RECOGNIZING THE NEGATIVE THOUGHT
“There’s that thought about the sky falling again,” you say to yourself. Are you playing a character out of your favorite childhood fable? No, you are practicing COGNITIVE DEFUSION. If you remember from last month’s blog, naming the thought is step 2 in the cognitive defusion process. Cognitive Defusion is a way of externalizing anxious thoughts to take the power out of them and relieve the anxiety that the unnecessarily cause. RECOGNIZING THE NEGATIVE THOUGHT is the first step.
You may suddenly feel off or sad or maybe you will feel nauseous. These are indicators that you are actually having negative or distressing thoughts that you might not be aware of. After you have recognized that you are having distress and named it, again by saying something like, “I recognize this thought as the sky is falling,” you will then move on to step 3.
Step 3, IDENTIFY ITS IMPACT, goes something like, “This thought usually makes me feel afraid.” In other words, how does the thought make you feel?
Step 4: Here’s where this whole thing goes a bit sillier than a children’s bedtime story. Create some space between yourself and the anxious thought. There are several possibilities with this, as well as, anything you might come up with.
Here are some ideas:
Put your thoughts on an imaginary train and watch them choo choo away into thin air or you can do the same with drifting on a cloud… there they go, go, go….
You can sing the anxious thought until it is no longer distressing at all. Maybe to the tune of twinkle twinkle little star, “I’m afraid the sky is falling, how I wonder why it’s falling, lalala!”
A funny voice is a great way to take the serious nature out of an anxious thought, so repeat it as much as possible in your best Donald Duck or Donald Trump!
Repeating an anxious thought over and over again really does start to make the words sound different and much less threatening any way you say them, so give that one a try too!
And finally, you could give a big push to the anxious thought so that you can begin to create space between yourself and the thought. Imagine the words and as you push them away, they become smaller and smaller and the thought becomes weaker and weaker!
Finally, step 5, consider what the thought might mean ASIDE FROM ITS LITERAL CONTENT: maybe you are actually just afraid of what tomorrow brings, maybe you have always been leery of storms, maybe you’re just tired or stressed. It is possible that the content of the sky falling isn’t really what’s causing your anxiety today. Thoughts aren’t necessarily the truth.
COGNITIVE DEFUSION can really work on those anxious/obsessive thoughts! Give it a try the next time your brain wants you to believe something that causes unnecessary anxiety!!
