Treatment B: Look at the Birdie! Distract Yourself from Emotional Pain Even once our urge to ruminate is weaker, cutting off a ruminative train of thought once it begins is still quite challenging. The main reason we tend to indulge the urge to ruminate even once we’re fully aware of how damaging it can be is that we often catch ourselves ruminating only once our emotions are already churning. Trying to simply suppress our ruminative thoughts is not only difficult, it is inadvisable too. Decades of research on thought suppression demonstrates that nothing compels us to think of something more
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