What Turns Wandering Thoughts into Something Worse?

Oct. 13, 2021 -- With each the lockdowns and social distancing of the pandemic, radical person had a batch of clip to themselves implicit the past twelvemonth and a half. While immoderate whitethorn person filled their clip with bread baking oregon agelong walks, others whitethorn person felt they had excessively overmuch clip to themselves, excessively overmuch clip to think.

These experiences came with much depression and anxiety, which could beryllium linked to the aforesaid brain web that is thought to enactment a meandering mind, called the default mode network.

Scientists funny successful this web wanted to recognize however wandering thoughts tin pb immoderate radical to a authorities of brooding successful which the aforesaid antagonistic thoughts resurface repeatedly. To summation immoderate penetration into these patterns, they recorded much than 2,000 thoughts spoken aloud by 78 survey participants who did thing but fto their minds rotation for 10 minutes.

Senior researcher Jessica Andrews‐Hanna, PhD, an adjunct prof of psychology astatine the University of Arizona successful Tucson, and her colleagues hoped that analyzing these stream-of-consciousness thoughts could output insights into however radical go stuck successful antagonistic intelligence spirals.

They recovered that astir participants thought astir the contiguous oregon aboriginal successful words that were neither peculiarly antagonistic nor positive. Almost three-quarters of the thoughts were focused inward connected the idiosyncratic oregon were imaginative.

Negativity Breeds Negativity

But the investigators recovered an absorbing signifier with antagonistic thoughts. The much antagonistic someone's thoughts became, the much apt that their adjacent thought would beryllium related to their erstwhile one. In different words, antagonistic thoughts created a concatenation absorption of much antagonistic thoughts.

Positive thoughts, successful contrast, tended to beryllium followed by wholly unrelated ruminations, indicating existent intelligence meandering. The signifier suggested that negativity tends to constrictive the scope of thoughts, whereas positivity tends to grow it during periods successful which the caput wanders.

The researchers besides recovered -- possibly unsurprisingly -- that antagonistic thoughts that were focused connected the aforesaid and connected the past were much apt to effect successful brooding, portion affirmative thoughts were little apt to arise.

It’s important to enactment that astir survey participants were young and educated and whitethorn person lone said things that they were comfy with the researchers hearing. And due to the fact that the authors didn't inquire participants astir their moods, the investigators could not subordinate circumstantial patterns of thought with immoderate mental health conditions.

Although the findings, published successful Scientific Reports, bash not connected their ain constituent to solutions for depression oregon anxiety, they whitethorn connection a starting constituent for aboriginal probe into however antagonistic trains of thoughts statesman -- and possibly however to derail them.