You’re with a close friend, and out of nowhere, a remark your friend makes reminds you of a problem you’ve been dealing with that you’d rather not think about. Now you can’t get it out of your mind.
Although you’ve heard that ruminating over your worries isn’t a great coping strategy, those thoughts are taking over, and you’re not sure what to do. Should you share your feelings with your friend? Should you just try to distract yourself? Or both?
It is true that people who are prone to depression are prone to rumination. But when it’s a one-off situation where you’ve got a thought stuck in your head, could it be actually better to turn it over in your mind until you figure out a solution? In this case, since you’ve got a friend right there with you, maybe you can jointly come to a happier place.
Emotion and Co-Emotion Regulation
According to a new study by the University of British Columbia’s Ashley Battaglini and colleagues (2025), people can alleviate stress through their own emotion regulation (ER) strategies or those that involve seeking support for the process from someone else, known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). ER has received far more attention in the empirical literature than IER, and almost never are the two investigated together. The UBC authors believe that there’s much to be gained by comparing and contrasting the two approaches.
ER occurs either through distraction or rumination. Of the two, distraction, where you actively direct your thoughts away from the bad and toward the more pleasant, should be more adaptive than rumination, where you run those thoughts over and over again in your head.
Over the long haul, though, distraction could amount to a maladaptive pattern of avoidance, because eventually you are better off confronting your inner demons. But you can also help restore your equanimity by sharing your reactions with someone close to you.
Corumination would therefore produce some benefits because now you can bounce your concerns off that other person. Your relationship could benefit, too, as this other person may feel closer to you due to your feeling comfortable enough to share your fears and worries. There is prior research to support this possibility.
Testing IER and ER as Stress Reduction Strategies
The UBC authors created a sense of closeness among two strangers using what’s known as the “Fast Friends paradigm.” Each participant was paired in the lab with the experimenter, with each answering a series of questions designed to foster a greater sense of closeness.
For openers, a question might be: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” and “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” Successive questions probed deeper and deeper into the initial responses.
The 112 adults in the final sample (studied both online and in the lab; average age 21 years old) were placed in one of four conditions involving rumination/distraction and ER together vs. alone. After watching a brief nature video, the participants were exposed to a stress induction in which they were told to recall the most stressful event that occurred in their lives.
Then, depending on which group they were in, they were given prompts either to think about their internal state (rumination) or focus away from their inner state (distraction). In the co-condition, they read these prompts aloud to their experimental partner.
In addition to filling out questionnaires assessing positive and negative affect across seven time points (before and after the induction), participants also completed standard measures of anxiety and depression, as well as providing saliva samples (to provide a biological stress measure).
The findings showed that, contrary to prediction, rumination turned out to have beneficial effects across the time points in the study after showing an initial spike in stress. But distraction did not alleviate stress. As the authors concluded, “failure to process the negative feelings may result in a ‘bounce back’ of negative affect compared to strategies aimed at focusing on and processing thoughts and affect” (p. 2038).
Right in the moment of the stress induction, both IER groups showed sharper increases in one of the biologically measured stress indicators. However, once the immediate stressor had passed, both IER groups declined in stress levels. Having someone to confide in right after experiencing a stressor, then, may help alleviate your body’s reaction to the event.
How to Use Rumination to Your Benefit
These findings suggest that you are best confronting stressful thoughts directly. As tempting as it may be to go anywhere but back to a memory of something that bothered you, in the long run, this type of processing can ultimately prove to be beneficial.
There is also a time and place aspect to the study. What if you don’t want to ruminate but would rather distract yourself? Maybe you’re trying a little escapism by listening to music or streaming your favorite comedy show. The UBC findings suggest that this is a perfectly good strategy, at least for the short run. Save your processing for later. Even better, if you can seek solace from someone close to you while you’re undergoing the stressor, this might put those feelings at bay until you have the chance to process things on your own
To sum up, finding your way out of a stressful experience by thinking it through can have an unexpected upside. Sharing those thoughts with a close confidante can make those benefits even more within your reach.
