because if you think about it allison underneath that fear of where do i belong is the fear of

where will i not Yes. Belonging. Where will I not matter?

Where will I be socially rejected or emotionally rejected? Yes. And again,

that is clocked by the brain as one of the most severe threats we can undergo as a human.

And it has a rapid escalation effect on your body's stress machinery.

So what you're feeling is real and getting in touch with that with real specificity.

language yeah by working with this part of the brain and what I've called the mist framework

because when we're lost in those places where we get triggered into thought spiraling rumination

self-judging other judging we're in a mist we actually can't see and what yes like on a

neurobiological level is that there are 267 areas of your brain that are super important to clear

clear thinking they're not lighting up They're not in use. They are offline.

All that's really working is this one closed circuit in your brain.

And you feel it, right? You feel it. It's like, whoa, I just keep going here.

I just keep going here. It's like Groundhog Day in your brain. And it feels terrible.

And you're actually not getting anywhere. You're not getting to any relief from the fear or the

wondering about the past or the future. So by using words,

and you like to use words, with incredible specificity,

we can actually decode our pattern of rumination in a way that...

it and puts it here in front of us maybe three feet away and that begins to make all the difference

that is the first step to emotional freedom because your brain starts to light up with awareness

other areas of your brain get engaged to go oh this isn't good I just spent the last hour making

dinner and I don't know if I added the salt to the stew or not I have no clue or I just drove here

I have no idea how I got here because I was loading the same reels over and over and over again so

we could try doing the MIST framework if you want sure okay I want it yeah that'd be great I love

it to

use your example We would start with the acronym is M-I-S-T for MIST.

And we're trying to clear the MIST by using the MIST framework. I love it. Okay, so M for you would

be using very specific words to create the sense of the story behind all the familiar reels that

you've seen a thousand times that your brain... loading up and where m is for mental imagery or

movie reels whatever works for you or montages it's that mental imagery the movies that replay a

little will come in from when you were five a little come in from yesterday and often it's like

Here's my old story or my familiar story of how people always dismiss me. Or here's my old familiar

story of how my voice doesn't matter. Here's my old familiar story of how people put me down.

I've interviewed so many people. They all come down to belonging and mattering. But what matters is

that you find your words for M, for your mental imagery, because the words that you say out loud,

that you name. Wow. Those are the words your brain will pay the most attention to.

Not the words I give you. Those words are not to be woo-woo. Those words are inside you and

they've been inside you for a really long time now. So if we were to do M, here's my old story of

how I don't belong. That would just be me spitballing, but you do it your way.

Yeah, it came as I was listening to you very clearly. They don't see me. Yes.

Yes. Okay. Let's start with that. Here's my old story of how they don't see me.

Let's move on to I. I is for the intensity of emotion, intense inner emotions.

Those could be, and they're very tied to our movie reels, right? Like you see the movie reel,

intense emotion gets going very, very quickly. It could be, which makes me feel afraid,

angry, scared, small.

So then we just go, here's my old story of how they don't see me, which makes me feel X and Y.

I mean, it's so interesting when you get specific. right? It actually makes me mad,

like angry. It makes me mad. It really does. I'm like, yes. Okay, Allison,

here's my old story of how they don't see me, how they don't see me,

which makes me feel. angry and mad and now we're going to do s for somatic sensations oh boy where

do you feel it in your body some people feel it like in the back of their head uh one person i

worked with just her headache like came on in eight seconds Some people, I feel it in my solar

plexus, like this anvil just landed on my chest. Heart might pound. Some people just,

their whole body contracts. So here's my old story of how they don't see me,

which makes me feel so mad and angry. And it makes my heart pound,

my solar plexus, whatever. Okay, so this is interesting. The minute I named it,

I felt more grounded in my body, which is interesting. But when it happens,

before I'm conscious of it, it feels like I, it's kind of what you were saying.

It's like I go down into a cave in my, it feels like kind of a cave in my brain. Like I just get

lost in a little kind of worrying energy in my brain, you know, like back here,

you know. Sure, yeah. Well, that's part of your default mode network, by the way. okay it's just

sort of like you know this buzzing sort of like worrying in in my head yeah so here's my old story

of how they don't see me which makes me angry and my head buzzes yeah so you can keep going there

and i want to say we all have multiple sentences we can say right yeah Different things are going

to emerge with different times. I had one person I worked with. She had one saying around her

husband, another around her daughter, and another around her mother. Like different things came up.

We can have multiple codes. But let me ask you this. So, so why don't you try saying the whole

thing in one sentence? Because that's where the magic is. Okay. So I want to ask you. And you can

change it. Okay. Because I want to, when you just said that, it made me realize, I think part of

what happens is, so I, they don't see me and that I feel mad.

And so there is a little bit of a, like, you know, when I say it, it's kind of in my, in my fists,

you know, in my, in my body. But I think it's actually a step after that. I go to either.

beating myself up typically. Yes. And that's what I feel in my,

it's like a loop opens up where I just start, why are you not bad? What's wrong with you,

Allison, that you haven't made them able to see you? Oh, I feel that viscerally.

Yes. Isn't this beautiful? So here's where you would be going with that. It's my fault. I'm

actually mad at myself. So here's my old story of how they don't see me. which makes me ashamed of

myself or feel like there's something wrong with me and my fists clenched.

Yeah. Like, try it again. Sorry, people, but this is important. Like,

you know, we all have to do this work. This is an important moment. So run it again.

Run it until... Yeah, and the listener, try to journal through this in your own experience. It's

powerful because I've never really been this granular about it. They don't see me. And that makes

me mad. I feel that in my fists. And then it's like I'm mad at myself.

Why can't I make them see me? So here we go.

And that is your code of rumination. And it's beautiful. And it's yours. And it's tied to your

whole story across your whole life. And probably your first caregivers who couldn't see the

position they were putting you in. Right? Yeah. Hey, Allison, you must choose.

Are you with us? Nope. Or are you with us? Grownups should be able to see the position they're

putting you in. And that had to make you really, as a child,

we code all of those situations as our fault. That's why when parents are getting divorced,

courts now order, you know, therapy for kids if there's some kind of custody battle.

Because From an early age until our brains are fully formed.

I've reported on this a lot. Kids cannot make that essential leap from there's something wrong with

me to there's something wrong with them. We cannot make that leap as children. And so we carry

things that are not ours to carry. And we carry them across a lifetime.

And what I found in doing my missed framework with people. is that they are able to drop things.

They are able to set down things that are not theirs to carry anymore. And it's the beginning of

the work. I don't want anyone to think that you do this and that's all you need to do and you won't

ruminate anymore. This is like a first step. It's the awareness that allows the other steps toward

real emotional freedom.

There's a lot in that. That's a really helpful, I think. I really appreciate your working through

it because I get what you're saying. Once you have that name for it,

you can look at it. What would you say to the listener who begins to connect those dots?

And you cover this in the book. Just as we're winding down here, Donna,

you know, how can you begin to, I love this phrase, repurpose? That energy.

Because it does feel like a lot of energy. It is a lot of wasted energy. It's a lot of dark,

wasted energy. Yeah, I love the idea of repurposing it, right? Yes. We all have things we would

rather be spending our precious mental energy on, right? We all want to be closer to that state of

flow, creativity, awareness, ideation. You have a podcast.

You see patients. You write books. you have a lot of ideation going on you want to be free and open

to that sort of importing or downloading of the good the good ideas or the next steps and not

walking around in this familiar story of rumination right so the first step is what we just did the

mist framework because what happens inside your brain is your brain kind of goes like oh you caught

me

Yeah. Steps back a little bit. Yeah. And it's happy because we want to be seen by ourselves.

Right. Like your story is about not being seen. You want to be seen by yourself.

So obviously we have to go way beyond that to do deeper work in terms of.

getting out of our ruminative habits so in the book really what I walk people through is then to

take that work somatically because what our brain is thinking oh I see that and what our body feels

they have to agree right our mind is a wonderful tool for escaping rumination but if we're still

somatically caught in the sensations of threat or social exclusion or feeling any of the D words

are a lot of diminished, dismissed, disregarded, disliked. Our body isn't coming along for the,

for the healing. Yeah. Yeah. And so I work, I walk people through a lot of very quick somatic

exercises that are based for working with the mental work that we're doing and for taking our

bodies out of that ruminative clutch as I think of it right we've got to get out of that ruminative

clutch we probably don't have time to run through them here but I do think they're pretty fun and

easy and all of them almost all of them are 60 seconds or less like you can literally excuse

yourself from a conversation go in the bathroom practice your missed framework and then do a 60

second silent exercise and come back and be like oh I see where I was here I see how I was getting

derailed and triggered in this conversation with difficult people toxic people but I'm going to

come back into it now with a refresh and and and I can't underscore this enough.

I didn't know this when I started reporting the book. You asked what surprised me. Yes.

What surprised me the most, Allison, is that this work allowed people to find their voice.

I did not know that that was going to be an outcome. But after a year of working with a lot of

people, that kept coming back over and over, that people were able to speak up.

by seeing themselves they were able to speak up to others in pretty wise and wonderful ways and

that was absolutely beautiful to witness wow and and it changed their families right one med

student changed his specialty he decided to go into a different specialty than what he had thought

he wanted One woman was able to voice herself with her husband. It was kind of like a gray-haired

teenager. And it made their marriage so much better that she had her voice and was able to speak

her truth.

From there, we can move into working more with language in our minds. We can give ourselves self

commands to get us out of rumination. Again, the language your brain generates is the language that

you're most likely to pay attention to. So we can literally come in after we've done some of this

work and just catch ourselves and be like, well, I'll give you an example. i was giving a lecture

and i am a little bit klutzy and that's okay i don't see that i'm not being self-critical here

it's just like that's how it is and i tripped on a wire going up to the to the stage right and i

caught myself i didn't go down but the ruminative me would have been like You're such a klutz.

And I would have carried that right to the podium. I would have been a little bit lost the first

couple of seconds of my talk. And I found myself going, it's okay,

Donna, you're human. Oh, this is how the work begins to show up for us.

I love that. And I go through a whole bunch of different statements that we can use in different

situations as self-commands. It's really great if you come up with your own. Yeah.

That you can load up, talk to yourself. It helps to talk to yourself in the third person.

Yeah. Use your own name. So you'd be like, Allison, that's okay. You're human or Allison.

Yeah. Because our brain associates a third person.

our own name with a sense of urgency in a way that using I does not.

Using I is associated more with anxiety and depression. Wow.

So those are some simple things right there. I love the moving into third person,

kind of speaking to yourself as if you're the moving, leaving the room and kind of,

I love, we'll link to all of the very practical.

somatic exercises, right? Because we don't always solve head problems with head. Sometimes our body

has to be part of the solution, right? Even just the movement. It's all in the book. It's just

like, just load it up with as many things as I found that can help you,

right? Like I was on a mission for myself, but also my reader. And some things,

here's a quick one. Lie on the floor. or go outside and lie on the grass,

our brain clocks the difference in perspective with a reboot.

It just gives you like literally two minutes out of rumination and if you can do the missed

framework. And you can do one or two somatic movements and you can lie on the floor.

You just gain 10 minutes of emotional freedom from which you can use all the other exercises to

reenter that state of creativity. I love that. Just simply changing, changing the scenery, changing

rooms. I mean, I will say I love also just want to what you said about voice,

because that makes sense to me. And I'm glad you. Because even like the example I gave, what I've

noticed is when I do notice that more and more, part of the shift internally more quickly,

to your point, I love that where there's just a quicker, you start to notice it's more easy for me

to go, do I want to be seen by that group? I actually love who I,

the folks, you know, and it just much more easily I can kind of let that release,

you know. And you're right, it's not. It's a whole embodied thing that just kind of happens slowly.

We talk a lot on the podcast about deeper formation, right? These are forming us.

And it's not often the quick fix hack. You know, it doesn't always happen. But there is this over

time you go. I love your example of just realizing I didn't in that moment. I just kind of released

it. And your brain somehow. learned a different way through the work that you're teaching us.

I love it. Donna, it's so helpful. It's kind of like a new language. You don't learn a new language

overnight. You don't just wake up and know how to speak, you know, Italian two days before your

trip. You have to build the brain. And I think if I could say anything about my hope for mind

drama, the book is,

I feel that I spent two years looking at every, I'm a neuroscience reporter,

looking at every single technique known to humankind for recognizing and exiting rumination and

coming up with the MIST framework, which is really just built on me putting together.

different pieces of very recent science and running them by neuroscientists because I'm not a

scientist. And I feel like I gave this everything in this book that I would want my kids to use as

an adult so that they're not ruminating. I love it. Because I don't want that for anyone that I

love. And I don't want it for the reader. I don't want it for anyone listening. It's a human

condition we don't talk about. And because we don't talk about it, we can't solve it.

You cannot solve a problem that you aren't being honest about, that you haven't named.

So let's name it, frame it, and let's do that interior work with a sense of tenderness for our own

story. Because that's where the wellspring of well-being begins, is that recognition within that

we're worth that time and effort. Yeah. And that energy, right? And repurposing that energy.

It's such a great book. It's called Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your

Inner Defeatist. I love that. How can my listeners find you,

the book, your work, other things you're doing, Donna? Yeah. So DonnaJacksonNakazawa.com has all

of my books and it has information about how to buy Mind Drama. You can go to...

anywhere where you like to buy your books right it's on amazon it's at bookshop i love bookshop

because it's independent bookstores which we all love to use but walmart um target anywhere that

you go where you like to buy your books it's there it's it'll be on audible um well i guess it'll

be on audible by the time this comes out so they're taping it now so really pretty much anywhere

you can find it and You can find me on Substack at Donna Jackson Nakazawa,

where I'm giving exercises and ideas.

Instagram, I'm not super big on social media. I'll just tell you right now because I have reported

a lot on social media and I feel like I'm mostly protecting my brain. Good for you.

I'm not being on it very much. I do post a little bit, but all of those places. Wonderful.

Thank you. Thanks so much for your work. for sharing the benefit of your wisdom with us today.

Pleasure. Great to be with you, Allison.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you

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