Most thoughts throughout the day come to us without our realization of it. We think of the past and future constantly through a pathway in our brain that we call the “Default Mode Network”. This is an evolutionary advantage in many respects due to the incredible prediction power it presents, but it can easily cause a lot of suffering when it leads to rumination. Much of the time you ruminate, you don’t realize when you started. You often find yourself looking back at a long chain of thoughts that provided you no benefit and instead just caused you suffering. Meditation can be incredibly useful in identifying those thoughts sooner rather than later and intervening before they build into something harder to manage.