Your thoughts are just things that pop into your mind based on your experiences, feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations. Your thoughts make sense or made sense at one period of time, but you may want to try to separate yourself from them because they have a tendency to be negatively skewed and are not always the most helpful. Some initial tools to try if you feel you are getting “hooked” by your thoughts is to practice identifying or acknowledging your thoughts when they arise. For example, if a not-so-helpful thought comes in such as, “you stink, you are dumb, you should go home,” you could try to give the thought less power by doing the following: say ‘thank you thoughts,’ sing the thought in your head or out loud in a very goofy way, repeat the thought 30 times fast, or you say to yourself “wow, my thoughts are really going right now,” or “my thoughts are being quite mean right now.”
Using thought defusion techniques can seem minuscule and at times goofy, AND these tips have a tendency to decrease the power of your thoughts. Everyone has thoughts – it is what we do with them that can make them more or less powerful.
