The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - On the Dangers of Ruminative Thoughts (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_983)

00:00:00.000 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Back in 2006, I published a paper in a medical journal titled

00:00:10.820 Medical Hypotheses, where I was arguing that various sex-specific forms of OCD, obsessive

00:00:19.960 compulsive disorder, happen in their particular ways because they're a misfiring of an otherwise

00:00:27.080 adaptive process that are very much sex specific and this is very much the mechanism that i use

00:00:36.420 to explain how we go from adaptive empathy to suicidal empathy which please i hope that you

00:00:42.940 go out and pre-order a copy today in less than five weeks in four and a half weeks it'll be

00:00:48.380 released but it's really important to pre-order so i will put a link to uh to to pre-order the

00:00:56.220 book in the description section. In any case, in the book, in the paper in question, I was talking

00:01:02.400 about various forms of OCD, one of which is what's called ruminative thinking. So instead of

00:01:11.000 imagining that you suffer from germ contamination fear, where you then obsessively will wash your

00:01:18.980 hands because you can't extricate yourself from the infinite loop of, oh, what if my hands are

00:01:24.560 still dirty. Another form of infinite loop is that instead of the germ being on your hands,

00:01:30.900 it's typically a negative thought that becomes ruminative and that you can't get yourself out

00:01:37.900 of. And then there are different strategies that OCD sufferers of ruminative thinking will engage

00:01:43.720 in. They might go back and try to ask people to alleviate that anxiety or that anxiety-inducing

00:01:53.440 pattern of ruminative thinking. Now, why am I saying all this? Because this past weekend, I

00:01:59.900 went to the movies with my family where we saw a movie where a form of ruminative thinking arises,

00:02:08.880 not because the protagonist suffers from OCD, but because once that person hears of a certain

00:02:17.760 In reality, they simply can no longer think about anything else.

00:02:23.360 They're fixated on that.

00:02:24.500 I won't tell you what, I'll tell you the movie, but I won't tell you, so I don't give you

00:02:30.800 a spoiler, you know, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's the movie, The Drama,

00:02:35.020 which came out, I think, last week.

00:02:38.620 Young, happily engaged couple about to get married, sitting around, and then they share

00:02:44.440 with one another, with a couple of friends.

00:02:46.480 what's the worst thing that they've ever done

00:02:48.920 and then the fiancé, the girl, the woman

00:02:52.120 shares something that she almost did in high school

00:02:57.260 that then causes the guy to go into a tailspin

00:03:02.220 he simply cannot extricate himself out of that thought

00:03:06.980 and then all kinds of bad things happen

00:03:09.840 but at the end, again, I don't want to do spoiler alert

00:03:14.200 you see when you talk about love is humble love is forgiving and so on so watch it but the point

00:03:21.260 here is that I'm linking OCD based ruminative thinking with the ruminative thinking in this guy

00:03:27.620 in the movie where once he learned something about his wife to be even if it happened many

00:03:34.040 years ago he simply can't wash that thought away and then I want to link it to one of my

00:03:41.520 prized possessions in my collection, very large personal library. This is the gift that my family

00:03:49.960 gave me on my last birthday, my previous birthday. It's a first edition, English edition, of

00:03:59.640 Arthur Schnitzler's classic novella, which then resulted in Stanley Kubrick purchasing the rights

00:04:08.340 of the novella and then resulting in the movie in the late 1990s Eyes Wide Shut. Eyes Wide Shut

00:04:14.360 was based on this beauty right here. You don't know how much I love this book. Anyways so why

00:04:23.320 am I saying this? Because the main gist of that movie is another form of ruminative thinking

00:04:31.160 whereby once the husband and wife decide to go down the very dangerous path of sharing

00:04:39.860 sexual fantasies and once the wife shares with her husband what her sexual fantasies were and now

00:04:48.080 that is ingrained in his mind all sorts of bad things can happen and of course there's a very

00:04:53.860 clear evolutionary story here. So here, I started off by talking about ruminative thinking as a form

00:05:02.660 of OCD instantiation. I gave you an example in a film where the guy, once he hears something about

00:05:11.800 his wife-to-be, he can't extricate himself from that repetitively intrusive thought, and then

00:05:17.800 linked it back to a novella written a hundred years ago by a Austrian psychiatrist Arthur

00:05:25.900 Schnitzler so there you go people one of the things that we love so much about literature

00:05:30.820 about films and so on is because if they are powerful cultural products that usually is

00:05:38.220 because it speaks to a universal window to our human nature take care everybody cheers

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 10, 2026

On the Dangers of Ruminative Thoughts (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_983)

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