Therapy
If a person is brooding, it does not necessarily have to be treated. However, if he suffers from the thoughts and his life is affected by them, a doctor or a psychologist should be consulted. The importance of the compulsion to brood has increased in the therapy of mental disorders.
Brooding is seen as a symptom that occurs in many disorders and requires a very individual treatment plan. In the meantime, the management of the compulsion to brood can be set as an individual therapeutic goal in the therapy of a certain mental illness, since the tendency to brood often existed already before the illness. In the following some treatment approaches are briefly explained, whereby the possibilities are even more extensive.
The patient is informed about his or her illness. Through the knowledge that the compulsion to brood is a pathological process, the affected person gains distance to the subject of his or her thoughts. The brooding can now be increasingly viewed from the outside and can be influenced.
The distance creates free space for the patient and gives him back a piece of his lost independence. Strategies are worked out with the patient, which he can apply when the compulsion to brood occurs. Thus, by different ways the thought circling should be interrupted.
The episodes that would otherwise last for hours are thus ended after a short time, which reduces the suffering of the patient and leaves room for other, beneficial activities. By learning relaxation techniques, the tense brooding phases can be broken through or even prevented. If the affected person notices that his thoughts start to circle, he applies the techniques.
Through the relaxation of the body – and in this sense also of the mind – no concrete thought processes can form and the brooding stops. The affected person should learn to deal with negative events and thoughts. His tolerance threshold for emotional frustration should be raised.
Fewer topics are regarded as dramatic and therefore do not give any cause for brooding. The patient is instructed to think through the worries he is dealing with in the context of the compulsion to brood. He arrives at the end of the thought process and can work out solutions with the therapist.
Often the senselessness of the worry itself becomes apparent. The affected person must be encouraged again and again to accept the most probable scenario. In homeopathy there are various remedies that are supposed to help against depression.
Since a compulsion to brood is often a symptom of depression, corresponding remedies are also used here. One homeopathic remedy that is said to have a special effect on the tendency to brood is Natrium muriaticum. This is common salt, the deficiency of which is said to lead to the brooding states.
By taking Natrium muriaticum, various homeopathic aspects should be served and the condition of the person concerned improved. They are supposed to help against the tendency to brood, make the affected person more accessible to his own emotional world, stimulate the appetite and lead to a certain emotional balance.
