Are You Reflecting or Ruminating?

Reflection often gets framed as this healthy, enlightened thing. But a lot of us were never taught the difference between reflecting and ruminating. Hi, my name is Rachel Havocost, and this month on Cadre, we're talking all about reflection, which is a lovely thing to do at the end of the year, and sometimes especially me, we can turn reflection into rumination. So let's talk about the difference. Reflection is about understanding. Rumination is about punishment. So reflection asks questions like what happened?

What did I feel? What do I want to carry forward? And what don't I? Rumination sounds more like, why am I like this? I should have known better. This is just proof that I'm failing. So reflection leads to clarity, and rumination keeps our nervous system activated. Reflection is nonjudgmental and observational. We're just looking at what happened in the facts we're Rumination tries to answer why, how come? And what can I do better? And it tries to look for meaning in what happened. The tricky part is that rumination can often disguise itself as self awareness because it feels productive.

It feels like we're being responsible. But if you leave that thought spiral feeling smaller, heavier, ashamed or bad about yourself, it's probably not reflection, it's probably rumination. So a really great way to think about this is that reflection should expand you, not shrink you. So if your reflection doesn't include compassion, it's incomplete. You are allowed to look back and learn about the past and use that as information without being cruel to yourself and attaching meaning. Wishing you all a very happy new Year and I will see you in 2026.