At some level, we're all artists. Screenwriters, perhaps, is closer to it. Every minute of every day we're writing the scripts that play on the cinema screen inside our minds.

The difference from a film at the cinema is that getting hooked by the stories of our own lives means being caught by an emotion, a thought or a defensive behaviour.

Instead of watching some character's inner conflicts unfold in someone else's plot, we're the lead in the film playing inside us.

In therapy there's a name for the way out of that: cognitive defusion. And it can be learned.

The first step to getting hooked is taking thoughts as facts

The stories we tell ourselves feel true: we believe our own mind far too much.

We live in a culture that loudly endorses trusting your own logic — a culture that reveres rationalisation.

That can be positive in a great many ways, not least the advance of science and technology. But as with every coin, there's another side to it.

The prevailing culture nudges us, almost imperceptibly, into believing every thought is true. We must trust what our mind says or we'll be labelled mad, we'll feel mad, we'll be mad.

And with that fear, and that internalised demand, whatever thought shows up is treated as beyond question.

We also get it wrong, often

I recently heard a lecturer on a master's course put it something like this: if a thought is there, and it arose inside me, then I have to listen to it every time.

If it arises in me, how could I question it? But that's exactly where the difficulty lies: when I can't create a space between what arises and what I make of it. Because it's that space that helps me build a far more objective picture of what's actually happening.

In fact, many of the thoughts we have are true. And that's where it gets complicated: our mind produces so many logical arguments for believing them.

But we need to recognise — and accept — that we also get it wrong a great deal of the time.

Our thoughts are frequently illogical and don't always help us reach our goals. Sometimes they actively pull us away from what matters to us.

And that's because the fragility of life is inseparable from its beauty. Whenever we value something, moving towards it will put us in contact with certain fears and obstacles.

So we start avoiding the situations that trigger particular thoughts. Or else we grit our teeth and force ourselves to do the very thing we fear, even when it isn't something we genuinely value.

What strategies do we use to control our thoughts?

We can divide the control strategies we use to get away from painful private events — thoughts, emotions and sensations — into avoidance strategies and struggle strategies.

Avoidance-based control strategies

• Escaping or taking cover. For example, leaving a class to avoid speaking in front of other people.
• Distracting yourself. For example, bingeing a whole series until you fall asleep whenever you feel anxious, bored or worried.
• Numbing out. Using medication, drugs, sleeping excessively, or simply staring at the wall, trying to forget a thought or feeling by going numb.

Struggle-based control strategies

• Suppressing. Forcing unwanted thoughts or feelings “down deep” so you don't have to see them. The classic “it doesn't bother me”.
• Arguing. For example, if the thought arises that you're a bad person, hunting for reasons to prove to yourself that you're not.
• Taking charge. Telling yourself things like “calm down, snap out of it, you've got this” — substituting certain thoughts or emotions for more positive ones.
• Forcing. Trying to make yourself feel differently or think differently.

So we all have an internal conversation with ourselves. What we don't realise is that this conversation is often misleading and also exhausting.

The trouble with these control strategies shows up when they're overused, when they're applied to situations where they can't possibly work, or when using them means you stop doing things that genuinely matter to you.

What role does the brain play in all this?

There's a particular factor that makes us take these mental stories as facts: an area of the brain — the angular gyrus — where the different sensory centres converge (hearing, touch, vision).

There, sounds, emotions, images, symbols and gestures are integrated, and it may well be responsible for our capacity to think in metaphor.

Now, this creative capacity to blend sensations doesn't only help poets and writers arrive at striking turns of phrase. It also predisposes us to get hooked, and stay hooked, on our thoughts.

Because rather than appearing as isolated pieces of language, thoughts arrive with a whole set of accompaniments that make them particularly compelling: images, symbols, interpretations, judgements, inferences, abstractions.

That gives our mental life a vivid intensity, but it also means we often can't be genuinely objective, and that we're frequently at the mercy of certain intrusive ideas.

The nature of cognitive processing

What's more, our cognitive processing — vivid, technicolour by nature — arrives mixed with our emotions and is amplified by them: an evolutionary adaptation that was extremely useful in its time.

Think about the kind of responses our ancestors needed in order to stay alive: they had to feel danger viscerally. They had to grasp the meaning of what was happening in a way that led rapidly to a response.

Our brain is built to read danger signals and respond automatically with flight, fight or freeze.

Today, most of the problems and dangers we face are vague or long-term threats: we no longer think “aaah, a snake!”, but “is my job secure?” or “is this relationship taking me where I want to go?”.

And yet our brain still responds to those threats with the same intensity it once reserved for a leopard.

How to unhook from our thoughts: cognitive defusion

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy we use the term fusion to describe getting hooked by our painful private events, and we work on cognitive defusion to unhook from them.

The first thing to understand is precisely that thoughts often aren't true, and that what we can sometimes do with them is put them to the test.

Start by asking yourself: is this that I'm thinking actually true? What evidence do I have for it?

Then try to recall examples of situations where you had a thought and believed it, but later realised or found out that you'd been wrong.

This may seem simple or even obvious — the idea that we can be wrong and that not everything we think is true — but it is far less obvious than it looks when you feel fused, hooked by your thoughts.

Of course, on the many occasions when we don't feel fused, we're perfectly able to question our own thoughts and to check with someone, or with some source, whatever error we might be holding.

We need an “aha moment”

But when we feel fused, we first need the “aha moment”: noticing that we're going round and round the same thing. From there we can use a few strategies that work more like games we play with our own mind:

• Sing your thought to the tune of “Happy Birthday”.
• Give it the voice of someone famous or a cartoon character.
• Write a title for a story you tend to repeat to yourself. The tale of “I'll never get what I want” could be titled “The Woman Who Never Got Anything She Wanted”.
• Name your thoughts like a radio station, for instance: “Nothing Matters FM”.

Then there are other, less playful but equally effective strategies, such as saying to yourself: “I'm having the thought that…”.

That immediately puts distance between you as the container of the contents that appear in your mind, and those contents themselves.

If there's someone who can observe them, that observing self cannot be the same thing as what is observed.

Living this experientially, first-hand, is genuinely powerful, and it's a process that Mindfulness makes far easier.

But what exactly is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the ability to pay attention in the present moment, without judgement and with curiosity, to whatever is here — especially our mental content and the sensations of our body, which we're often quite disconnected from.

The simple act of paying attention creates the space between thought and action that we need in order to be sure we're acting from our own will rather than from a habit on autopilot.

Formal practice. It's the one we know from those photographs: a person sitting in a steady posture, eyes closed, apparently not having a single thought (I promise you they're having thousands, but they may have learned to let them pass). It's a stretch of time in which you do nothing but be in the present moment, without getting tangled up in whatever arises. You move your attention across different anchors — your breath, the sounds around you, physical sensations — observing thoughts and moods without judging them.

Informal practice. This is about learning to live more consciously and less on autopilot. It means approaching everyday activities in a particular way. The more attentive you are to your experience from a stance of complete openness, without struggle and without judgement, the better equipped you feel to face life and stressful situations, and to enjoy each moment.

Therapeutic writing

Conscious writing is another tool that may serve you, and it can be great fun too. Keeping a journal to record your experiences, your emotional content and the thoughts that weigh on you — ordering them, releasing them and leaving them there — can be genuinely revealing.

James Pennebaker — a leading researcher on the relationship between writing and emotional processing — found across all his studies that people who wrote about emotionally charged episodes experienced a marked improvement in their physical and emotional wellbeing.

Pennebaker's writing rules

“Set an alarm for twenty minutes. Open your notebook or create a new document. When the time starts, begin writing about the emotional experiences you've had in the last week, the last month or the last year. Don't worry about punctuation, spelling or coherence. Just go wherever your mind takes you, with curiosity and without judging yourself. Write only for yourself and not for any possible reader. Do this for a few days. Then throw the paper away or close the document without saving it. Or, if you're ready for it, start writing a blog or find a literary agent; it doesn't matter. What matters is that these thoughts are no longer inside you and are now on the page. You've begun the process of ‘distancing' yourself from your experience in order to gain perspective on it.”

Taking distance and creating space

Only when we step back from our private events can we see that there may have been more than one way of approaching a situation. And in order to live with meaning and intention, that wider view is essential.

Writing is an excellent tool for widening our point of view and making us more sensitive to context. However certain we may feel about the best course of action, the world keeps changing and circumstances are unpredictable.

When we choose to explore the world inside and outside us with curiosity, we can make decisions with greater flexibility, based on what matters to us and on who we want to be.

You can have the thought that you're a fraud, notice it, and then decide to set it aside, because what matters most is making a meaningful contribution to the meeting you're in.

Or you can accept your fierce craving for a slice of cake, observe the thought that you want to serve yourself a piece, and then choose not to reach for it.

Doing this isn't the same as repressing your emotions or thoughts, because you're neither ignoring nor denying them. You're simply noticing your internal reaction with curiosity, and the information it gives you, without letting it make decisions on your behalf.

Techniques for stepping back from your thoughts

Finally, I want to share five concrete techniques for practising cognitive defusion and taking distance from your thoughts. Each one is as good as the next — but each person finds one works better than another. It's up to you to try them and see which ones you keep.

This last technique is, in fact, the one I use most to create distance. It's easy to apply on the fly, or in the middle of a difficult conversation.

Remember that it's up to you to try them and see which ones you keep. And if you feel like it, I'd love to hear which one helped you most and in what context you used it.

Writing it down and sharing it will help you consolidate the practice and make it part of your life. I hope they serve you well.

With love,
Katu.

Katia Rosenbaum

Clinical psychologist · licence No. 33475 (COPC) · MSc in Neuropsychology (UCL) · About