Brooding

The brooding is a form of reflection in which the thoughts of many topics or a specific problem revolve without a solution to arrive. Strictly speaking, in clinical psychology and psychopathology, a distinction is made between past-related and future-related topics as brooding or worries. Both are usually accompanied by negative emotions, with brooding being associated with more depressive feelings and worries with more fearful feelings.

Brooding is often about abstract, unspecific and vague topics: negatively charged philosophical or pseudophilosophical questions, a conflict or a problem for which no solution seems to be available. A simple, obvious solution is doubted, not sought in the brooding process by definition; A decision between a multitude of solutions is perceived as difficult, and the desperate search for solutions prevents the solution. A person can become trapped in his mind and cannot find a way out, with persistent worrying brooding being a sign of illness . Preferred topics for brooding relate to decisions , conflicts , personal performance, assumed assessment of oneself by others, future , past or the meaning of life .

Brooding is a search into the void that continues despite possible solutions.

Differentiation of normal and pathological brooding behavior

When people find themselves in conflict, stress, or crisis situations, brooding and worrying thoughts are understandable and normal. There are also dimensional differences between people with regard to their inclination to these circular and interlinked thought processes. When it comes to the question of whether this is still happening in the healthy area, the subjectively felt suffering and the experienced restriction in everyday life are decisive. Pathological brooding, i.e. brooding and / or worries with a disease value, occurs more frequently and persistently at first. During a major depressive episode, brooding thoughts can paralyze people for hours several times a day. People with generalized anxiety disorder , the main characteristic of which is multiple worries, experience similar things. Pathological brooding often begins without any external cause and is experienced as difficult to control and as aversive . Often brooding also keeps you from sleeping and can therefore also indirectly impair your health. The time intensity also leads indirectly to health restrictions, since positive activities are no longer carried out and tasks and problems can no longer be tackled. The latter leads to an intensification of brooding and thus to a vicious circle . Excessive brooding can also lead to temporary impairment of cognitive abilities such as focus , retentiveness, and memory.

Linguistic history

Brooding is an “iterative formation to dig” and in this etymological meaning refers to “tireless preparatory work in depth”. In the Romantic era , the so-called "mode of brooding" referred to as a kind of profundity on the mysteries of nature or the depth of one's own mind , and Walter Benjamin still spoke of the "richness of old brooding". The actual pathologization of brooding , on the other hand, begins with Wilhelm Griesinger , who, following Richard von Krafft-Ebing, defined brooding as an “obsession in question form”. In everyday language brooding is today, even within the meaning of tinkering Dice, puzzles used or musing, to do this with the default with the free will. In colloquial language, brooding is easily confused with processes that correspond to brainstorming or normal philosophizing .

Profit by avoidance

In clinical psychology , brooding and worrying are first and foremost understood as attempts to solve problems that are used in a dysfunctional manner. For example, future-related worrying thoughts can also lead to results in preparation for action and thus prevent dangers. Uncomfortable thinking through negative past situations can lead to avoiding mistakes and correcting one's own behavior in the future. However, this is only true if the thoughts produce results, which is not the case with pondering. The emotion-regulating aspects of brooding were first discussed by Borkovec et al. a. (1983). Within the more recent therapy research, these approaches are further developed and increasingly evidence is being collected, which firstly points to the sustained conditions of brooding in a short-term decrease in strong aversive emotions such as inferiority, fears and insecurity, and brooding in this respect dampens emotional processing ( negative reinforcement ). Second, the protective character of brooding with regard to strongly increasing aversive emotions in favor of long-term consistently high aversive emotions is examined. Within a learning model it can be explained why pathological brooding, despite the accompanying unpleasant feelings, persists as behavior, albeit at a reasonably high emotional cost.

Brooding as a form of indecision, procrastination, getting bogged down, up to massive psychological resistance can cause good resolutions, plans and life change projects to fail. These resistances often contain an unconscious gain, are part of psychological mechanisms, as they leave in the dark whether the real solutions would have made people happy. By avoiding action, people may save themselves from the sobering experience of failure or the insight that they are not as talented or intelligent as desired.

Psychopathology

In psychopathology , endless brooding can take on the status of a major symptom, e.g. B. Depression . The tendency to brood can severely limit the ability to make decisions , whereby the thoughts usually revolve around the topics of hopelessness, feelings of inferiority and self-reproach and impair the normal ability to act.

The main criterion for diagnosing generalized anxiety disorder (ICD-10: F41.1) with a lifetime prevalence of around 4–5 percent is also worrying brooding in almost all areas of life, such as one's own health and that of people close to you, work, the environment, politics , Disasters or finances.

Obligation to brood is present in obsessive-compulsive disorder with the diagnosis ICD-10: F42.0 "Predominantly obsessive -compulsive thoughts or obsessive-compulsive thinking" and can be present in obsessive-compulsive disorder with diagnosis F42.2 "Obsessive-compulsive thoughts and actions, mixed". Brooding can take the form of compulsive ideas, pictorial representations, or compulsive impulses. For the person concerned, these obsessive thoughts are often tormenting and run off in a chain of endless deliberations and imponderable alternatives. This goes hand in hand with the inability to make simple decisions that are necessary for everyday life.

Obsessive-compulsions and depression are closely related, so obsessive-compulsive brooding should only be considered an obsessive-compulsive disorder if it occurs outside of an episode of depression.

therapy

The importance of the phenomenon of brooding is increasingly seen in therapy research as a general symptom, the treatment of which can be set as a therapy goal beyond the modern disorder-specific treatment manual within an optimized emotion regulation.

Possible treatment strategies for this include a. Symptom-specific psychoeducation , problem-solving training , relaxation procedures , mindfulness-based approaches (e.g. mindfulness-based cognitive therapy , acceptance and commitment therapy ) to increase tolerance for aversive emotions, cognitive restructuring to correct dysfunctional metacognitions about brooding, worrying confrontations (e.g. in sensu pictorial) thinking to the end).

Web links

Wikiquote: Brooding  - Quotes

• Interdisciplinary conversation about brooding , at schwarzmarkt-archiv.de, audio file

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jan Eichstaedt: An experimentally testable theory of volitional action and volitional decision, developed on the phenomenon of perseverance. Investigations on free will and involuntary brooding (=  Europäische Hochschulschriften. 6 610 ). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-631-33105-3 .
2. ↑ Lothar Pikulik: The early romanticism in Germany as the end and beginning. About Tieck's William Lovell and Friedrich Schlegel's fragments. In: Silvio Vietta (Ed.): The literary early romanticism. Göttingen 1983, p. 118.
3. ↑ Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek : Depth. About the fascination of brooding. Fink Verlag, Paderborn / Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7705-4952-8 .
4. ^ Walter Benjamin: Collected writings. Volume I, 1, p. 328.
5. ^ Wilhelm Griesinger: About a little-known psychopathic condition. Lecture given in the Berlin Medical-Psychological Society. In: Archives for Psychiatry. 1868. I, p. 633.
6. ↑ TD Borkovec, E. Robinson, T. Pruzinsky, JA Dupree: Preliminary exploration of worry: Some characteristics and processes . In: Behavior Research and Therapy 21 (1) . 1983, p. 9-16 .
7. ↑ Hans-Werner Rückert: Discover the happiness of action. Overcome what is blocking life . 2nd Edition. Campus, 2004, ISBN 3-593-37448-X .
8. ↑ F42.0 - ICD-10-GM Version 2008. German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information, Cologne.
9. ↑ Steven C. Hayes, Victoria M. Follette, Marsha M. Linehan (Eds.): Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition . 9th edition. Guilford Press, 2004, ISBN 1-59385-066-2 .
10. ↑ Zindel V. Segal, J. Mark G. Williams, John D. Teasdale: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Relapse Prevention . 1st edition. Dgvt-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-87159-077-1 .
11. ^ Adrian Wells: Emotional Disorders and Metacognition: Innovative Cognitive Therapy . 1st edition. Wiley & Sons, 2002, ISBN 0-471-49169-1 .

This article is about a health issue. It is not used for self-diagnosis and does not replace a diagnosis by a doctor. Please note the information on health issues !