Need help getting out of this self conscious slump I’ve been in.

Hello Roy,

Thank you for your question. So if I heard you correctly, until recently you were doing quite well, but then you experienced waves of anxiety and great self-doubt and feelings that you were a failure and that you would have no more successes in life.

I do find that a lot of us are prone to feeling bad about ourselves when we have spent a lot of time thinking about the struggles we are dealing with or going over past mistakes or difficulties. A term that is sometimes used for spending a lot of time caught in one of these patterns is "ruminating."

It's quite common for us, when we find ourselves dealing with many tough issues or feeling under a lot of stress, to begin a process to "find answers" to these problems. Unfortunately we rarely do find any answers when we spend too much time ruminating.

What usually happens is we get sucked into a black hole of worry and obsession and after a certain amount of time we find ourselves more depressed and even more obsessed to make sense of our situation. But as you've likely experienced, these sessions of rumination rarely end well and can sometimes go on for hours at a time. And it is quite easy to get entangled in a chain of these episodes, so much so that one may feel like one is sinking into a sort of quicksand of despair.

One way of breaking out of the cycle of depression, rumination, and then more depression, as mundane as it sounds, is distraction. Though the distraction should ideally be something that is moderately engrossing so that it breaks your train of worry.

Another method is to journal about your feelings and thoughts that you are having at the time. Any journaling in this manner is usually helpful, but it would likely be more helpful to journal for at least 10 minutes or so. This can help to lessen your stress, break your rumination, and lessen the strength of the urge to continue the ruminating.

These are simple techniques to understand, but not always easy to do at the time. I hope this is of some assistance, Roy.

Mark D. Haase, LPC, LMFT