Ruminating is where you’ve been taken over by persistent and repetitive thoughts and find yourself dwelling on the negative. It’s a pretty efficient way of driving yourself mad.

What to do? It’s not easy to talk yourself out of it.

Mental health professionals might advise you take on rumination – fixating on your problems – as a project. Tackle one issue at a time, make a step-by-step plan – convert anxiety into action and accomplishment. And so forth.

And you may well need to do all that – if you are overwhelmed with real-world problems.

But rumination can be a fixation on regrets and failures and what-ifs.

Either way, the professionals will also suggest that, in the meantime, you need to distract yourself.

But how?

In January, the New York Times ran an interesting piece about the concept of awe and how it might be “a salve for a turbulent mind”.

It’s something of a buzz-word in therapy and such at the moment.

Dr Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times that “awe is critical to our wellbeing – just like joy, contentment‌ and love”.

His research suggests that awe “has tremendous health benefits that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, the ‘love’ hormone that promotes trust and bonding”.

Dr Keltner describes awe as: “The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world”.

He said that our bodies “respond differently when we are experiencing awe than when we are feeling joy, contentment or fear”.

And yes. He’s written a book about it. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

So… you need to go whale watching?

We’ve published a number of stories in recent years about how exposure to urban green spaces – parks and gardens, but also the beach – positively impact your health.

Example? Your risk of stroke drops by 16 per cent if you just live near a park.

Turning that around, a 2019 study found that children who grew up with the lowest levels of green space – parks, gardens and sports fields – had up to a 55 per cent higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder.

A 2022 study found that being in nature “helps people deal with negative body image by removing some of the triggers of body image anxiety, such as the focus on social media, and strengthening coping mechanisms to keep negative feelings in perspective”.

See here and here for more of our green-space reports.

Short version: getting among the trees gives people – be they someone ruminating on the past, or someone ruminating on their body image.

So, that’s how you can distract yourself from ruminating. Studies have piled up, showing time and again that nature can take you out of yourself.

What’s relatively new is that ‘awe’ appears to play a powerful role in enabling that escape from persistent thoughts. It may be the therapeutic mechanism.

The 2020 study

In 2020, Portuguese researchers conducted an experiment to see if participants, in a short amount of time, might experience a reduction in their rumination.

The authors of the new study explored the possibility “that a shift in attention away from self (notably induced by the emotion of awe), leading to mood restoration, may mediate such nature-rumination relationship”.

In other words: feeling and expressing awe might help nature do its healing.

And that’s what they found

The researchers showed that “a walk as short as 30-min in an urban park significantly reduced ruminative thinking in healthy participants, whereas a 30-min walk along a city transect devoid from natural elements did not”.

They also found that the walk in nature “significantly reduced negative mood and elicited more awe and more externally oriented thoughts than the walk in city”.

Bottom line: The more awe participants experienced while walking, the greater reduction in the amount of time that participants dwelled on negative thoughts.

A suggestion