A thought diary: how to write a thought down so it stops looping

There is a thought you have had about twenty times today. About the conversation that went wrong. About the email with no reply. About the sentence you said and now hear through someone else's ears. Each time it feels as if one more pass and you will understand something. The twentieth pass is no different from the third.

This has a name, and the name has twenty years of research behind it. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, who spent her career studying it, summed it up with colleagues in 2008: rumination is repetitive, passive focus on what is wrong, on its causes and consequences, with no movement towards action. The key word is "passive". You are not solving the problem. You are rereading it.

A thought diary is not for writing a thought down. Notes are enough for that. It is for making the thought stop coming back, and for that it has to be written down in a particular way. Below is what is known about which way.

Why "think it through once more" does not help

Intuition says: if a thought will not let go, something in it is unfinished. The data says otherwise. Nolen-Hoeksema's review gathers dozens of studies comparing people prone to looping with everyone else. The loopers solved problems from their own situation worse, believed less in the solutions they found, and carried them out less often. Rumination is not deeper than ordinary thinking, it is narrower: it runs in one groove and each time confirms where it started.

Not every return to a thought is harmful, though. In 2008 Edward Watkins worked out when repetitive thinking helps and when it does not, and found two dividing lines. The first: abstract or concrete. "Why do I always ruin everything" loops forever because the question has no answer. "What exactly did I say at 3:40 and what did she reply" has an end. The second: judging or describing. As long as the thought is passing sentence, it does not move.

How "why" differs from "why"

The most precise experiment on this was run in 2005 by Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk and Walter Mischel. They asked people to recall a time they had been truly angry or down, and to think about why they had felt that way. The same question, with one difference. Half were told to recall it in the first person, back inside the event. The other half were asked to "step back" and look at their past self from the outside, as if at another person.

Asked from inside the event, "why" intensified negative feelings and led back to retelling; the same question asked from the outside reduced them and more often led to reinterpretation.

So it is not the question. It is the point it is asked from. From inside, "why" turns into "why me". From outside, it becomes what it was meant to be: a question about causes.

In 2014 Kross and a large group of colleagues found the cheapest way to change the point: a pronoun. People preparing for a stressful task who told themselves "I am nervous, I can do this" were more anxious and performed worse than those who said the same thing by name or as "you": "Ethan, you are nervous, you can do this". One word of difference, and the distance is already there.

The word that dampens

One more thing, to explain why write at all rather than think. In 2007 Matthew Lieberman and colleagues showed people faces with strong emotions and asked them either to pick a word for the face ("angry", "scared"), or to match it to another face, or to name the gender. Only naming the emotion in a word reduced activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain behind the alarm response. Putting a feeling into a word is not a comment on it. It is an action on it.

A journal forces this. In your head a feeling can stay "just bad" indefinitely. On the page it has to be named, and in the moment of naming it is already a little smaller.

Five steps to keep the thought on the page

Put these studies in sequence and you get five steps. They are the thought diary.

1. What happened. Describe the event rather than judge it. Per Watkins, concrete and without verdicts: not "I ruined it again" but "at 3:40 I said the report would be ready tomorrow, she said 'fine' and left". If the description contains "always" or "again", it is not yet a description.

2. Which thought will not let go. One sentence, verbatim, as it sounds in your head. "She has decided I am unreliable." It matters to write it in exactly the form it loops in, because the next step needs something to compare it with.

3. What I feel next to this thought. One or two words. This is Lieberman's step: name it, do not describe it. Shame. Anger. Tiredness. Not "awful", that is a judgement, not a feeling.

4. What if I look a little wider. This is Kross's step, and what matters is the point you look from. Four questions that move it: What would I say to someone close to me in my place? Is this definitely so, or is it one version? What of this will still matter in a year? Is there more fact in this thought, or more tiredness? You do not need to answer all four. One that has an answer is enough.

5. What I am left with. The last line, even half a step softer than the first. Not "everything is fine", that does not happen. "She may just have been in a hurry, and I am tired. I will ask tomorrow." If the half step did not come, that is a result too, and worth writing down as is.

When this is not an exercise

An honest boundary. Everything above is about thoughts that get in the way: a conversation, an email, a sentence. If thoughts frighten you, if they include wanting to disappear or to hurt yourself, that is not a task for "see it differently". What is needed then is not a page but a person: someone close, or a helpline. In Lanternly the tool stops at words like that and shows where to turn instead of continuing the exercise. That is deliberate and will stay that way.

Why this beats "just don't think about it"

Last thing. The most common advice about a looping thought is "distract yourself". In 1998 James Gross compared two ways of handling something unpleasant: suppressing the response, that is not showing it and not thinking about it, and reappraising, that is looking at the situation differently in advance. Suppression left the feeling in place and added physiological load. Reappraisal reduced the feeling without that load. The five steps above are reappraisal broken into actions. It takes longer than distraction, about seven minutes. But afterwards the thought does not come round for a twenty-first lap, because there is nothing left in you for it to look for: everything that was in it is on the page.

If it is not one thought but anxiety as a whole, there is a separate piece on that.