It’s a fact. Your mind is a maker of thoughts, a connector of thoughts, and a creator of patterns. Your mind doesn’t stop thinking and thinking. Thinking is always happening, up and down, left and right. And overthinking is what busy minds do, many times!

Here is what you can do to handle overthinking:

Observing your overthinking thoughts is a skill that can be learned.

In a study conducted by Ruiz, Luciano, Florez, Suarez-Falcon & Cardona-Betancour (2020) on repetitive negative thinking, participants were taught defusion skills,  3 sessions of 60-minutes (1st session was 9-minutes), and 5 audio recordings of 30-minutes each between sessions.

While learning and practicing different defusion exercises, participants were developing their abilities to notice triggers for worry and rumination, take distance from those thoughts, and behave according to what was important to them (values-based actions).

Results of this intervention, after a 1 and 3-month follow-up showed a clinically significant decrease in the measurements of worry measured by the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and depression, anxiety, and stress measured by the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS). No adverse effects were observed.

The research on ACT for repetitive negative thinking (Ruiz et al., 2016a, 2018a, 2019; Dereix-Calonge et al., 2019; Salazar et al., 2020) continues to show the evidence for defusion skills – observing thoughts for what they are – and the benefits from them in the long-run.

The skill of observing your overthinking thoughts

Many easter philosophies, mindfulness-based therapies along with Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) have highlighted the advantages of learning to notice and observe uncomfortable thoughts without buying into them and without struggling to eliminate them. Within ACT, there is a distinction between fusion and defusion.

Fusion refers to those moments when we take our thoughts literally, as the absolute truth, get entangled with them, and “pushed around by them.” (Harris, 2009).

Defusion was a term coined by Steve Hayes, Ph.D., co-founder of ACT,  is the skill of observing and seeing our thoughts for what they are – content from our busy minds.

When practicing defusion you learn to see that thought is not a threat to you, a command you have to go along with, may or may not be true, and is more like letters put together or pictures that your mind comes up with.

When getting into overthinking mode, all the thinking troubles you.

How to practice observing your overthinking thoughts

There are many ways to practice defusion; here are four of my favorite ones that you can practice right away.

When noticing the beginning of an overthinking pattern, try these defusion skills:

Labeling and what’s my mind up to?

Ask yourself, “What’s my mind up to?”

Then answer yourself by labeling each thought as your mind presents it:

“Now my mind is having a worry thought.”
“And now my mind is having a doubtful thought.”
“And now my mind is having an uncertain thought.”
“And now my mind is having a criticizing thought.”
Continue in this way until you’ve labeled seven to ten thoughts.

Labeling is describing a thought as something your mind produces, rather than something you are or something you do. It’s a subtle distinction, but it lies at the heart of defusion.

Instead of using statements like “Now I’m overthinking” or “Now I’m worried about,” use the phrase “Now my mind is having a worry thought.; now my mind is having a doubtful thought;

You can also say, “my mind is having the urge to know …”

Thank you, mind

Every time your mind comes up with an unpleasant thought, literally say “thank you mind.”

Here are some examples:

What I said was embarrassing. “Thank you, mind.”
I’m a mess. “Thank you, mind.”
They’re laughing at me. “Thank you, mind.”
I’m anxious. “Thank you, mind.”
I’m worried. “Thank you, mind.”

Turning your hand

Each time you catch one of those overthinking patterns starting to show up, let go of it by turning your hand over as if you’re letting go of a small stone that you’ve been carrying.

Tell yourself, “there’s a [enter the type of thought … ],” as you turn a hand and let the thought fall away.

Card-carrying

Write your most bothersome thoughts that start overthinking patterns on a 3 by 5 index card and carry it in your pocket or purse. When your mind comes up with one of these thoughts, dismiss it by saying to yourself, “I’ve got that on the card.”

The power of practice defusion intentionally

Rather than automatically following the same overthinking patterns over and over, make a conscious effort to practice defusion in favor of finding new ways of thinking better and living better.

Does defusion really work?

Here is my report: I don’t go one day without having an occasion to practice defusion – judgments about my cooking abilities, internal questions about what’s wrong with me; the lack of time to do what I really care about doing, worrying about my looks, what-if thoughts about loneliness.

Defusion has become the antidote to hours of dwelling in my head.

Even the ten to fifteen minutes of watching my mind – Vipassana meditation – sets the tone for my maker of thoughts.

Overthinking thoughts slip by with far less friction.

Here is the deal about our thoughts:

• Our thoughts about life are not life.
• Our thoughts about life are descriptions of life

Here is the deal about our mind: Our mind is a maker of thoughts, a connector of thoughts, and a creator of patterns. And it’s default mode is to protect, defend and guide us from anything that could be a threat. Not our fault; that’s just what the mind us and that’s just how it kept us alive for hundreds of years.

Thinking is always in the background ….sometimes loudly, sometimes like a whisper, sometimes like a soft soundtrack.

Our thoughts come in the form of hypotheses, dreams, theories, stories, pictures, questions, calculations, or plans. Our thoughts also come with poignant doubts, criticisms, scary images, unpleasant possibilities, or distressing urges to find the right response.  And, when facing upsetting moments, all that thinking – all those thoughts – gets amplified, exacerbated, and augmented.

e.g. what if I lose my job; what if people make fun of me; would I make it? Did I research every option before making a decision?  

Thinking is always there.
Thinking is always happening.
Negative thinking is always popping up.

At first glance, the problem is with negative thinking itself. The problem with this frame is that it characterizes our mind as this omnipotent device that holds the truth, is accurate, and is always right. But, that ignores something crucial: the mind is always doing its own minding, regardless of what’s really happening inside and outside of us.

Take a look by yourself: set a timer for 2 minutes and watch what your mind does. Where does your mind take you? What words, letters or pictures does your mind come up with?

The problem is not with negative thinking itself; the problem is with how serious we take our thinking; how infatuated we are with thinking and how we rely on thinking to control what’s out of our control.

Think about it:

When having a doubtful thought (e.g. is this the right length of this article?),  we respond to that thought with other thoughts (e.g. I have seen other authors writing this length; what if it’s not; did I see things right? My friend Jess wrote around the same length; what if nobody reads this article? What if I’m writing for nothing? I’m not a writer…)

It’s like thinking gives us a sense of control of that uncomfortable experience – of that uncomfortable doubtful thought.

The late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner is well known for his work on thought control. When asked the question, “How do people control their own minds?” he responded:

“The simple strategy of directing attention can often be helpful, as people can stop thoughts, concentrate, improve their moods, relax, fall asleep, and otherwise control their mental states just by trying to direct their thoughts. These strategies of mental control can sometimes backfire, however, producing not only the failure of control but the very mental states we are trying to avoid.”

Wegner’s studies on thought control emerged from his research on thought suppression. Wagner illustrated what thought control is inspired by a line from Dostoyevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Wegner wrote:

People who are prompted to try not to think about a white bear while they are thinking out loud will tend to mention it about once a minute… It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. [2]

Our attempts to control our thoughts make sense; we may even feel less afraid, less at the mercy of what we don’t have control of. But then, we end up with a war of thoughts, one after another; one thought fighting against the other thought. We spend so much time proving, disproving, discounting and trying to make those uncomfortable thoughts stop.

It feels like when dealing with negative, repetitive, and distressing thinking our role is to surrender to it, to respond to thinking with more thinking, and to dwell and dwell.

But, that’s not true.

What type of relationship do you have with your mind?

That’s the fundamental question for you right now. 

• Are you at the mercy of your thoughts?
• Do you respond to thinking with more thinking?
• Do you spend hours in your head trying to control what you cannot control in your outside world?
• Do you respond with more thinking to all those negative thoughts your mind comes up with?

If you answer yes to any of the above questions, my friend, watch out!

As much as we need thinking to live our lives, it also can take us on a very dark path.

Instead of taking the thought making of your mind as your boss, what about …

Nurturing the relationship with your mind.

You can sharpen your thinking by nurturing the relationship with your mind.

Here is how you can nurture the relationship with thinking:

• Radically accept that thinking happens, thinking comes and goes.
• Turn your attention away from the thoughts that are not helpful to you in a given moment.
• Keep in mind that your mind is always trying to protect you and it does it in the only way it knows: connecting thoughts, creating patterns, and coming up with a lot of thoughts.
• Remember that when feeling anxious, scared, or distressed, your mind will quickly come up with all types of thoughts to protect you
• Take ownership of your responses to thinking.
• Even when your mind comes up with doubts, what-if thoughts, criticizing thoughts, ask yourself, would something helpful come for me if I respond to that thought? If the answer is not, refocus your attention.
  

I’ll expand these ideas in other articles. I leave with my last thought:

The first distressing thought is on your mind, the rest of the thoughts is on you.