Some of us tend to brood over painful experiences. Others distract themselves, taking on more work, for example, or watching videos. In my experience, brooders think distractors are uninsightful people avoiding their problems (read “more troubled than I am”) and distractors think brooders are wallowing, tiresome, and way more troubled. Still worse, brooding is thought to be a female failing and distraction male (some research backs this up). The judgments fly.

Natasha Odou, at Australian National University in Canberra, and Jay Brinker, now in Hawthorn, at the Swinburne University of Technology, have set out to show empirically that there is a third, better way: introspection with “self-compassion,” which includes “self-kindness, a sense of common humanity and mindfulness.”

Their careful research found that distraction reduces negative emotions without creating positive ones. On the other hand, dwelling on an episode can send some of us deeper into a funk—unless we concentrate on self-compassion.

To explore how compassion could protect us against the bad effects of brooding, Odou and Brinker tested the effect of a 10-minute writing exercise about a painful event ( “in which you experienced failure, humiliation, rejection, embarrassment or reacted with self-criticism…”). To establish a lower-than-usual baseline for mood, everyone first listened to Prokofiev’s “Under the Mongolian Yoke” at half-speed and read 24 depressing statements in a slide-show.

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