Repetitive negative thinking is associated with cognitive function decline
29 comments
·September 14, 2025notmyjob
“The prevalence of cognitive disorders is increasing year by year, placing a heavy burden on patients, families, and society. It is estimated that the total annual cost of dementia disease in China will reach $1.89 trillion in 2050 [4]. However, there is no drug that can stop or reverse the progression of dementia.”
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
adamwong246
It's common for old fogies to claim that the future is bad and the past was best. But I don't remember a time in my life that was this stressful. I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff. Everybody wants to escape the real world and live through their screens. Nothing is real and everything is a meme. And the fact that we allowed DJT to even approach the White House is such a damning indictment of America and it's vaunted democracy. The bad guys won, and there's no clear way to change that.
shortcord
+100 million people died in war in the 20th century. Not to mention preventable famines, etc.
Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.
hackable_sand
And here I am in camp "it's always been this way".
All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.
notmyjob
For many nations, DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened, by a wide indisputable margin. Not all nations, but some.
CamperBob2
Absolutely. Putin's regime has certainly benefited enormously.
nradov
This is unironically the best time to be alive. The problem is that most people are ignorant of real history and don't realize how much life used to suck. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.
an0malous
Most would agree the 21st century is better than the 16th century, but is 2025 better than 2019?
adamwong246
Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.
kcoddington
I'm not seeing where they are coming up with RNT as a cause, other than a lot of theory. Wouldn't it be a symptom of cognitive decline instead? Dementia patients, particularly those with Alzheimers, tend to become depressed because of confusion and memory loss. Wouldn't it be more likely that these depression symptoms are being caused by deteriotating brain function rather than the other way around?
giantg2
I believe there have been other studies showing people with a history of depression develop dementia at higher rates. There are some that have shown the structural/signal changes that happen after longterm depression as well. These are things that occur years or decades before the dementia.
IAmBroom
They don't claim it's a cause. In fact, they explicitly state more research is needed to determine the relationship.
pessimizer
Of course. It would be bizarre if there weren't a relationship between Lewy Body dementia, Alzheimer's, or vascular dementia (which in old people, means you've gone into heart failure) and repetitive negative thoughts. For one, you know you've got an incurable disease that will inevitably destroy your mind, and you've become one of the rare class of people for which assisted suicide has almost no controversy, it's something you're putting down payments on. For two, you can't finish thoughts.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
It just seems like a silly study.
rzzzt
In... mice? Nay, this time it is adults over the age of 60.
null
cowpig
> RNT was assessed using the perseverative thinking questionnaire (PTQ). The scale consists of 15 items covering three domains: core characteristics of RNT, unproductiveness, and psychological capacity captured. Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0 “never” to 4 “almost always”, with a total score ranging from 0 to 60.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
dimensional_dan
Oh man one more negative thing to worry about.
sindriava
10/10 exactly what people with these issues want to hear. Great thing to post OP!
geoduck14
Can't people with these type of issues control what they think about?
Can't they have a go-to list of positive things to think about when they notice they are thinking negative thoughts?
lokar
Don’t some religious seekers spend a lifetime trying to control what they think about (or don’t)?
null
notmyjob
No, but you can think less by reducing your cognitive ability through say drugs and alcohol. Notice how the happiest boomers guzzle the wine and don’t have as many (negative) thoughts.
jerkstate
Unfortunately, alcohol use is also linked to dementia.
fwip
It's not quite as simple as that, but what you describe has some relation to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Part of CBT involves recognizing when you're ruminating/spiraling in thought patterns that you want to avoid, and strategies to redirect and break that loop.
StefanBatory
/r/thanksiamcured
IAmBroom
Short answer: no, you can't just "think positive" your way out of mental illness.
Also: Correlation is not causation; we don't know that avoiding these RNTs changes anything in the brain chemistry.
throwaway77385
The only thing I'd add to this (as someone with stupidly depressive and negative thought patterns), is that there are techniques that can help.
The parent comment comes off as flippant, but I am going to assume it's not intended that way.
Learning to think more positively takes an incredible amount of effort. An effort which seemingly never goes away. It just never gets easier. It's like my brain is simply wired to assume the worst, worry and of course just constantly make suicide seem like some kind of great way out. So much so, that when I was younger, I had assumed everyone just walked around constantly wondering whether it'd be easier to just die.
To this day, that's where my brain goes first. Decades of nearly daily thoughts of ending it. BUT and this is the crucial part, to me that was just always part of the noise. It's there, but it's not forcing my hand. I can both live and also constantly think that I don't particularly enjoy just existing for existence's sake and therefore death sort of seems like a viable alternative. I don't act upon it, because I'm too curious to see what's next, for the time being.
Anyway, the techniques that people are often taught in therapy sound simple and obvious, but they are harder to do than one might assume. Especially for people deep in depression.
Gratitude journaling is one of those things. It is quite boring and tedious to write down what one is grateful for in life. To write down every single good thing that happened in a day, no matter how small.
BUT, it sort of forces you onto a track of positive thought. It literally blocks / occupies thought, because it takes effort to do and focuses the mind on the positive, even if for a short period of time.
Similarly, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile. There is some feedback loop between pretending to be happy and then sort of feeling a bit happier all of a sudden. Doesn't always work, won't work for everyone and deep clinical depressions are a whole different ballgame.
Exercise is a pretty big one for me as well. As much as I hate it, I always feel better afterwards.
Again, the sum of various small techniques can eventually make a bit of a difference.
I've come to terms with the fact that depression is hard-wired into my brain structure and it's not going anywhere. But, I have also made a ton of new pathways that allow me to more quickly switch into more positive and grateful modes of thinking. And this, in some ways, is like a list of positive things to think, like the parent comment alluded to.
Though without all of the above, I'd also take offense at the implication that depressed people can somehow choose to be depressed and need to just stop being depressed. That notion is ridiculous and has prevailed for (what feels like) centuries of ignorance of mental conditions.
IAmBroom
So, hide the lamp under the basket because you don't want to see it?
I have a personal theory (I'm sure it's not a novel one and it probably has a name) that human brains are naturally predisposed to negative thought than positive thought because our brains are essentially evolved prediction engines. And because it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it (e.g. it is usually less urgent to act on the signs of deer you might want to hunt and eat, than the sign of a tiger who might want to hunt and eat you), our prediction engines have a bias toward negative prediction. Conscious awareness of this fact (or rather, theory) has helped me curb negative thoughts at least to some extent.