Grace Ogren didn’t realize she was depressed until she started thinking about suicide.
“It just kinda layered over time, and it got really hard to see how far down I had gone,” she told The Epoch Times.
This layering of thought isn’t unusual—it’s a default mental state known as self-focus. Defined as a tendency to pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and plans, self-focus can hurt our mental health if we dwell on gloomy thoughts, experiences, and emotions.
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests scientists may be getting closer to spotting the warning signs earlier. Researchers at Columbia University identified a unique brain pattern, which they call the “pre-self pattern,” that appears just before the brain shifts into an active pattern of self-focus. The study’s authors hypothesize that detecting and recognizing this pattern could help predict a tendency toward negative thought patterns and enable mental health professionals to better serve the millions of people who struggle with mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety.
Since self-focused thinking involves a complex combination of neurological, genetic, and environmental factors, predicting mental health risks through brain activity alone is challenging. A more effective approach may be to examine our own thinking and take proactive steps to reframe our views of the world.
Not All Internal Thinking Is the Same
Before diving into brain patterns, it’s important to distinguish between different types of internal mental processes.
Self-reflection or introspection—the deliberate examination of one’s character, actions, and motives—is a thoughtful process that helps us grow emotionally and spiritually.
Self-focus, however, is a more automatic tendency to pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and plans. It can be neutral or even positive, but it becomes problematic when it turns into rumination.
Maladaptive self-focus, or rumination, involves repetitively dwelling on negative thoughts, past mistakes, and perceived failures. This is the point where mental health risks emerge.
The distinction matters because healthy self-reflection strengthens us, while maladaptive self-focus can trap us in cycles of depression and anxiety.
Mapping the Brain: An Emerging Area of Research
Researchers Meghan L. Meyer and Danika Geisler of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, who conducted the study, set out to find specific brain patterns for self-focused thinking and, in the process, discovered the “pre-self pattern” on a brain scan. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology—a type of scan that can detect activity in different areas of the brain—to observe what happened in the brain during moments of rest when the study’s 32 participants weren’t focused on any particular task.
What they found was a distinct pattern that appeared just seconds before the brain shifted into full self-focus: the “pre-self pattern.” Comparing these results with publicly available data from the Human Connectome Project—an ongoing series of studies exploring connections in the human brain—showed that the brains of people who tend to hide or push down their emotions and problems also move in and out of the pre-self pattern when at rest.
Because internalizing—a maladaptive form of self-focus—is associated with cycles of negative thought, the authors hypothesized that the pre-self pattern could potentially be used to predict whether self-focused thought will lead to depression or anxiety.
However, this discovery remains in the preliminary stages of research. While scientists are working to map these brain patterns, mental health professionals already have proven methods to identify harmful thought patterns and effective treatments to address them, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy, which has a strong track record of helping people break free from cycles of negative thinking.
Self-Focus: The Positive and Negative
Experts say mental health outcomes depend on the type of self-focused thinking we engage in.
“Self-focused thinking can be a useful tool for emotional growth,” Jan Miller, a licensed psychologist with Thriveworks, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Known as adaptive self-focus, this type involves evaluating our behaviors, environment, and experiences so we can learn to respond better over time.
Negative, or maladaptive, self-focus, on the other hand, can be harmful.
“Maladaptive self-focus includes rumination on perceived or real past mistakes, self-criticism, personalization—attributing negative outcomes to you even if there is no connection—and catastrophizing that ‘everything will go wrong,'” Miller said.
Rather than leading us to find a solution to our problems, maladaptive self-focus pulls us into a cycle of negativity, which Amy Serin, a stress expert, neuropsychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychology, and director of neuropsychology at Horizon Recovery, calls a “doom loop.”
“When we get into the rumination and the worry and the negative self-talk, then it can actually reinforce connectivity in the brain that can make us worse and worse over time,” she told The Epoch Times.
For Ogren, this default negative mental state was all too familiar. She was 13 when she began to notice something different about the way she related to the world after her family moved.
“My siblings were going through the same stuff, and the way that I handled it was much different,” she recalled.
For her, the depressed thoughts felt “normal.”
“I would think, ‘This isn’t going to get better.’ That thought would come, and then I would usually try to go find evidence for it,” she said. “And that would lead me into darker places and then feed the cycle.”
What Happens in the Self-Focused Brain
Connections related to self-focus occur in several areas of the brain, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). The ACC is involved in self-focused activities such as making decisions and processing emotions, while the PCC is associated with our memories and internal thoughts.
The ACC helps us remember and track our experiences and use what we learn to predict the outcomes of our actions, James Hyman, a neuroscientist with a doctorate in psychology and associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, told The Epoch Times. When we get a result that doesn’t match past experiences, our brains are supposed to use the feedback to adjust our future responses.
However, this process, known as prediction error processing, goes “a little haywire” in depression so that the brain reacts more strongly to unpleasant outcomes, Hyman said. Instead of adapting to difficult circumstances, someone with depression may begin to believe that his or her experiences will always be negative.
That’s where a third part of the brain, the default mode network (DMN), may play a role in depression and anxiety.
The DMN comprises multiple interconnected areas of the brain that automatically activate during periods of rest and quiet wakefulness. When the brain is not focused on anything specific, the DMN switches on and directs one’s attention toward internally focused thought processes such as daydreaming, mind-wandering, recalling personal experiences, envisioning the future, and reflecting on feelings and social interactions.
Some research shows that activity in the DMN is altered in people with depression. Specifically, connections between the areas of the brain that make up the DMN appear to be higher than normal, which could explain why the DMN has been shown to play an active role in rumination.
“Rumination breeds rumination within the brain,” Hyman said.
So when the brain overreacts to negative experiences, as it does in depression, default thoughts get darker and darker over time. When a pattern of ruminating is developed, we’re more likely to default to maladaptive self-focus and get stuck in a doom loop.
These coordinated patterns, known as functional connectivity, show up on MRIs as areas of increased blood flow, indicating simultaneous activity in several parts of the brain. Areas that are frequently active together are more likely to form connections.
However, based on current brain science, it’s difficult to determine exactly why some people are more prone to developing these maladaptive patterns than others.
Can Brain Patterns Predict Mental Illness?
The Columbia study raises a possibility: Could detecting the pre-self pattern help identify people at risk for depression or anxiety before symptoms emerge?
“It’s almost the unattainable thing,” Hyman said, adding that while some research showing similarities between brain patterns in parents and children could suggest genetic links, she hasn’t seen “any good work that’s tried to dissociate that from environment.”
Janel Coleman, a licensed master social worker and psychotherapist, prefers to use factors outside the brain to evaluate her clients’ mental health risks, such as whether they have strong social support from family, friends, or community.
“If they often spend time alone, there is more of a risk to be in those maladaptive thought patterns because you don’t have people who can say to you, like, ‘Congrats on this thing’ and lift you up,” she told The Epoch Times.
Serin said that while predicting mental health conditions may be difficult, it’s possible to evaluate existing patterns of rumination to predict where negative thoughts will lead and how they will affect a person’s life if allowed to continue without intervention.
Breaking Free From Negative Self-Focus
Whether or not brain scans can predict depression, experts agree that recognizing and interrupting negative thought patterns is crucial for mental health.
Katy Parker discovered this after she was unexpectedly struck by a coworker’s car. In an instant, she went from a life of travel to being hospital-bound and dependent on her husband. She developed severe anxiety and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Being unable to work or care for herself left Parker feeling hopeless and depressed.
“I was thinking: ‘If I give up this work, what else do I have? I’m not worthy anymore,'” she told The Epoch Times.
As a Christian, she believed that God had called her to serve through her job, so she thought, “If I leave this, I disappoint him; I disappoint others.”
The struggle led her to the point of suicidal thoughts.
“But I didn’t really want to die,” she said. “I didn’t want it—the life I had then.”
It took her a long time to ask for help, but once she found the right support, Parker learned a cognitive behavioral therapy method called the downward arrow technique that helped her identify faulty core beliefs behind her maladaptive thought patterns.
One key insight came when she found herself struggling at the gym during her recovery. She left the session feeling “stupid” and like she couldn’t “do anything,” and her therapist used the technique to help her trace the thought pattern back to childhood.
“We came to this core belief that I’m stupid, and that’s from—somebody told me this when I was a child,” Parker said.
She learned to reframe her experience and see that she was doing the best she could at that point in her recovery. Over time, she combined the downward arrow technique with her Christian beliefs and used evidence from the Bible to help disprove other core assumptions. Today, she works as a trauma-informed well-being writer, grief and loss coach, and mental health mentor.
For Ogren, who is now a writer and researcher at Recovery.com, a similar process of “checking the facts” helped her shift from validating her negative self-focused thoughts to proving them wrong.
“I went and just started very small, looking for one reason or something why [a thought] wasn’t true or why it didn’t need to be,” she said.
Practical Steps
Anyone can use these techniques to start overcoming maladaptive mental patterns.
Coleman suggests keeping a thought record to reveal where our minds tend to go during moments of internal focus. Then we can engage in genuine self-reflection—thoughtful examination of our character and motives—by using questions such as “What does this say about me?” and “How true does this feel for me?” to reveal and reframe our own core beliefs.
Hyman said that we can also pay attention to what we say about ourselves. He said that the ACC monitors speech, and when we refer to ourselves negatively, our brains respond as if someone else were saying bad things about us. However, he added, “if we do the opposite, it should have just as good of an effect” as if another person is praising or encouraging us.
That may be one reason why a support network is so important for breaking free from maladaptive thinking. As Coleman noted, having people around us who can say positive things and point us toward the truth can help us avoid falling into depressed or anxious patterns.
Ogren found this support from a therapist, her parents, and her church.
“I feel like they are the propellers, and they got me moving in a sense,” she said. “Someone believed I could get better, and it was basically all of them, and that really helped.”
