Let's Talk
When we are feeling stressed or have something on our minds, it may help to talk to someone we trust. Sharing our thoughts and experiences with other people can reduce the stress response in our bodies and activate the parts of our brain that process language and meaning.[1] Expressing our emotions may help us become more aware of our feelings and make us less likely to react without thinking.
Helpful vs unhelpful talks[2]
Sometimes we just want someone to listen to us while we talk about something that happened, without their input; this is called venting. Venting may help us feel less stressed because:
- we're not keeping our thoughts to ourselves and
- it feels good to know someone cares enough to listen to us
However, talking about how we're feeling to someone else may also make us feel worse, if:
- it doesn't feel like the other person is giving us helpful feedback or
- we don't feel better after we open up to others — instead we may feel as if they're judging us or not taking us seriously
Effective venting:
1) Choose when to vent to others — we don't always have to express how we're feeling to other people in order to gain perspective — we can gain insight into why we're feeling a certain way and what to do about it through other methods such as:
- Writing down our thoughts
- Meditation
2) Carefully choose the people we open up to — we may ask ourselves if we've talked about our feelings to this person before and if they were helpful or did they make us feel worse?
3) Allow people to share their perspective — when we're expressing our feelings to someone, it's helpful to ask them for their input about how we can look at the situation differently or what they think we could do to improve the situation.
Sharing our feelings vs repeatedly talking about something[3]
While sharing our thoughts and/or feelings with others can be helpful, it may also become unhelpful when we end up talking about the same issues over and over again, without coming up with a way to improve the situation, this is called rumination. When two or more people ruminate together it's called co-rumination. Talking about the same thing repeatedly, especially about things that make us feel negative emotions (anger, sadness, frustration, etc) may make us feel worse and even lead to depression or anxiety.
Spotting Co-rumination:
1) Notice the signs
- Sharing may be helpful when we talk about our feelings with someone and come up with ways to improve the situation.
- Rumination/co-rumination occurs when we talk about our feelings or a situation with someone else over and over again without coming up with ways to improve the situation.
2) Take note of when we tend to talk about the same situations over and over again:
- Are we co-ruminating with a particular person or group of people?
- Is it in a particular environment (i.e. at home, after work, when talking to someone on the phone, on social media)?
- Are we repeatedly talking about a certain topic(s) or person(s) (a particular friend, coworker, our romantic relationship, our salary, health, etc)?
3) Ask people we trust (i.e. friends or family) to point out when they notice us talking about the same things over and over again.
How to stop co-ruminating
1) If we find ourselves ruminating with a certain person(s), we should take note of it because awareness makes it easier to stop ruminating — we should remember to be supportive when pointing out to others that we're ruminating with them because they may not be aware of it.
2) Once we notice we're co-ruminating, try to come up with possible solutions — we may ask ourselves and the other person: is there anything we could do to improve situation?
- Possible solutions may include: talking to the person with whom we had the difficult encounter, or saying sorry for something we did or the way we reacted.
- If there's nothing we can do to fix a situation then we may think about how to improve the situation, if it were to happen again. (i.e. Could we react in a different or more helpful way?)