How To Quickly Defuse The Negative Thoughts In Your Head

The purpose of these exercises is to help you step back and see if buying into negative thoughts helps you move toward, or away from, your values in life. Sometimes the horrid thoughts go away. Consider this a handy side effect of defusion, not the main aim, or it won’t be long before you are cursing me bitterly for not getting rid of your thoughts. The question is always whether a thought helps you take action to live a rich, meaningful, and vital life.

So, don your thought-bomb-disposal kit and read on.

This is one of my favorite ways to defuse from self-judgments and evaluations. Try it now.

What you should end up with is something like this:

What do you notice? Is there a sense of distance between you and your thoughts? Do you feel less caught up in the thought? Now that you have that space, what does it free you up to do differently?

Sometimes I feel like my mind makes intrusive calls to me, like the people who ring on your landline (I know, right?) and who seem to think you have been in an accident recently. Your mind pulls a similar trick1, but you can unhook from it by learning to thank it for its efforts instead of fighting with it. Also, learn to give your mind a name to supercharge your defusion exercises.

Mind: Hi, it’s me. I think you should be worrying.

You: Hey, Sheila. Thanks, but I’m okay. I appreciate you are trying to help, what with your big doom-spotting antennae, but I got this.

Mind: Ha! That’s not going to work. You can’t brush me off so easily. If you don’t have a really good worry about the impending doom in your future right now, you’ll be finished by tomorrow morning.

You: Thanks for the thought, Sheila. I really do get that you are trying to help. Anything you want to add?

Mind: Ummm... yeah... give me a second...

You: Look, Sheels, I got stuff to do. Laters, yeah?

This is another way to reduce the power of your thoughts a bit more. Take your troublesome thought and sing it out loud. Lots of people do it to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” but I think “Mamma Mia” is a pretty good alternative—it doesn’t matter what you choose. Sing it at different speeds to see what that does to the thought.

Similarly, you can say the thought in the funny voice of a character from a film, cartoon, or anyone in public life. Was Mr. Bean’s voice not made for this very technique? Try saying, “I am a massive failure” in Mr. Bean’s voice and see what happens to your relationship with that thought.

This is in no way about mocking yourself—you are just trying to see your thoughts as just thoughts, not commandments given to you on a mountainside.

Over a hundred years ago, a psychologist named Edward Titchener found that when words are repeated over and over again, they lose their meaning. He did it with the word “milk,” but I like to do it with “lemons.” Or “fork.” “Fork” is such a silly word.

Try it now. Say the word “lemon” out loud forty times. I hope you aren’t on the bus. What happened? I am pretty sure that the word “lemon” just became a series of meaningless sounds. And when this happens, words also begin to lose their associations and emotional valence.

Maybe “lemons” or “milk” or “fork” don’t hold many problematic associations or emotions for you, but I bet the words or phrases you use to criticize yourself do—judgments like “stupid,” “fat,” “worthless,” “bad person.”

So now repeat that exercise but with your self-critical judgments. Repeat them at least forty times to take the emotional power out of them. You aren’t trying to convince yourself whether your judgment is true or not. You are just trying to take the power out of the words your inner critic spews out.

What do you notice? Does the power of these words change? If it works for you, see if you can try this a couple of times during the week. Best not to do it in a meeting with your boss while you quietly chant, “Loser.”

Write your troublesome thought on a little piece of paper and put it in your purse or wallet. The thought might be distressing or painful, but the question you need to ask yourself is whether you are willing to carry it around with you and see it for what it is—a set of words that don’t dictate what you can and can’t do. I have one in my wallet that reads “I am a terrible therapist.” It may or may not be true, but I still go in to work every day to try to help people. When that thought comes up, I think of that piece of paper in my wallet, I acknowledge it and I move on to doing what matters to me. It’s just a thought.

From the book STRESSILIENT by Sam Akbar, Ph.D. Copyright (C) 2023 by Sam Akbar. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Essentials, an imprint of St Martin's Publishing Group. Now available wherever books are sold.