“Me too,” “me too,” “me too.” That's what I kept repeating in my mind over and over for almost a week after I said that to a person who said, “Nice to meet you.” It was a small and very minor mistake; however, I couldn’t believe I practically said that I was pleased to meet myself too. It didn’t matter that I was just learning English at that point; I was just so embarrassed and wanted to disappear.
I’m pretty sure that I am not the only person who sometimes thinks over and over about the same mistake, failure or situation that embarrassed or made us feel weak or uncomfortable. And reflecting and meditating on our mistakes is not bad; or haven’t you heard the phrase “we learn from our mistakes”? That’s because when we reflect on a mistake, we can find a way to fix it or avoid it in the present or future. Still, we could find ourselves ruminating on a mistake and just thinking how foolish we are, and not taking any learning from it.
Right now, the thing I tend to ruminate the most about is when I make mistakes when speaking English, as I told you in the beginning—here’s an example of how it may look, in case I explained myself poorly—and there it is, as you may notice: I don’t have so much confidence in my English. Maybe because it is the thing that I am struggling with every day the most. But I can recall from when I was in Colombia, I also tended to ruminate about every mistake when interacting with other people; I struggle even in my first language, Spanish, because I am not a people person. I consider myself an introvert, and I struggle with social interactions. But then, I realize that mortifying myself for every single error would not help me at all. In addition, I don’t like the narrative of “poor little me.” So I decided to stop ruminating and start reflecting on my failures so I wouldn't repeat them.
I started by searching the etymological meaning of reflection, which means “turning of the thought back upon past experiences or ideas” or “remark made after turning back one’s thought on some subject.” And rumination, which means, “to turn over in the mind, muse, meditate, think again and again.” If you notice, when referring to someone analyzing their inner thoughts, feelings, and memories, they are very similar. So, where’s the difference?
The difference is that when you reflect on a certain situation, you are analyzing how and why it happened, what factors were involved, how you could avoid it from happening again, or even replicate—I almost wrote “reply” instead of “replicate” (unfortunately, if you don’t speak Spanish you wouldn’t get why or maybe you will prove me wrong)—the situation if it was a positive one. So every time I misspelled something or pronounced it wrong, I just asked the person to show/tell me the right way, then repeat it again and again until I memorized it.
On the other hand, when you ruminate, you only keep repeating what happened and never analyze the why or how, but just keep reproducing the bad feeling it generates in you when it happened. If you felt embarrassed, disappointed, or sad about what happened, you would just keep reproducing it in your mind and never get over it, but get deep and feel stressed and anxious because ruminating is a cycle of negative thinking, and as any other cycle, like the water or life cycles, it doesn't have an end unless you decide you stop it.
While I am a firm believer in the power of the mind and that, as soon as you decide to do something, you should be able to do it, I do know we usually need to start by taking small steps. So I will share with you what I do when the ruminating cycle starts.
As soon as I realize I am walking around the same thought, I just stop whatever thing I am doing and stand up and scratch my body. Then I walk for five minutes while thinking about something that makes me happy: that’s probably an anime I am watching, a movie I like, the book I'm reading, or my family and my pets (I have two lovely female dogs, and my mom sends pictures of them every day, and it just makes me smile). In other words, just do something you enjoy for a moment, so you will get distracted from the negative thought you were having.
Then, if the rumination was about a problem I got to fix, then I would try to break it into small parts and analyze how it could be solved. If I got trapped in the same cycle again, then I would call my mom, dad or a friend to just speak about the problem. In case you can’t speak to anybody, just say the problem aloud. When we try to explain what is happening, you may find what to do. In case it seems impossible to solve, well, there’s no point in worrying about it. I always tell myself, “if there’s a solution, why worry? If there’s no solution, why worry?” Let’s think about it, if you know what to do, everything is going to be OK, and if you know there’s no way of solving it, there's no reason to worry because it won’t make sense, because no matter how much you worry about it, no solution would come.
And the other thing I do is think about the things I have overcome in the past and how I have improved in other areas. For example, when I say something stupid in English or speak using the wrong word or verbal tense, I just think about how two years ago I wasn’t even able to understand what the other person was saying, so I wasn’t even able to try to have a conversation. The point is that we grow every day. Day by day and time to time, we learn something new, we improve our skills and abilities, we are capable of correcting our mistakes, and be a better version of ourselves every day—don’t let your brain tell you otherwise, you have the power to control your mind.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.