Why You Can’t Stop Overthinking: Overthinking as a Trauma Response

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • April 17, 2026

The 3 a.m. Mind That Won’t Quiet Down

It’s 3:14 a.m. and Iris is already awake.

She didn’t set an alarm. She never has to. Her brain does it for her — that reliable, unwelcome jolt into consciousness somewhere between three and four, the way she surfaced out of sleep as a child when she heard her parents’ voices shift into argument downstairs.

Tonight the loop is already running by the time she registers where she is. The Q3 presentation she’s giving on Thursday. The email from her direct report that she answered too sharply. The conversation she had with her sister last Sunday that she’s reviewed at least forty times since — parsing each sentence, each pause, each possible interpretation of her sister’s tone when she said “fine.” The mortgage refinance she hasn’t had time to call about. The doctor’s appointment she’s been postponing for six months.

She lies still, watching the ceiling, trying to slow-breathe her way out of it the way the wellness app she downloaded suggests. It doesn’t work. It never works. The thoughts don’t stop because she breathes slowly. They just continue, politely, while she breathes slowly.

By 4 a.m. she gives up. She gets her laptop. She starts working on the presentation. It’s actually pretty good by 6 a.m., when she puts it away to get her kids up for school.

She’ll be exhausted at the office today. She’s always exhausted. She has been running on six or fewer hours of sleep for so long she can’t remember what fully rested feels like. She’s told herself this is just the price of the career she’s built. She tells herself a lot of things about the overthinking: that it’s just her personality, that it’s what makes her good at her job, that once she gets through this quarter — this year, this phase — it’ll slow down.

It doesn’t slow down. It’s never slowed down. And the reason it hasn’t isn’t that Iris isn’t trying hard enough or isn’t disciplined enough. It’s that the overthinking isn’t a habit. It’s a trauma response — and it can’t be breathed away any more than her heartbeat can.

If you recognize yourself in Iris, this post is for you. We’re going to look at what’s actually happening in your brain when the loop won’t stop, where it comes from, why it’s so persistent in driven and ambitious women, and — most importantly — what actually helps.

What Is Overthinking, Really?

Let’s be precise about what we mean when we say overthinking, because the word gets used casually in ways that flatten something clinically significant.

In the clinical literature, what most people call overthinking maps onto two related but distinct processes: rumination and worry. Rumination is past-oriented — it’s the mind replaying what happened, what was said, what went wrong. Worry is future-oriented — it’s the mind generating “what if” scenarios, preparing for every possible threat that hasn’t happened yet. Most overthinkers do both, often within the same sleepless hour.

What the clinical definition captures that the casual use of “overthinking” misses is the passivity of it. Rumination isn’t deep reflection. It isn’t rigorous analysis. It’s repetitive, uncontrollable, and distress-generating — and critically, it doesn’t produce solutions. It produces more rumination.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, spent her career studying this phenomenon, and one of her most striking findings was that rumination is not merely a symptom of depression and anxiety — it’s a cause. In her landmark 2008 review with colleagues Blair Wisco and Sonja Lyubomirsky, she demonstrated that experimentally inducing rumination in otherwise non-depressed people produced significant increases in depressive and anxious affect. Experimentally reducing it produced significant decreases. This matters clinically: addressing the overthinking directly is not a consolation prize while you wait for the underlying distress to resolve. It’s a primary intervention.

But here’s the piece that most anxiety resources miss: for driven women with relational trauma histories, overthinking isn’t just a cognitive habit that got out of hand. It’s a survival response. It was learned — often very early — because staying two steps ahead of every possible threat was the safest way to navigate an unpredictable environment. The overthinking isn’t broken cognition. It’s a system that worked, once, and hasn’t gotten the update that the environment has changed.

That reframe — from “character flaw” to “adaptive response to a threat level that no longer exists” — is where real healing begins. We’ll come back to it throughout this post.

The Neurobiology of the Loop

When clients ask me why they can’t just stop overthinking — why willpower doesn’t work, why mantras don’t work, why telling themselves to “let it go” doesn’t work — I explain it this way: you’re trying to out-think your threat-detection system. And your threat-detection system is faster, older, and far more persistent than your rational mind.

Here’s what’s actually happening in the brain.

The amygdala — the brain’s primary alarm center — is constantly scanning the environment for danger. In most people, the amygdala’s alarm quiets relatively quickly when no actual threat is present. But in individuals with trauma histories, the amygdala is calibrated to a higher baseline. It’s more sensitive. It detects threat signals that don’t reach conscious awareness and fires the alarm before the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s reasoning center — has any information to work with.

That’s the critical piece: the alarm goes off first, and the reasoning comes second. Your brain is already in threat-response mode before you have any conscious awareness of what the threat is. And then your prefrontal cortex — doing exactly what it’s designed to do — starts generating explanations. Possibilities. “What if” scenarios. It’s trying to identify the threat that the amygdala is already responding to. And because the threat isn’t consciously identifiable (it’s a nervous system signal, not a real-world danger), the loop never resolves. The “what ifs” keep generating.

Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and developer of polyvagal theory, offers another essential lens. His research describes the autonomic nervous system’s hierarchy of responses to threat: social engagement, fight/flight, and freeze. What’s less often discussed is what happens cognitively in each state. In a fight/flight state — which is where many chronically overthinking women are operating, much of the time — the nervous system is mobilized, hyperalert, and scanning. Cognitively, this translates to the relentless “what if” generation of worry and the relentless review of the past that is rumination. It’s not in your head. It’s in your body.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written compellingly about why trauma survivors can’t simply reason themselves out of threat responses: the nervous system is running a program that predates language, that operates below the level of conscious thought, and that doesn’t update based on intellectual argument. You can know, intellectually, that you are safe. Your nervous system can simultaneously be running a threat response that says otherwise. And the overthinking is the cognitive expression of that nervous system state — not the cause of it.

This is also where the work of Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, becomes directly relevant. Dr. Brewer’s research on habit loops and mindfulness-based interventions has shown that attempts to suppress thought (the “just stop thinking about it” approach) actually increase thought frequency — the classic white-bear problem. What reduces the DMN’s activity and interrupts the rumination loop isn’t suppression. It’s curiosity: a specific kind of non-evaluative attention to the present-moment experience that interrupts the self-referential loop of the DMN.

Ellen Hendriksen, PhD, clinical psychologist and researcher at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, adds another important dimension: anxiety-driven overthinking often functions as a form of avoidance. The verbal, linguistic quality of worry — the “what if” chains — is cognitively demanding and emotionally numbing compared to the full emotional experience of the feared outcome. In other words, the overthinking may be, paradoxically, a way of not feeling. The mind generates scenarios precisely because it’s less threatening than actually feeling the fear at the center of the loop.

This is a pattern I see consistently in my work with driven and ambitious women. The intelligence and analytical capacity that serve them so well professionally get recruited into the service of emotional avoidance. The overthinking feels like it’s solving something. It rarely is. It’s usually circling the feeling that’s waiting to be felt.

How Overthinking Shows Up in Driven Women

Overthinking doesn’t look the same in everyone. In my practice, I see several distinct patterns that are particularly common in driven, ambitious women — each one a specific expression of the underlying threat-detection system trying to manage a specific kind of threat.

The Perfectionism Loop. This is the endless review of your own performance. The replaying of the presentation after it’s over, cataloguing every stumble. The parsing of an email you sent for signs of inadequacy. The 3 a.m. inventory of what you should have said differently. This loop is the fight response’s cognitive expression — the preemptive self-attack before anyone else can attack you. If you find it first, name it first, fix it first — the threat of judgment is neutralized. Except it isn’t. The loop just starts again.

The Anticipatory Anxiety Loop. This is the rehearsal of every possible scenario before a high-stakes event. Every question they might ask at the board meeting. Every way the conversation with your partner might go wrong. Every possible complication in the plan. This loop is the flight response’s cognitive expression — the preparation for escape from a threat that hasn’t materialized yet, and possibly won’t. The driven woman running this loop is not being neurotic. She’s doing what her nervous system learned to do when preparation was genuinely the difference between safety and danger.

The Relationship Analysis Loop. This is the parsing of other people’s behavior for signs of threat. The slightly short text that gets analyzed for seventeen minutes. The colleague who didn’t respond with her usual warmth in the meeting. The partner who was quiet at dinner. In women with relational trauma histories, the relationship analysis loop is the fawn response’s cognitive expression — the continuous monitoring of others’ emotional states as a safety strategy. If you can identify the shift before it becomes a rupture, you can manage it. Except the monitoring itself creates distance, and the distance creates more threat signals, and the loop intensifies.

The Meta-Loop. This is the overthinking about the overthinking. The thoughts about why you’re like this. The self-critical analysis of your anxiety. The “why can’t I just stop” spiral. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, captured this beautifully: “Ruminators don’t just think about their problems — they think about their thinking. They think about why they are thinking about their problems, and whether their thinking is getting them anywhere.” This meta-cognitive quality is particularly characteristic of driven women who bring their analytical intelligence to the analysis of their own mental processes — and find, to their frustration, that analysis doesn’t resolve it.

What all of these patterns share is that they’re driven, not chosen. They’re automatic, not deliberate. And they’re adaptive — each one developed because, in some earlier environment, it served a genuine protective function. The woman who endlessly anticipates problems may have grown up in a family where unexpected bad things happened without warning, and preparation was the only available response. The woman who monitors every relational signal may have grown up with a parent whose moods were unpredictable, and reading the emotional weather was the safest way to stay out of the storm.

Let’s look at what that actually looks like in practice.

Meet Vera. She’s 38, a physician in a large academic medical center — department chief at an age her colleagues consider remarkable. She comes to therapy because she hasn’t slept more than five consecutive hours in three years. She’s tried everything: melatonin, blackout curtains, a new mattress, the CBT-i sleep protocol her colleague recommended. Nothing works, she says, because the problem isn’t the sleep. The problem is that her mind won’t stop running.

In session, Vera describes the loop in precise, clinical detail — she’s a doctor, she has language for everything. What she doesn’t have is the ability to locate the loop in her body. When I ask her what overthinking feels like physically, she pauses for a long time. “Like acceleration,” she finally says. “Like I’m always already moving toward the next thing before I’ve finished the current thing.”

“When did you first learn to move that fast?” I ask.

She’s quiet again. Then: “My mother was ill a lot when I was growing up. Not — she wasn’t dying. But she was fragile. And someone had to manage things. I was the oldest. So I just — I became the one who kept track. Who anticipated. Who made sure nothing got missed.”

“How old were you when you became that person?”

“Seven,” she says, without hesitation. “Maybe six.”

The perfectionism loop, the anticipatory anxiety loop, the management of every possible contingency — Vera didn’t develop these at medical school. She developed them at six years old, in a household where someone needed to keep track, and she was the one who stepped up. The nervous system that learned to scan relentlessly then is still scanning now. It doesn’t know the environment has changed. It’s still doing its job.

This is what I mean when I say overthinking is a trauma response. Not trauma in the sense of a single catastrophic event, necessarily — though that’s certainly part of some women’s histories. Trauma in the broader sense of a nervous system that learned, in a specific environment, that constant vigilance was the safest strategy. And that is still running that strategy, decades later, in an environment that is categorically different.

The Childhood Roots of Vigilance

Here’s the thing that most content about overthinking gets completely wrong: it frames it as a cognitive problem. A bad habit. A thinking style that can be corrected through better thinking. And while there are genuinely useful cognitive strategies for managing overthinking in the moment, treating it as primarily a cognitive issue misses the most important part of the picture.

Overthinking, for women with childhood trauma histories, starts in the body. It starts in the nervous system. It starts in the earliest lessons about whether the world is safe and whether you are safe in it.

Research by Katherine McLaughlin, PhD, developmental and clinical psychologist, has demonstrated that childhood adversity is significantly associated with elevated rumination in adulthood — and that this elevated rumination partially explains why childhood adversity leads to adult depression and anxiety. The mechanism is exactly what you’d predict from the threat-detection model: childhood adversity calibrates the nervous system to a higher threat baseline. The child who grows up in an unsafe or unpredictable environment develops a threat-detection system that is finely tuned, highly sensitive, and always scanning. That’s not a malfunction. That was survival.

The difficulty is that the nervous system doesn’t automatically recalibrate when the environment changes. The driven woman who left her chaotic childhood home twenty years ago, who built a stable, accomplished life through formidable intelligence and effort, can find that her threat-detection system is still running the calibration it developed at eight years old. Her prefrontal cortex knows she’s safe. Her amygdala doesn’t believe it.

This is the clinical picture I see consistently in my work with ambitious women: impressive external architecture — the title, the accomplishments, the carefully constructed life — layered over a nervous system that is still, quietly, running its childhood threat-scan. The overthinking is often the most visible symptom, because it’s the cognitive face of a physiological state.

There’s another piece to this that’s worth naming directly: many driven women with childhood trauma histories are so used to the overthinking that they’ve come to identify with it. It’s not just something they do — it’s something they are. They’re “a worrier,” “an overthinker,” someone whose “brain doesn’t turn off.” And in some cases, the overthinking is also entangled with identity and self-concept in ways that make it feel dangerous to release: if I stop monitoring everything, something bad will happen. If I stop anticipating every problem, I’ll be caught off guard. If I stop reviewing every interaction for what I did wrong, I’ll lose my edge.

These beliefs aren’t irrational. They were formed in environments where vigilance genuinely was protective. The work isn’t to argue them away. It’s to help the nervous system have enough new experiences of safety that it can begin to loosen its grip on the old strategy — not because the strategy was wrong, but because the environment has changed.

I think about Toni Morrison’s words in a different register when I’m sitting with clients who have carried vigilance like armor their whole lives. The hypervigilance that drove your childhood survival didn’t come from weakness — it came from intelligence, from attunement, from a form of power. The work of relational trauma recovery isn’t about dismantling that intelligence. It’s about learning that you don’t have to be on guard to stay safe — that safety can come from within rather than from anticipating every external threat.

That shift — from external vigilance to internal safety — is one of the most profound movements I watch clients make in therapy. It doesn’t happen through insight alone. It happens through accumulated experiences of safety, in a body that slowly learns it can exhale.

Both/And: Your Overthinking Is Protective AND Exhausting

One of the things I notice most consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is how much shame surrounds the overthinking. The self-criticism that layers on top of the original loop: “Why can’t I just stop?” “Normal people don’t do this.” “What’s wrong with me that I can’t turn my brain off?”

The shame makes everything worse. Not because feelings of shame are invalid — they’re understandable, given how the overthinking gets in the way of sleep, presence, relationship, rest. But because shame activates the threat-detection system, which intensifies the very loop you’re trying to exit. It’s the meta-loop problem Nolen-Hoeksema identified: the overthinking about the overthinking. The judgment of the response becomes another alarm signal, which generates more overthinking, which generates more judgment.

Here’s the Both/And I want to offer you, because both of these things are completely, simultaneously true:

Your overthinking is not a character flaw. It is your threat-detection system doing exactly what it was designed to do in the environment where it was calibrated. It is a form of intelligence. It is a survival strategy that worked. It kept you tracking, preparing, anticipating, managing — and in the environment where it was formed, those were genuinely adaptive capacities. The driven woman who overthinks is not broken or weak or neurotic. She is running a very sophisticated protective program.

And: that program is costing you something real. The sleep, the presence, the ability to be in your body, the capacity to receive joy without immediately scanning it for the catch. The chronic cognitive load of the loop is exhausting in ways that don’t show up in blood work but accumulate, over years, into a kind of depletion that rest alone doesn’t fix. You can’t think your way out of it, because thinking is the mechanism of the problem. Something different is needed.

Both of those things are true, at the same time, without contradiction. You’re not wrong for having developed the overthinking. You’re not wrong for wanting to be free of it.

Let me introduce you to Eliza. She’s 44, a tech executive in San Francisco — the kind of role that requires her to hold an enormous amount of information simultaneously, to anticipate market shifts and organizational dynamics and competitive threats, to think three moves ahead at all times. Her overthinking, professionally, is genuinely functional. Her board values it. Her direct reports rely on it. She has built a career in part on her capacity to run scenarios that others don’t think to run.

She comes to therapy because her marriage is suffering. Her husband — patient, loving, consistent — has told her gently that she’s never really there with him. That even when they’re together, she’s somewhere else. That he misses her. And Eliza knows he’s right. She knows it every time she catches herself, at dinner, mentally composing an email. Every time she’s lying in bed beside him and her mind is already in Tuesday’s all-hands meeting. Every time her daughter asks her a question and she has to consciously drag herself back into the room.

“The overthinking isn’t the problem at work,” she tells me in an early session. “It’s that I can’t turn it off anywhere else.”

This is the Both/And in its most precise form. The same cognitive capacity that’s adaptive in one context — the strategic anticipation, the scenario-generation, the continuous scanning — is creating disconnection and depletion in another. It’s not that Eliza needs to stop thinking strategically. It’s that she needs to develop the capacity to choose when to engage that mode, rather than having it be the only mode available.

That’s what trauma-informed therapy can offer: not the elimination of the adaptive capacity, but the expansion of the repertoire. The development of a nervous system that can genuinely choose between vigilance and rest — rather than running the vigilance program as its only default.

You don’t have to give up your analytical intelligence to heal from overthinking. But you do need to give your nervous system something it hasn’t had before: the experience of being safe without scanning.

The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Overthink More

The gender difference in rumination is one of the most replicable findings in the clinical psychology literature. Women ruminate significantly more than men, across all age groups and cultural contexts. This gender difference partially accounts for the well-documented 2:1 female-to-male ratio in depression prevalence. But here’s what’s crucial: it’s not primarily biological. It’s socialized.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, spent decades tracing this pattern, and her conclusion was unambiguous: girls are systematically socialized to focus inward on their emotional states, to evaluate their behavior in relational terms, and to take responsibility for others’ emotional experiences. This socialization starts early — in the differential ways parents and teachers respond to girls’ emotional expressiveness versus boys’, in the ways girls are taught to manage conflict through reflection and self-evaluation rather than action, in the cultural scripts that praise girls for emotional attunement and self-monitoring and penalize them for taking up too much external space.

The result is a ruminative cognitive style that is, in many ways, a learned response to a specific set of cultural expectations. The overthinking that driven women experience as a private failing — “this is just my brain” — is, in significant part, a culturally produced cognitive pattern.

For driven and ambitious women specifically, there’s an additional layer: professional culture rewards and reinforces overthinking. The driven woman who anticipates every possible problem, who prepares for every contingency, who never lets anything get through her without review — she’s praised as thorough, prepared, indispensable. Her overthinking generates real professional value. Her company benefits from it. Her reputation is built, in part, on it.

This professional reinforcement creates a particularly complicated bind. The behavior that generates the most psychological cost — the relentless scanning, the inability to rest, the chronic cognitive overload — is also the behavior that gets rewarded in the environments where driven women spend most of their time. Reducing the overthinking may feel professionally dangerous, even when it’s physiologically necessary. And this is precisely why trauma-informed executive coaching can be so important alongside therapy: the work of recalibrating the nervous system needs to be integrated with the practical reality of high-performance professional environments, not treated as separate from it.

There’s also the race and culture dimension that a responsible systemic lens can’t skip. For women of color in predominantly white professional spaces, the hypervigilance that drives overthinking is not only psychologically conditioned — it’s often rationally warranted. The monitoring of social dynamics, the anticipation of bias, the continuous assessment of how one is being perceived: these are not paranoid distortions. They are realistic responses to real patterns in real environments. The overthinking of a Black woman in a corporate boardroom, or an immigrant woman in a profession she fought hard to enter, is not the same phenomenon as the overthinking of someone in an environment of unearned safety. Recognizing that distinction is part of what it means to take the systemic lens seriously.

The work of healing overthinking, then, is not just individual psychological work. It happens in the context of cultures that produced the pattern, professional environments that reward it, and social structures that create conditions that make vigilance genuinely adaptive for some women in ways it isn’t for others. Holding all of that complexity is part of what good therapy does. It situates your nervous system in the world that shaped it — and helps you find a path that doesn’t require you to betray either your own healing or your real-world intelligence about the environments you’re navigating.

How to Heal: Regulating the Overthinking Brain

Let me be honest with you about what works and what doesn’t, because there’s a lot of well-meaning but incomplete advice about overthinking out there.

What doesn’t work, long-term: Willpower. Thought-stopping. Positive affirmations. Telling yourself to “just let it go.” These approaches treat overthinking as a cognitive habit that can be overridden by a stronger cognitive intention. They don’t work because they’re trying to use the same system that’s creating the problem to resolve it. The prefrontal cortex cannot out-argue the amygdala. It’s trying to reason with a smoke alarm.

What actually works: Approaches that address the underlying nervous system calibration — that help the threat-detection system learn, at a physiological level, that it is safe. These approaches include:

Somatic Therapy and Body-Based Interventions. Because overthinking is the cognitive expression of a nervous system state, approaches that work directly with the body are often more effective than purely cognitive ones. Somatic therapy — working with physical sensation, breath, movement, and the felt sense of the body — helps the nervous system discharge the activated energy that the overthinking is trying to manage cognitively. This isn’t about relaxation. It’s about the body completing the defensive response that got interrupted, so the alarm can actually turn off. If you’re looking for somatic-informed therapy in the Bay Area or online, that’s exactly the kind of work my practice specializes in.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). EMDR is one of the most evidence-based treatments for trauma-rooted anxiety, and it’s particularly effective for the kind of overthinking that is driven by unprocessed traumatic memories. EMDR works by helping the brain reprocess traumatic memories so that they lose their threat charge — meaning the amygdala stops firing the alarm in response to stimuli associated with those memories. For driven women whose overthinking is tied to specific early experiences (a chaotic household, an emotionally volatile parent, an early experience of abandonment or humiliation), EMDR can produce rapid, durable relief that cognitive approaches alone cannot. Trauma-focused therapy including EMDR is available through my practice across multiple states.

Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS offers a framework that is particularly useful for the driven woman who has tried to argue herself out of her overthinking and failed. Rather than treating the overthinking as a problem to be eliminated, IFS treats the part of you that overthinks as a protector — a part that has been working very hard, for a very long time, to keep you safe. The therapeutic work is to develop a relationship with that part, to understand what it’s protecting against, and to offer it the reassurance that its job can be shared with the larger Self. Many of my clients find this framework deeply liberating: instead of fighting the overthinking, they begin to understand it — and that understanding creates the space for it to loosen. Fixing the Foundations, my signature course for relational trauma recovery, includes IFS-informed tools for exactly this kind of work.

Mindfulness — but the right kind. Judson Brewer’s research at Brown University has shown that mindfulness reduces DMN activity — it interrupts the ruminative loop by activating present-moment attention, which suppresses the self-referential default mode. But the key word is “right kind.” Mindfulness as a suppression strategy (“I will focus on my breath so I don’t have to think about this”) doesn’t work. Mindfulness as curiosity — a non-evaluative, genuinely interested attention to present-moment experience, including the overthinking itself — does. The goal isn’t to stop the thoughts. It’s to change your relationship to them: from a person being dragged by a runaway train to a person standing beside the tracks, watching the train go by.

Regulation before Reasoning. This is the sequencing principle that underlies all of the above: you cannot think your way to safety. You have to feel your way to safety, and thinking becomes available again once the nervous system is no longer in threat response. Practically, this means developing a repertoire of nervous system regulation tools — movement, breath, cold water, grounding, co-regulation with a safe person — that you can use in the moment of an overthinking spiral to bring the physiological arousal down before attempting any cognitive intervention.

Healing from overthinking isn’t a linear process. It isn’t a quick one. But it is genuinely possible — and the evidence base for trauma-informed approaches to anxiety and rumination is robust and growing. If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself — in Iris at 3 a.m., in Vera learning to anticipate disaster at six years old, in Eliza who can’t be present at dinner — you don’t have to keep managing this alone.

The loop can be interrupted. The nervous system can learn something new. Not because you forced it to — but because you gave it, perhaps for the first time, the consistent experience of genuine safety. That’s what trauma-informed therapy offers. And it’s the work I find most meaningful in my clinical practice.

If you’re ready to explore what that kind of support could look like, you can connect here for a complimentary consultation. And if you want to start by understanding the patterns beneath your patterns, my free quiz can help you identify the childhood wound that may be quietly shaping your experience.

You deserve more than managing. You deserve to actually rest.

Related Reading

Buckner, Randy L., Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L. Schacter. “The Brain’s Default Network: Anatomy, Function, and Relevance to Disease.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1440.011.

McLaughlin, Katie A., Karestan C. Koenen, Eric D. Hill, Maria Petukhova, Nancy A. Sampson, Alan M. Zaslavsky, and Ronald C. Kessler. “Trauma Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a National Sample of Adolescents.” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 52, no. 8 (2013): 815–830. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2013.05.011.

Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan, Blair E. Wisco, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. “Rethinking Rumination.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 5 (2008): 400–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x.

Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan. Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003.

van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking Press, 2014.

Watkins, Edward R. “Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought.” Psychological Bulletin 134, no. 2 (2008): 163–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer