Transcript of The Mystery of Accents and the Dangerous Habit of Rumination

I know you like interesting and thought-provoking conversations and ideas because you listen to Something You Should Know. So let me recommend another podcast I know you will enjoy. It's the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan has a real talent for getting his guests to share stories and offer thought-provoking insights. Over the years, I've sent a lot of people to listen, and I get feedback from people who are so glad I introduced them to the Jordan Harbinger Show. Recently, he discussed Scientology and the children who are raised in that organization. It's a fascinating conversation. And he talked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick about how to protect your mind and body from the modern world. And it's tougher than you think. I've gotten to know Jordan pretty well. We talk frequently, and I tell you, he is a very smart, insightful guy who does a hell of a podcast. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, have you ever pushed on a door you were supposed to pull? I'll tell you why that so often happens. Then, some people have accents when they speak. Why do they have them?

Accents come originally from our parents or caregivers, but very quickly they cease to be the main influence. It's axiomatic in linguistics that we sound like our peers, people that we are spending time with and like identifying with and forming our sense of identity around.

Also, does having more sex make couples happier, or do happy couples just have more sex? And rumination—overthinking something over and over again.

You think you're gonna get the answer by ruminating, but your brain is terrible at it. And what it does instead is locks down on that ruminative thinking, and the answer never comes. Relief never comes.

All this today on Something You Should Know.

Ich heiße Shannon Maldonado und bin die Gründerin von Yowie, einem Geschenkeladen, der auf Kunstwerke und handgefertigte Objekte spezialisiert ist. Meine Wahl fiel auf Shopify, weil Shopify im Vergleich zu den anderen Plattformen, die ich getestet habe, mit am benutzerfreundlichsten war. Ich habe vor allem an die Zukunft gedacht. Alle Tools, die für die Auswertung von Verkaufszahlen wichtig sind, zum Beispiel von Lagerbeständen, findet man direkt im Dashboard. Starte jetzt einen kostenlosen Test auf shopify.com.

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So, wie oft hast du schon mal eine Tür aufgezogen, die du hättest schieben sollen, und eine Tür aufgezogen, die du hättest ziehen sollen? Probably more times than you can remember, and the reason why you do that is what we're starting with today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So every day, millions of very intelligent people fail this one simple test. They try to open a door the wrong way. But according to design expert Don Norman, that's not because people are dumb. It's because the door is poorly designed. Don Norman coined the term Norman Door to describe a door whose design gives you the wrong clue whether you should push or pull. A well-designed door should tell you what to do without needing a sign that says push or pull. That's why the best doors have handles only when you're supposed to pull and flat plates when you're supposed to push. If a door needs written instructions, the design has already failed. It's a good reminder that the best design is often invisible. When something is designed well, you barely notice it because it just works. When it's designed poorly, you notice it immediately and then blame yourself, when in reality the designer may be the one at fault.

And that is something you should know. The moment someone starts talking, you begin to make judgments. Before they've even finished their first sentence, you've probably guessed where they're from, how educated they are, how intelligent they are, how trustworthy or friendly they are. And a lot of those impressions come from one thing: their accent. But what exactly is an accent? Do we all have one, or is it only other people who have accents? Why is it so difficult to lose the accent you grew up with, yet so easy to pick up bits and pieces of someone else's? And what do our accents reveal about us that we don't even realize? My guest has spent his career studying and teaching accents from all over the world. Eric Singer is one of Hollywood's leading dialect coaches, helping actors master authentic accents for film and television. Millions of people know him from his fascinating videos online that analyze accents around the globe, and he has a book coming out next year called The Case of the Disappearing R. Hey Eric, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, glad to be here. So one thing I'd be really curious to know is, does every language have different accents within that language, or are there some languages where there's just one way to speak it and everybody speaks it?

The short answer is yes. I mean, what we basically mean by accent is just the sounds that you use while speaking. So everybody has an accent. You can't not have an accent. It's how you form the sounds of the sort of those basic kind of mental units of sound to meaning mapping that make up words in a language. If, you know, if the question is, does every language have accent variation, the answer is yes, as long as it has more than than, you know, 30 or 40 speakers and has been around, you know, been around for more than a couple of decades, because it turns out that accent variation is an absolutely inbuilt basic feature of language itself.

When I think of somebody with an accent, I listen to you, for example, and think, "Well, he doesn't have an accent," and I listen to me and I think, "I don't really have an accent," but I hear a Southern accent or a British accent, and I think, "Okay, now that's an accent." So there's two things at play here.

One of them is this just sort of very, very basic tendency, very basic human tendency, right, to make distinctions between self and other, between my group and the other group, right? I mean, we're ultimately, we're still small group primates roaming the savanna, and, you know, so we developed this very, very finely honed ability as human beings to kind of tell very quickly from a tiny little bit of information, visual or oral, like, "Are you one of me or are you not one of me?" And there was a time when, you know, your life might have depended on it, right? So it's a very finely honed mechanism. So the first thing that we're doing is kind of saying, "Oh, I think you sound like me," or, "I think you don't sound like me." In fact, that's where the word accent came from. The, uh, you know, it comes from "ad cantus," so it's, it's a song that is added to speech. It's like how those other people speak, those people over there. The other thing that's at play though, in, you know, because I don't know if we grew up anywhere near each other, right? But there's this deeply confused idea that we all get deeply indoctrinated with and kind of carry around with us, that there is some version of the language that is sort of more correct, which is also just completely at odds with the basic nature of language.

But the thing is, the— all the different ways that native speakers of a language speak, accents vary socially. You know, we all know that accents vary regionally, right? They vary socially as well. So up and down the kind of the social scale and across different social groupings. Basically, if there is a social group that a society identifies as meaningful, that some people are identifying with other people who are like them in some way, whether that's you know, race, religion, politics, we are going to find accents that vary along those axes, because that's part of what it is, and that's part of why it varies originally.

So here's a question, I'm not really sure how to ask it, but so if I hear someone with an English accent speak, I identify that as an English accent, and they probably hear me speak and identify that I have an American accent. But do British people, for example, and I guess you could ask this about American people as well, do British people, when they hear other British people who have different British accents, do they hear, "Oh, that's an accent," or, "That's just a British person speaking"?

The Brits tend to be less confused about this than we are for a couple of reasons. In part because accents do vary, historically have, but still do vary much more by by short distances than they have in the US. The reason for that's really interesting, and we can get into it too, but, you know, the, the basic reason is we've just had less time for accents to diverge here. It's why you have more accent, regional accent variation on the East Coast of the US than the West Coast, right? And more in Australia than in New Zealand, um, and more in, you know, in the UK generally and in England than anywhere else. So Brits tend to be more aware of the fact that kind of everybody has an accent. And the other reason is that their version of what you and I are speaking right now, which tends to go by the terrible misleading name "General American." General American is an accent spoken by a relatively small portion of the population, but it is somehow— and it's, it's the, you know, it's the communication professions, and it's the, you know, the kind of the highly mobile, usually college-educated which is, you know, a way of speaking that is particular to kind of the top of the pyramid, of the kind of socioeconomic pyramid.

We think it's neutral. It's not. It's, you know, the people who speak it are anything but general. It's not neutral. It's one particular way of speaking. Whereas in the UK, you know, or in England specifically, you know, the equivalent is Received Pronunciation, which, yes, sometimes, you know, you'll see people making claims for its neutrality, usually in sort of drama school training or things like that, but people are generally aware aware that this is, you know, a highly educated kind of upper-middle-class accent. So Americans do have a little bit, and partially it's, it's because of the stealth actor-like thing, partially it's just because the country's so big, um, but we do tend to have a little extra confusion than kind of people almost anywhere, uh, about this like not having an accent thing or this idea of neutral.

But I guess what I'm asking is, do most people think that they're the norm and everything else sounds a little odd to them, and so that's an accent, or—

Yeah, it depends. It's if you speak a variety, like if you speak with a Southern accent, that is a dispreferred accent, right? It comes with low social prestige. It's been stereotyped and mocked a lot. If you speak with a New York City accent, it's been stereotyped and mocked a lot. New York City is memorably, the great sociolinguist William Labov called it a sink of negative prestige. So if you speak one of those accents or dialects that are kind of highly non-standard, highly stigmatized, highly dispreferred, no, you don't think you don't have an accent and everybody else does. You're very aware of that thing.

When I listen to you speak, you don't have an accent to me. You sound like you speak perfect English, and here's what I mean by that. So when you pronounce the word car, C-A-R, If you pronounce it and don't pronounce the R, as in car, I'm in the car, well, that's an accent, not wrong, but it's an accent. Well, that's interesting though.

So let's, I mean, let's, if I do pronounce it car, but everything else around the way I'm speaking has shifted not to, you know, let's say New York City or Boston, but something across the Atlantic, does that sound incorrect if I say park your car in Harvard Yard?

A little. But not as much as "cah." Right.

And a lot of Americans would probably say not only does that not sound incorrect, it actually sounds, you know, hyper-articulate and intelligent and educated, because we have these associations. And that is the crucial realization, is that it's not— and they're very strong, like I get it, and it's totally fine that you're like, "You sound like you don't have an accent. You sound like you speak really correct English." But it's just that. It's just an idea that we have that's kind of deeply embedded, but it comes from social conditioning, and that's it. There is nothing more correct about "car" than "cah" or "cah" or "cah," switching back and forth between, you know, southerly New York City and, you know, British RP. We just— we have these different associations with different ways of speaking, but again, if it's a native— if it's an established native speaker variety, That's sand, right? Building your sort of impressions on that, just, "I just feel it's that way," or "They told me that way," you know, "It was that way in third grade." There's nothing undergirding that that is empirical or linguistically true.

Okay, well, I get that, and I understand what you're saying, but I want to probe a little deeper on that, and in just a moment, I want to ask you another question. Denk an den 31.

Juli. Wieso? Last call für deine Steuer.

Oh no, ich weiß gar nicht, wo ich anfangen soll.

Bei Wieso Steuer? Das ist wie Steuererklärung, nur ohne Stress. Wieso Steuer?

Klar, macht fast alles automatisch. Dauert das lange?

Nö, einfach per App. Na dann.

Hol dir jetzt dein Geld zurück mit Wieso Steuer. Bis zum 31. Juli abgeben.

I'm speaking with Eric Singer. He's one of Hollywood's leading dialect coaches, and we're talking about accents. So I get what you're saying, Eric, but I could also understand someone saying, well, wait, if the word is spelled C-A-R, and there's an R at the end of that word and you're not pronouncing it, you say "cah" instead of "car," then you're pronouncing it incorrectly.

So yeah, when people go to like, "But it's spelled that way in this language," in English especially, that's a really, really tenuous argument. I get that. English is not pronounced the way that it is spelled. There are no Rs in Colonel, You know, but we pronounce it that way.

But the dictionary says you pronounce the R. The dictionary says you don't pronounce the L in kernel.

It depends what dictionary. You know, if you're looking at, you know, at English English or Australian English or New Zealand English or, you know, most of the other national varieties of English, in fact, there are less. Okay. Also, it confuses the sort of the fundamental task of dictionaries, which is dictionaries are there to describe native speaker pronunciation, not to prescribe it. You know, people get very confused about this and think that the dictionary is some authority about the way you're supposed to do things, and that is not what dictionaries are doing. So, you know, if you look up the word nuclear in the dictionary— I made a video about this recently that some people got quite upset about— you will find nucular as an existing pronunciation, because guess what? Millions of native speakers of not just American English, by the way, but also British English— I'm not so sure about Australians and others— pronounce nuke— pronounce nuke— the word I say nuclear as nuclear. The reason why, like, why that came about is very interesting, but, you know, but the basic fact is there are lots of pronunciations that are, again, that are sort of lower prestige, that are dispreferred, that may in fact have begun as errors of some kind.

Usually the story is a little more complicated than that, but, you know, people really hate, like, espresso, right? But there are other, you know, the word iron is a similar example of kind of reversing the order of sounds, right? Very few people say "iron," right? "Iron" is the sort of standard accepted form, but it's not spelled that way, right? Nor is "comfortable" or "prescription," right? We could go on and on and on and on and on. English is a very poor match for kind of spelling to sound correspondences. So again, when people are resorting to that, they're usually not, again, not aware of this, and sometimes with the best of intentions. Um, but English— English, I love the technical term for this— English has what's literally called a defective orthography, meaning that the relationship between spelling and sounds is particularly opaque and tenuous. Makes it a nightmare to learn to read and write, right? For kids, uh, and for, you know, for, for English language learners, it's, it's really tough. The other thing, and this is kind of the, maybe the most fundamental interesting piece of like, but it's not spelled that way, is that Writing doesn't matter.

Now, by that, I don't mean we shouldn't be teaching reading and writing. Obviously, these are essential skills, but when it comes to like what the language is and how it works, writing is this weird, arbitrary, idiosyncratic little offshoot of like language. Language is a spoken phenomenon, right? We've been speaking for 150,000 to 200,000 years, and writing came along like really late in that, right? You know, maximum 10,000 years ago, scratches on, on, you know, on stones. Really tiny handful of the world's languages have ever even been written down at all until very, very recently. And even in just like an individual person's lifetime, right, we learn to speak, we in fact master the basics of our native language long before we ever actually master reading and writing. So they're basically irrelevant when it comes to like how language works and how it changes and what pronunciation is.

Do we know where accents come from, or do they just Show up.

We do. We know a lot about it. There's a lot that we're still figuring out. Linguistics is an incredibly sort of exciting field with lots going on right now, but accents come, you know, originally, of course, from our parents or caregivers, but very quickly they cease to be the main influence. So people are often asking me, like, you know, "What's my accent?" or they're telling me about somebody else's interesting accent. They usually start with who this person parents are and where they came from or what languages they spoke, and it's rarely relevant. It's certainly not the main story. It's axiomatic in linguistics that we sound like our peers, not our parents. So as soon as we have peers from like, you know, 3 or 4, if we're going to preschool, we start to pattern towards them. Um, and especially then this happens like as you go through preadolescence and adolescence, the, you know, the kind of peak years of accent formation are the same as the peak years of identity formation. It's like 11 to 17. So your accent— some people's accents do continue to change and grow to some extent after that, but the basic pattern is usually very set by 17.

The basic, basic pattern is usually set by 12, which is why if you move to a new place before you're 12, you'll usually end up sounding completely like a native of that place, and if you're older than 12, usually you won't, or you won't quite. So there's a kind of a cutoff there. It's a little, it's a little rough, right, and individual, but that's basically where our accents come from. They come from the people that we are spending time with, doing things with, and like identifying with and forming our sense of identity around.

Well, where did they get it? And where did the guys that influenced them get it? I mean, it's impossible to really find the origin then, right?

It's, it's just— where do they get it? Like, where do the 11-year-olds that you are copying and accommodating towards when you move to a new place, where did they get their accent? You know, from the next, like, micro-generation just above. This is in fact— so many people are familiar with the idea that, like, language is always changing, um, without kind of fully knowing what all of the implications of that are, and they're so cool. But this is one of the ways that language is always changing, is that, like, the kids that are a little older than you, they are cool, right? Like, we, we take on their styles of dressing, their taste in music, their— the video games that they play, and their language, right? And so we see this with slang terms and things like that, but we also see it with accent, right? With like, find like the sounds that they're using. And the thing is, we go slightly further. It's the linguistic innovators among us who, by the way, are usually almost always, in fact, the girls, um, are the ones who are like listening to what those girls 2 years older than them are doing.

And they do it slightly more. So sound change keeps like advancing micro-generation by micro-generation. So here's a question I imagine people wonder about.

The colonies here in America were settled by the British. They were British, so they probably, when they came here, they had British accents. But the British accent is gone from American English, and so I wonder why the English that Americans speak wasn't kind of a variation on British English, much like say London is different than the way people speak in the Midlands or in Northern England, but there's still a Britishness to it. Why don't we have a Britishness to the way we speak?

So, you know, the fact is that the original settlement of like the, you know, the American colonies, right, people came from all over the British Isles, but not in the same mixes to the same places at the same time. So, you know, there were kind of these, without going into detail about all of it, there were kind of 4 really big founding waves. We all know about like the Puritans, the Pilgrims, right? They mostly came from East Anglia, from the eastern 6 most counties in England. To the— like Virginia, to the— what were the kind of the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia colonies, they were like Southern English nobility fleeing the revolution that happened in the middle of the 17th century and they brought a lot of their like Southern and Southwestern English like peasant servants with them and then later had a lot of Irish indentured servants come along. And then you had this gigantic wave of Scotch-Irish who came from— and it's a weird kind of misnomer. They really came from the border region between England and Scotland. Some of them had been in Northern Ireland in Ulster for like a generation or two, but basically they all came from that border region, but they're called the Scotch-Irish.

Quarter of a million came in the half century from 1675 to 1725. They have had a massive, massive, massive impact. Impact on what then became the original pattern for American English and what is still with us. So the main reason— it's a little complicated, right? And there's a lot of things that go into it, but the main reason we pronounce our Rs and why we say park the car is because of the influence of those Scotch-Irish. So there's similar— there's an effect in biology called the founder effect, which is that like the organisms that kind of establish a place and establish a biome, they have this hold and they set the pattern for everything that comes after. Same thing is true in linguistics, and so we call it the founder effect as well. So the thing is, when you have an established population in Georgia coming from these various places in the past, now they mix and create this new thing in these first generations. If it's truly this, this kind of like, these are the first English speakers here situation, then when other people come in subsequently, because as kids we learn our accents from the people around us.

If it's already established, that's what we're learning. Sometimes you can overwhelm this, you can knock this off-kilter a little bit. You can have, you know, an incoming group of speakers, like, affect the accent of a place. The thing is, it's really rare. It takes like a massive, massive, massive proportion of new immigrants from a particular place. So that happened in like the upper Midwest, so that, you know, the kind of Minnesota, like, O and A, right? Those long vowels that, you know, okay, you betcha, right? That probably is a result of massive Scandinavian immigration during the late 19th and early 20th century, but it's relatively rare. Usually that founder effect holds, so it is those first populations, they set the pattern, and then it's whatever comes after just follows that.

Well, it's amazing how many different accents there are and how we judge people based on their accents, not deliberately, not knowingly, but we just do. And it all goes on under the radar, and I appreciate you bringing it to the forefront and talking about it. Eric Singer has been my guest. He is one of Hollywood's leading dialect coaches. You can find him on social media with some great videos analyzing accents around the globe, and he has a forthcoming book called The Case of the Disappearing R. And Eric, thank you for being here and talking about this. Thanks, Mike.

It's been great to be here.

There may be no mental habit more destructive and more common than rumination. The endless replaying of mistakes, worries, conversations, and what-ifs doesn't solve problems nearly as often as it creates them. Yet millions of people ruminate every day, often without realizing the toll that it's taking. Rumination often leads to stress, anxiety, depression, poor decisions, and a diminished sense of well-being. In fact, some experts argue that how much you ruminate may be one of the strongest predictors of your long-term happiness and mental health. The problem is that rumination can feel productive. It masquerades as problem-solving when it's really just mental spinning. And once you get caught up in that loop, it can be remarkably difficult to escape. Here to explain why our brains do this, what it's costing us, and how to break free is science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Her work has appeared in Wired, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Psychology Today. She's the author of several books, including Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. Hi, Donna, welcome to Something You Should Know.

So happy to be with you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

So first, can you explain what rumination is exactly? Where is the line between thinking and overthinking and rumination? And then how many people do it?

The psychological definition of rumination is to replay the past in a recursive and negative manner over and over again. And in the common vernacular, what is that? We call it thought spiraling, story spinning, getting stuck in the story. But I found in the many interviews I did with psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists, and lots of people like you and me who ruminate, that really it was replaying the past and worrying about the future. In a way that makes us highly self-referential, self-critical. Well, you know, what do they think of me? How come I did that? What's wrong with me? And hypercritical and judgy of others. And so I think that pretty much is something we all can recognize that we get caught in from time to time.

And when people think a lot about good things, is that Is that rumination or is that something else? Because it seems to be a very negative— in my, in my view, very ruminating is a negative thing, not a good thing.

Well, that is the psychological definition, is that it is a negative thing. And in fact, it's the biggest risk factor for developing anxiety and depression and substance use disorders across a lifetime. So it has a big impact on our mental health. Across a lifetime. But at the same time, you're picking up on something, Mike, and that is when you actually go to Webster's Dictionary, rumination is one of those funny words with two sides, like the word cleave. I love the word cleave because it can mean to cleave to or to cleave from, right? We don't have that many words that mean the opposite in the English language. Rumination is actually one of them. It both means to, ruminate in that psychological meaning in a recursive thought spiraling negative way that has a high cost for our wellbeing. And it can also mean its opposite, to ponder, to ideate, to think through things. And so I wanted to dig into where is this coming from in our human experience? Where is it happening? I'm a science journalist. Where is it happening in the brain? And it turns out the same area of the brain that gives rise to our stickiest thought loops that we cannot escape is the same area of the brain that if we can work with it properly, will take us into that better state of ideation and musing and problem solving.

Well, we ruminate not to beat ourselves up. We ruminate to— because it's supposed to be doing something. And I've always thought that When you're ruminating, you're sort of like working on the problem, you're trying to figure it out or whatever. But what are the reasons people ruminate? And maybe later on it's just habit, but at some point it was serving a purpose.

It's what psychologists call effortful control. And it's an attempt to get a locus of control over a problem or the scenario. And, you know, we've all had them. The snarky thing that your spouse said in the kitchen this morning. Or it could be you came out of a meeting or— and your boss said something. You're trying to decode it and you just keep replaying it, or you're at lunch and something didn't seem right with your 3 best friends and you're like, what? What went sideways? You're trying to gnaw on it and figure it out. But really, it is an effort to get control and figure out whether or not there is a threat. And the reason for that goes back to our evolutionary biology. Just a real quick little evolutionary biology factoid is that social stress across evolutionary time was the most dangerous form of stress we could face. Why is that? Because way back when, sitting around the communal fire, if people were gossiping about you or jabbing each other in the ribs and looking at you and laughing, that was a physically dangerous proposition. What do I mean by that? That was a sign that if that continued, if you continue to face that social-emotional threat of non-belonging, you could be set at the edge of the tribe.

What happens there? You and your gene pool, which we care a lot about, are not gonna get the good tubers, the good meat. If you're set fully outside the tribe, you're gonna be picked off by marauding tribes or predators. So our immune systems over millennia, they developed developed in tandem with our threat detection system so that at the first sign of social-emotional threat, your body actually puts forth a pretty profound cascade of stress chemicals and hormones that rev you up for physical defense. If you are a ruminator, if you have ever ruminated, you can recognize that feeling of tension mounting in your body by just replaying something that happened. And that's because the brain cannot tell the difference between something that you're replaying that happened a year or a day or a month ago and you replaying it in your head right now. You get the same physical sensations. However, you think you're gonna get the answer by ruminating, but your brain is terrible at it. And what it does instead is locks down on that ruminative thinking and the answer never comes. It's a survival response gone rogue. Relief never comes. And the second thing I found is that although we think we're gonna get the answer, not only do we never get the answer, we feel worse and we're further away from a solution.

So you used the phrase a moment ago, if you are a ruminator, well, who is a ruminator? Is everyone a ruminator? And where is the line between stopping to think about something and trying to figure it out and ruminating about it? All good questions.

Let me take them in order. So number one, let me just tell you that almost all of us, I mean, we all ruminate. The reason we all ruminate is because it's what separates us from other mammals, right? The word actually came from the word ruminants, which are a type of mammals like pronghorns and bison, and they chew and digest their food and then they spit it back up and they regurgitate it and they chew it again. So it's kind of what we're doing in our minds. So we know that on average, we spend at least 4 hours a day. That's the average human thinking negative recursive thoughts. That's a lot of time. And so we know that over the last 5 years, we are ruminating more than we ever have before. So I cannot give you a specific number of people, but what we do know is that one-third of people are not familiar with the word rumination or what it really means. We know we're ruminating more than we ever have before. Individuals who work in traffic industry and looking at traffic fatalities tell me they think people are ruminating more than they ever have before because traffic fatalities are at their highest rate in 20 years and road rage is at its highest rate.

And road rage is rumination, right? Like, what did that driver do? Why'd they cut me off? I'm gonna get him. So we're ruminating more than we ever have before. And at the same time, a third of us don't even know that this is a problem. All of us are ashamed of it. We don't talk about it. You don't like go to dinner tonight and say to somebody, "Yeah, I lost like 2 hours today thinking about this thing that my sister said." But you cannot solve a problem that A, you can't name, and B, you can't talk about.

And then the other question was, where's the line?

Look, rumination can make us anxious, but it is not an anxiety disorder. It can lead to an anxiety disorder. It can be predictive of anxiety disorders and depression. But many people ask me, okay, so how do I know if I'm like getting caught in rumination or I'm in productive thinking? Like we're raised to think, wow, The more I think about this, you know, the smarter I am. This is a great thing. Thinking is an intellectual pursuit. It's really easy to trip over that line from hard thinking or productive thinking into rumination. So how can you know? Ask yourself a couple questions. First, you gotta catch yourself. If you can't catch yourself, then you're probably ruminating. If you catch yourself, Ask yourself, hey, is this a reel I've loaded up many, many times before? If the answer is yes and you haven't come up with a productive solution, you're just replaying it, you are definitely ruminating. Thinking gives you insight. Thinking looks very different in the brain. The default mode network, which allows your brain to open up to these great ideas, it does that because it's sync. It's like an interface with 267 areas of your brain, and you know those feelings, but it's like, well, what do I say to my sister?

And you start to get these ideas, or you write some notes about it, and you're like, oh, I get it, I know what's going on. Or you think about something that's happening to her, and you suddenly are flooded with this compassion, and you know how to handle the situation. Or you're taking a shower, and you're like, I know how to solve this problem at work tomorrow. That's not rumination, that's ideation, that's problem solving. And we can see it in the brain. Your whole brain like blings and lights up. When you're ruminating, you're loading up the same reels again and again. And you have to ask yourself, do I feel better after having thought about this or do I feel worse? And if you feel worse, you can ask yourself like, how often do I wanna feel this way? That can be a really good way to step out of rumination.

My sense is, my, well, my experience is that one of the reasons people ruminate is because they've been ruminating, that ruminate is its own fuel. The more you ruminate, the more you ruminate.

Well, any neuroscientist would agree with you, especially when I say that your rumination patterns are often unique to you and they're signal fires from the past. And usually when we can work through that process with individuals, We find that the recognition that this is a storyline they've been stepping into and can't get out of for years or decades, that revelation in and of itself is very empowering. It helps them to set that rumination pattern a little bit outside of themselves. So they— and we can see that through the different techniques that I teach that the brain starts to light up again and there's that recognition, shoot, you know, here I am again, lost in the mud. Like, I, I don't want to be here. I don't want to spend hours of my day replaying this difficult friendship or this difficult sibling relationship or, you know, what's happened with my parents or this tough thing I'm going through with my daughter. Like, I want to be moving on to all the creative, wonderful things that I like to do in life. How do I get out of this? And we, we have to work with the brain to do that, cuz the brain is what gets us stuck there in the first place.

And so how do you do that? How do you get out of this when it seems to scratch an itch? So for somebody it's like, like scratching a mosquito bite or something.

It's, yes, it's very seductive. This, the promise is seductive. I think of it like if, if you've ever had a tooth pulled and your tongue just keeps wanting to play in that spot. Like, is the tooth really gone? What's going— and you know I shouldn't do that, but you can't stop. It's very seductive because again, it's the brain's promise to you, this seductive storyline that this is going to give you an answer. But I promise, because I've talked to so many people, that is not the way that answers. So one of the things that I've done is work with the latest neuroscience on the brain and the area of the brain that gives rise to these very distinct, distinct experiences that come forth when we're ruminating. And working with that neuroscience to create what I've called the MIST framework to help people exit rumination in pretty quick order, see that it is a signal fire from their past. Something is calling to them to attend to some feelings that they have not dealt with. We know that rumination gets us when something that we need to process emotionally is remaining unprocessed. And the MISS Framework helps to do that.

And I am happy to run you through it if you would like.

Yeah, sure. I'd like to hear that.

I'm just gonna tell you about one person I worked with who had a kind of a ruminating pattern that works very well with the MISS Framework. Actually, the MISS Framework works well for everyone that I've worked— whom I've worked with. So the MIST framework is an acronym, of course, MIST. Why MIST? For two reasons. One, when we're ruminating, we get caught in a fog, right? We can't see straight, we can't think straight. And also because the default mode network is a network, it's a network of three areas. And these three areas together spin up our ruminative storylines that are so unpleasant, the reels we can't get out of. M, D is for one area of the default mode network that brings forth that mental imagery, those mental images you've seen 100 times before, those same reels. And together, those mental images kind of tell us a story about ourselves, usually a negative one. I is for intense interior emotion, because when we see those movie reels, it brings up a lot of emotion for us, kind of like a, like a score to a film. And we start to feel those emotions. And S is for somatic sensations, because the third part of our default mode network, it pulls up all these somatic sensations that are often very old in our physical bodies and where we hold that tension, that clutching, that contraction.

And T is for tying it all together. So one woman I worked with, she was really, really struggling with the fact that She, she was an artist and she was having a lot of issues as she became more and more known in her field with criticism from other colleagues. And it was really crippling her. She was just not able to go in her studio and do the kind of work that she knew she was capable of doing. Her head just kept replaying things that other artists were saying about her work. And so when she did the MISS framework, she pulled up the mental images And I usually tell people the best way to start the MISS Framework is to start with the sentence, "Here is my old story of," because it is always an old story. That, that is a fact because that's why it's laid so thickly in your neural circuitry because you've been doing it over and over. So when she did, "Here's my old story," and she looked at her mental images that came up when she was ruminating about these very critical other artists in an artist group she was in.

She was able to go, "Oh, here's my old story of how my work sucks." And she saw these images of her dad, who was a very, very famous artist, criticizing her early on in life when she was trying to do her artistic work and please him. "Here's my old story of how I suck and don't matter and no one sees me." When she did I, so I is for interior, intense interior emotion, MIST became, here's my old story of how I suck, how I don't matter, and no one hears me, no one sees me, which makes me feel ashamed and sad and angry. When she added S for somatic sensations, it became, here's my old story of how I suck, how no one sees me, how I don't matter, which makes me feel angry and ashamed and sad. And for her, it just made her kind of hunch over. Her whole neck hurt, her shoulders hurt. And she said, "Which makes my neck hurt and my shoulders hurt and my head pound." She tied it all together. And as soon as we did that, and I've done this with so many people, I said, "Okay, how does that feel for you?

Here's your old story. You understand the movie." You understand the emotion, you see and you're feeling it in your body. She could say, wow, like it's gone. It's gone from my body and it's a little bit outside of me. I can see, wow, why am I doing this to myself? Like, why do I keep going into this storyline? And that MIST framework gives us a tool to quickly exit our really stickiest thought spirals By naming the experiences with real verbal specificity, and it is so important that you come up with your own words because the words your brain comes up with are the words that your brain will pay the most attention to. Once you see the story, you can step out of the story. And of course, that I have 100 other ways to help continue to stay out of the ruminative mind and get your whole brain to sync up for that ideation and creativity again.

So essentially it's being aware of what you're doing and what it's doing to you helps you step out of it because you're able to see this is doing me absolutely no good.

Absolutely, and this isn't just like psychobabble. This isn't just like something that, you know, I've developed and oh, you know, it'll make you feel a little better. This is neuroscience. We see on fMRI scans scans, that when we use this real granular specificity with language, the areas of the brain that give rise to rumination, they stop locking down. They're no longer a locked circuit sticking you over and over with the same story.

Well, as you say, everybody ruminates, some a lot more than others. But, you know, I think the most important thing you said was the fact is the answer never comes. And understanding that and understanding now how it happens and why people do it, I think is very, very helpful. I've been talking to Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She's author of the book Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Donna, great. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

It was a great pleasure to talk to you.

We've all heard the advice that if you want to be in a happier relationship, have more intimacy, more sex. It sounds logical because happier couples do tend to have more sex more often. But here's the question researchers at Carnegie Mellon University wanted to answer: which comes first? They assigned some married couples to double how often they had sex for 3 months. The result? Those couples were not happier. In fact, many enjoyed sex a little less because it started to feel like something they had to do instead of something they wanted to do. The researchers say they uncovered a classic case of reverse causality. It may not be that more sex creates happier couples. Instead, happier couples naturally end up having more sex. Their conclusion isn't to schedule more intimacy, but rather to create the kind of relationship that makes you want intimacy in the first place. And that is something you should know. You know, word of mouth has been the primary way the audience for this podcast has grown, and it's all thanks to you and other listeners who tell people. We love it, we encourage it, and hope you keep doing it. I'm Michael Ruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.