• Posted July 8, 2026

Rumination Plays Key Role In Caregiver Stress, Study Says

Caring for a loved one with dementia can be incredibly stressful — and a great deal of that stress could be coming from caregivers second-guessing themselves, a new study says.

Caregivers who dwell on difficult problems, negative thoughts or distressing events can find their day-to-day anxieties developing into deeper stress, researchers reported recently in the journal The Gerontologist.

Mindfulness training might be able to help them break this mental cycle and better manage their stress, researchers said.

“Our hypothesis centered on rumination — that mental habit of replaying worries, going over the same difficult moments again and again without resolution,” said lead researcher Tina Savla, a professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

“We wanted to know two things: first, whether rumination is the cognitive bridge that carries anxiety into deeper distress, and second, whether training caregivers in mindfulness changes how that bridge operates,” Savla said in a news release.

For the study, researchers recruited 133 caregivers for veterans with dementia and randomly assigned them to one of two different support programs.

One program focused on problem solving, reframing negative thinking and acceptance.

The other program featured mindfulness exercises designed to address rumination.

“Caregivers of veterans living with dementia are, in many ways, a window into caregiving at its most demanding,” Savla said. “This population let us observe, in a real healthcare system with families under sustained strain, how anxiety feeds into those repetitive thought cycles and how those cycles relate to depression and stress.”

Results showed that rumination was indeed linked to both depression and stress among caregivers with higher levels of anxiety.

Further, mindfulness exercises appeared to lower levels of anxiety among caregivers, especially when provided before anxiety reaches overwhelming levels, researchers said.

“Some anxious groups can benefit from one intervention, but another group might not,” researcher Nahyun Kim, a doctoral student in human development and family science at Virginia Tech, said in a news release. “We have to consider the full context of each caregiver and provide support in a customized way.”

The research team plans to follow the caregivers over time, but added that coping skills alone can’t provide the support these folks need.

“The real future of this work is pairing psychological tools with structural relief,” Savla said, pointing to  “expanded respite benefits, caregiver leave policies, Medicare-covered caregiver training” and comprehensive care models as ways to help caregivers and ease their stress.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on caregiver burnout.

SOURCE: Virginia Tech, news release, July 6, 2026