Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

by Daniel J. Levitin

One of the most important findings about coping styles in depression was made by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, who distinguished rumination from distraction and found that distraction was far more effective than rumination in coping with bad fortune, and that rumination was associated with significantly longer periods of depressed mood. People who ruminate have a tendency to repetitively focus on what went wrong, and the causes and consequences of what went wrong, over and over and over again. They lock themselves in their rooms; they stay in bed; they catastrophize the future. All of us have a tendency to do this, to varying degrees. Withdrawal from the world after a negative experience is evolutionarily adaptive—it gives us time to heal and to reflect productively on what went wrong so that we can avoid or correct patterns of our own behavior that can lead to trouble. And to some extent, the sadness that rumination steeps us in feels good: It releases the neurochemical prolactin, which is calming and soothing—the same hormone released in mothers and their infants while nursing. But excessive rumination increases stress hormones. It drives a downward cycle of unhappiness and can trigger one or multiple episodes of major depression. Rumination interferes with interpersonal problem solving, depletes motivation to engage in constructive behaviors, and impairs social relationships. Rumination also feeds the destructive aspects of mood-dependent memory retrieval because the hippocampu...