The most correct thing would be to call it “rumia”, which means “action and effect of ruminating”. However, psychiatrists and psychologists prefer to call it “rumination” or “rumination”, two terms that do not appear in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. “Mental rumination”, according to experts, “is the set of ideas that persistently and recurrently dominate the patient’s mental activity; they are arranged as a ritualistic thought that includes a prediction of whose fulfillment the patient is certain, of a pessimistic, even catastrophic nature, without causing anxiety” (Juan Manuel Martín Arias). Let us replace “sick” with “any of us”, Specifically, half of Spaniards, according to the latest studies, many of them in need of anxiolytics to fall asleep. A more general definition of “mental rumination” would therefore be “a persistent pattern of negative thinking characterized by continuous reflexive and uncontrollable emotion”. What has been having negative thoughts in a loop. We all know what it is. The lights in the bedroom go out and the head begins to spin. Something similar happens when we are in the shower, where many times great ideas and inspirations come to us without looking for them. These are times when we can’t do anything else: neither look at the mobile, nor the television, nor talk to anyone… We are trapped, so to speak. And that’s when the whole brainstream overflows. The two routines against “mental rumination” In an article he himself has summarized that magic formula in two simple routines. “Your time of mental worry”Instead of letting your head explode in the middle of the night -and that causes the consequent wakefulness or the most serious insomnia-, reserve 15 minutes in the middle of the afternoon or at the end of the afternoon just for yourself. “I call it my time of emotional concern,” says the author. He recommends that no one distract us, neither the family, nor the children, it is even good to take a walk. It is time to think about what worries you or causes you anxiety. It has two advantages: the first is that there is a good chance that oneself exhausts the internal debate on the problems. The second is that if they reappear at night, you can postpone them – or place them – to your “emotional worry time” the next day. Aric Prather says that if you practice this routine two or three times a week, your nightly “mental rumination” will begin to fade. 2. “Your problem and solution list” There is another easy trick that our psychologist recommends: write on a piece of paper the list of problems that will surely assail us the next night. On that same paper we write the possible solutions, or rather, the plan on how we are going to face the resolution of those problems. They have to be practical steps, assumable, not impossible. Once this is done, Aric Prather recommends folding the paper and keeping it next to the bed. When the fearsome “mental rumination” assails us at night, we can say: I have a plan. “Some people I’ve worked with even reach out and touch the paper,” reveals the psychologist. Other advice In his book, Dr. Prather offers other tips, already more hackneyed, to promote sleep, such as not drinking coffee in the afternoon, relax doing a non-work physical or mental activity and prepare the bedroom for the night (dim the light, warm the room or pick up the clothes). The two hours before getting into bed are crucial; you have to lower the level of anxiety with pleasurable activities. But what has caught the most attention in Prather’s book has been a striking and extreme piece of advice to clear your mind in one fell swoop: stick your head in the freezer. “That brief cold snap will activate your arousal system,” he says, “like jumper cables on a car battery to wake you up, without the need for coffee.” What if you still can’t sleep? It is something that begins to occur more frequently after the age of 50: sleep becomes more fragmented. “In general, if you have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, you should get out of bed,” says the psychologist. “Give yourself 20 minutes or so to try to sleep, but if you’re still nervous, head to the couch or the living room and do something quiet, like knitting or meditating.” The idea is that it is not good for the body to associate lying down with being awake. The bed is for sleeping, it is not a psychoanalyst’s couch, he tells us. And if one has difficulty (or laziness) to get up, it is even worth placing your head where your feet were before and putting on music or a podcast that gradually returns us to a state of drowsiness. So, yes, we return to the usual position. And if we still don’t sleep, nothing happens either. “No one has died from going to school without sleeping once,” said Sabina’s song. Parents of newborns know this. The problem is only when that sleeplessness is persistent, and it already becomes fearsome insomnia.