By Michael Rodriguez, PsyD
Throughout the day, for all of the days of your life for as long as you can remember, you have been thinking. If you are awake, it is likely that you are thinking about something.
For most people, much of the time, this is a helpful thing. Our ability to think — to represent ideas, concepts, symbols, plans, memories, evaluations, and similar phenomena in our minds — provides us with a distinct advantage over ourselves and our environments. If you can’t plan, you can’t figure out what groceries you will need for dinner later. If you don’t have the ability to remember the route to the store, you won’t be able to get there. If you can’t evaluate the content of your fridge, you won’t understand that being out of onions means that you need to buy vegetables for your soup.
Thinking, however, does have some downsides. Those same capacities that allow us to represent aspects of the world in our minds can lead us astray. Sometimes we will think things that aren’t true, and sometimes the content of our thoughts can be distressing. Unfortunately, emotional distress is likely to cause you to stay attached to your thoughts, to get caught up in them, and to consider them as reflecting true facts about the world.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) describes this process of being attached to our thoughts as “cognitive fusion.” When we’re experiencing cognitive fusion, our thoughts become our reality. We become likely to treat the thought “I’m an absolute idiot” in the same way that we would treat the thought “I’m out of onions,” which is to say we treat them both as valid information about the world.
A good indication that you are in a state of cognitive fusion is if you find your mind running in circles, either with worries, rumination, or self-directed insults. In order to break the vicious cycle of these kinds of fused thoughts, it can be helpful to practice cognitive defusion techniques.
Cognitive defusion is about looking at thoughts rather than looking from them, and about noticing thoughts rather than buying into them.
There are a number of different types of cognitive defusion techniques you can use to get some distance from your thoughts in an effort to regulate your emotions and act effectively. The following script is one guide you might use to practice cognitive defusion.
Cognitive Defusion Exercise:
Pick one thought that has been running through your mind recently that has been causing you distress. Try to distill whatever the thought is down to a single sentence. Notice how that thought makes you feel.
Focus your mind on that thought, that sentence. Say it to yourself, in your mind, three times in a row.
Now, instead of thinking it to yourself, imagine it written down in front of you.
How did you imagine it? Notice the font you chose. Notice the colors. Is it handwriting? Is it typed? Is it black font on a white background, or something else?
Change the font. Imagine the sentence in Helvetica. Now change it again, to Times New Roman. Change it again, to a gothic font. Now to a handwriting script. Pick a few words in the sentence, and make them bolded. Now italicize the other words.
Change the color of the font. Make it appear to be red letters on a black background. Now blue letters on a red background. Make every letter a different color.
Change the size of the letters. Blow them up to be hundreds of feet tall in comparison to you. Now shrink them down, so they could fit in the palm of your hand.
Change it back to a standard typewritten font, in a readable size. Read the words in front of you. Notice, who did the voice that read the words sound like? Was it your own voice?
Read the thought again, but change the voice. Imagine it is Mickey Mouse reading the thought to you. Now Bugs Bunny. Again, but now it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Again, but now it’s Tina Fey. Pick another recognizable voice, and hear them read the thought to you.
Now attend to the feeling you have with this thought. How upsetting is it now, in comparison to before you began the exercise?
