Your Thoughts are Making You Anxious. Now What?

Two ways of relating to thoughts

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) talks about two ways of relating to thoughts. We can either be fused with them, or we can be defused (de-fused). Fusion with thoughts is best seen as a kind of entanglement, clinging. We believe the thoughts we are fused with; we think of them as being true, obvious, at least in the moment when they are present in our minds.

We don’t look at all thoughts as truths a priori. If you’ve ever meditated for more than five minutes, you may have noticed that your mind produces thoughts in enormous quantities. We have thoughts about all kinds of things and a good number of them is patently absurd. I don’t know about you, but I often laugh at the weirdness of my own thoughts.

We can’t laugh at all of them, however.

The difficult thoughts

There are some thoughts that, as soon as they pop up in our consciousness, we zoom in on and the more we look at them the more real they seem, and in the blink of an eye, you start feeling uncomfortable, anxious – even panicked!

You may try to distract yourself so that you don’t sink into complete panic, and if you come back to these thoughts later on, you may have a more skeptical, critical approach to them: hindsight is always 20/20. What once seemed like absolute reality, now looks like a joke.

Meditation teachers often say that we shouldn’t believe everything we think, and this is the path that ACT takes. Through ACT and other mindfulness approaches, we learn to defuse thoughts, or put more plainly – to unglue ourselves from them.

The mandatory part where constructivism comes in and saves the day

Personal construct psychology (PCP offers an even more radical approach than ACT. Whereas the word radical isn’t always good, here it is. It’s not just some thoughts that we are fused with and then need to proceed with defusion, it’s that all our knowledge in general is hypothetical in nature and shouldn’t be confused with truth or reality, no matter how much convincing evidence we have. Our thoughts are nothing but assumptions based on other assumptions and interpretation of evidence based on – you guessed it! – more assumptions!

Constructivism teaches us to be skeptics, in the truest sense of the word. Use thoughts as tools, but don’t get too attached to them. A tool that is useful and sharp today, may be blunt and dangerous tomorrow!

Fused  & Anxious – my future book title

Can constructivism help us understand why we end up fused and anxious (I’ll copyright this – sounds like a good book title!) in some cases, but not all the time?

Clearly, the answer is yes.

Constructivist theory would tell us to look at threat and fear as possible causes.

Thoughts that threaten us are those thoughts that align with our biggest taboos. If a  thought is true, you might as well re-think who you are as a person. Throw your carefully curated identity out the window and start again from scratch. When thoughts come close to such vulnerable spots, we tend to immediately assume they’re true and once we make that assumption, anxiety ensues. We assume they are true, because we must never allow the outcome they imply: you simply have to safe your identity, it’s who you are.

In defense of threat and fears, they are protective mechanisms. Misguided and perhaps unnecessary at times, but still protective. It may sound like a preposterous idea, but anxiety, threat and fear protect us and point us towards danger – perhaps real, perhaps imaginary, but hey, no mechanism is perfect! – and where there’s danger, psychologically speaking, that’s the best place to build and develop. In constructivism, we see every bad emotion as a potential new start, a path for significant self-improvement.

Easier said than done, I know.

Changing our relationship with difficult thoughts

By changing how we approach anxiety-inducing thoughts, we can deal with quite a few items from our collection of anxieties.

The goal is never to get rid of anxiety altogether. If you set that as your goal, you are very likely going to fail at it. And I’m not saying this because there’s something wrong with you and then you can’t count on anxiety-free living, but because anxiety, just like sadness, anger, guilt, but also joy and love is just a normal part of life. In fact, if I look at it from a constructivist perspective, because of how we organize our experience, without feeling anxiety sometimes, there’s really no calm either. They are inextricably tied. The goal is to get rid of too much anxiety, and build tolerance to the rest.

What is this shift I am talking about, what is that mysterious “defusion”?

Defusion is the process by which we “unglue” ourselves from our thoughts, allow them to come and go instead of seeing them as horrible truths about who we really are.

ACT gives us two directions. We can achieve this by taking a step back and observing the content of our minds without clinging (the mindful approach), and perhaps admiring the creative mess that our minds usually are. Another approach is “deliteralizing” language: learning to see language as a succession of sounds and syllables, a sack of metaphors at best. As a consequence, our thoughts are no longer truths, but combinations of utterances that we don’t have to take as seriously.

As a constructivist, I would say that both of these are the same: we achieve defusion once we learn to interpret our present moment experience as being hypothetical in nature. I feel anxious and understand it as a hypothesis expressed with sensations instead of words. I have a thought about failing and understand this as a hypothesis that the outcome of what I do might lead to failure. A hypothesis is not truth. And second of all, when you encounter a hypothesis in science you ask yourself: is this useful? Is this testable? Unless the answer is yes to both, there’s no need to entertain them further.

Beyond the intellectual

On one hand, there’s the intellectual insight which is great to have but never quite sufficient. If you’ve been struggling with anxiety, you know how little power our intellect has when it comes to our psyche. You can have all the insights in the world, understand all the fancy constructivist theory, read all the books and still be as anxious as you were on the first day.

What we need is to embody insights experientially.

I propose that we understand embodiment as two distinct things in this case. First, that means that you’re mindful enough to remember the insight when your experience calls for it. When difficult thoughts come about, you bring to mind the fact that they are just hypotheses and not reality. Second, you use a defusion technique to demonstrate that insight, to create a new kind of experience. And with repetition, this new kind of experience is reinforced and it slowly, very slowly, becomes your new normal.

This is a process. It’s like having a plant that you have to water every day. It grows at its own speed, but you have to water it regularly nonetheless, not just when it grows a new leaf. Patience and self-compassion are your friends on this journey!

Defusion techniques

Here are a few simple and easy defusion techniques. Don’t be fooled by their perceived simplicity – re-training yourself to have a healthier relationship with your thoughts will be a demanding process nonetheless.

1.      Thank you mind!

When difficult thoughts come about, you can simply thank your mind for them. You can do this with the intention to actually cultivate gratitude. Your mind wants to help so even if it isn’t amazingly effective at it, the intention can and perhaps should be appreciated. You can also do this in a slightly snarkier way, the way you would thank a troll just so that you don’t engage with them again – it’s up to you.

2.      Sing the thought

If you like music, this might be up your ally. If you’re bad at singing – perhaps even better. Find a tune that you like, a song that’s in your head these days, and sing your thoughts to that melody. I like to use this technique and in my experience it works very well when I choose something deadly serious and solemn – my choice is Bellini’s aria Casta Diva – and then sing my thoughts along with every ounce of pathos I can muster. I usually end up bursting in laughter because my thoughts end up sounding absurd so very quickly.

3.      Say it out loud

A simple approach, providing that you’re alone, is to pause for a moment and say the thought out loud several times. Slow down, be mindful of what you’re saying, vary your tone and speed.

4.      Say it in a funny voice

Repeat the thought in a funny voice. Think of a movie character that’s funny and say it the way they would.

5.      Rephrase the thought to emphasize its hypothetical nature

When you notice thoughts that typically make you anxious, pause for a second and actively rephrase them. You can do this silently or out loud, depending on where you are and what works better for you. Try both – your experience is the judge of how something works, not your mind. Rephrasing is simple enough. If you have a thought “I’m a failure” – to take an evergreen example – you can rephrase it one of the following ways:

·        “I’m having a thought that I’m a failure and this is making me feel anxious.” – Here you’re emphasizing that it’s a thought and not who you are and you are fleshing out the connection to the feeling it causes. Indirectly, you’re telling yourself: you’re reacting to the thought, not to reality.

·        “My mind is warning me that I might fail which is why I’ll try to see what’s actually in my control here.” – This is not the usually way of rephrasing, but it’s useful sometimes. You are seeing something good in a otherwise judgmental thought and focusing on that.

·        “Oh, honey, be careful!” – Rephrase your thought in a way that a loving parent might put it, or someone you trust and love, a close friend or a partner.

6.      Give it a name and say hi

This one requires a bit of preparation and in a few weeks, I’ll have a blog out on this topic, so keep an eye out. Write down most of your negative thoughts on one piece of paper. Say them out loud and while you’re doing that imagine someone saying them. Who is this person? What do they look like? Are they male or female or something else entirely? Are they even human? Give that person/entity a name. You can even draw them and keep an image close by. Whenever difficult thoughts arise, say hi to that person in a cheerful voice, as if you’re saying hi to a grumpy friend.

A few concluding tips

This is getting quite long, so I’ll give you a few more tips before I say goodbye, so that I’m sure you have everything you need to get started right now.

·        When you apply these techniques, try to be mindful. Even if you can’t completely stop what you’re doing, it’s still good to pause for a moment, to check in with your body, to be attentive to the way you’re applying a technique.

·        You can also take a deep breath before you use a technique. Releasing at least a bit of tension will help you.

·        Reward yourself for successes. Our brains are more easily trained when we reward them for doing well.

·        Failing is never good although it mandatorily goes with trying to change. Be compassionate to yourself when you fail and then learn from mistakes.

·        If you try a technique once and it doesn’t work, it’s not a sure sign that it won’t. Give each one a few days of continuous use before going on to the next one.

·        Don’t try all of these at once. Choose one. You only need one.

·        If you’re coming up with excuses about not being able to use these, consider yourself called out. These techniques don’t require time or any tool in particular. They can be used anytime, anywhere.

·        Keep going and keep trying!