Cognitive Defusion Helps Disarm Distressful Thoughts Befriending Our Anxiety Series

In neuropsychology, the brain and mind are often distinguished by the axiom that "the mind is what the brain does." It is estimated that we experience 6,000 or more thoughts per day. It is well documented that humans have a negativity bias in our thinking, with estimates that as much as 80% of our thoughts focus on experiences of pain or things we dislike about ourselves or the world. 

In acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive defusion is a detached mindfulness technique in which people see their thoughts as just thoughts, or mental events, rather than considering them to have intrinsic meaning. 

We are not simply a sum of our thoughts or judgments about ourselves. This technique is used to help shift perspective, to see our self as bigger than our thoughts, able to hold diverse and even distressing thoughts like "I am a failure" or "I am a bad person," without having to believe or act in accordance with these thoughts. A helpful metaphor to convey this perspective is "you are the sky, everything else is the weather." 

So how do we engage in cognitive defusion? We can defuse from our thoughts, create some space between ourselves and our thoughts, by doing the following:

• Observe our thoughts as they come and go without chasing after them or holding onto them. It can help to visualize your thoughts on clouds floating through the sky, or on leaves gently flowing down a stream.
• Ask ourselves what are the values and emotions connected to our thought? For example, if you have the distressing thought "I am a failure," the underlying value might be I value my work and achieving success, and the emotion I'm experiencing is fear of failure.
• Practice noticing thoughts. For example, if you have the thought "I'm letting my family down," you can pause and say to yourself, "I am having the thought I am letting my family down." Then say, "I am noticing I am having the thought that I'm letting my family down." Then say, "I am noticing that I am noticing that I am having the thought that I'm letting my family down." With each step in this noticing process, you create space between you and the thought, and this diminishes the impact of the thought on our feelings and actions.
• Turn your thoughts into a silly song that you sing with a silly voice over and over again. For example:
  • Every-thing-I-do turns out wrong, la la la
  • Every-thing-I-say sounds dumb, la la la
  • I'm-making-such-a-fool of myself, la la la
  • People-will-not-like-me anymore, ha ha ha 

Cognitive defusion techniques likes the ones provided above can help reduce the negative emotional impact of distressful thoughts, while also reducing avoidance of negative thoughts and the believability of the thoughts. Non-avoidance of negative thoughts helps mitigate against anxiety because we learn we can experience negative thoughts without acting on them or being strongly impacted by them. We learn over time that our thoughts are not a threat to us. Conversely, avoiding anxiety-provoking stimuli, including negative thoughts, tends to increase the negative emotional and behavioral impact of unpleasant thoughts.