Finding yourself caught in a cyclone of repetitive thoughts about past mistakes or unsolvable problems is a painful loop. Wasting mental energy by ruminating over embarrassing moments or simply dwelling on negative thoughts wouldn't make the list of practices on how to be successful.
Almost everyone has lost themselves for an hour, days, or, unfortunately, years from rehashing the mistakes of the past. Breaking this irritating pattern can be a game-changer, and experts believe they have a solution.
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Breaking free of chronic rumination and painful mental loops
In a helpful breakdown of chronic rumination, Claudia Zamora, a psychologist who advocates for personal growth, offered a simple solution for breaking free of a mental loop. In her 2025 article for Psi Chi, Zamora writes, "I didn’t need to stop my thoughts. I just needed to observe them without getting stuck." She did so through meditation, noting that meditation doesn't trick your mind into not thinking, but helps retrain how you relate to your thoughts.
Implementing a simple meditation exercise can break the cycle of unhelpful thoughts. This doesn't require a long and detailed regimen. There are many forms of mediation, and something as simple as a mindful re-direct can "pattern interrupt" and life hack someone free from ruminating.
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Sticking with the theme of meditation, Zamora offered these three quick-fix mind hacks to end complicated and painful conversations alone in your own mind:
1. Use a 5-second countdown
When a person finds themselves trapped in a painful mental loop, count down from five and then shift into a different activity. Suggestions followed stretching, shaking your body, or even saying a word or phrase out loud. This shift of thought to action can "stop rumination in its tracks." A 2023 study in the National Library of Medicine found that a simple distraction helped clear out negative thinking and momentarily reduced the rumination loop.
2. Focus on your breath
A short-term mindfulness training not only helps with emotional regulation but also improves attention. Spending as little as 60 seconds of focused attention on your breath can snap the replaying conversation in your mind. A 2025 study in Springer Nature Link found that even momentary mindfulness can have a causal impact on negative thinking cycles, derailing rumination before it escalates.
3. Label without judgement
It's a process called cognitive distancing. If a pattern of negative thoughts begins, try labelling it without any opinion. The example shared by Zamora was "Oh, another catastrophic prediction. Thanks, brain!" A 2025 study published in eLife showed cognitive distancing made emotional states more stable and more manageable. It doesn't just momentarily suppress emotion, but rather changes the dynamics of internal states so they hold less influence.
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Why do people get lost in ruminating?
Your overthinking might be linked to your parents. A 2024 study in the Oxford Academic journal showed that a person's perceived life stress related to family ties predicted the frequency of daily rumination. A 2023 study in Springer Nature Link showed emotional distress, past trauma, and life stress accompanied by poor support and guidance, predisposed individuals to ruminate. This unhelpful routine might be a maladaptive attempt at processing distress and emotions with a negative bias attachment.
Zamora offers some helpful framing to the problem, saying, "If your mind, like mine, tends to spiral into relentless over analysis, know that you are not broken, nor are you alone. The mind will think. That’s what it does. But through meditation, you might just discover that your thoughts are not chains but passing waves. They do not define you, nor do they hold the power you once believed they did."
Watch this helpful video shared by Marian Hanson, a counsellor in the United Kingdom, on pattern interrupts for negative thinking and overthinking:
- YouTube www.youtube.com
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.