In a recent post we looked at how mindfulness can help us let go of our thoughts when we get caught up in ruminating or worrying or just thinking in circles. Letting go of thoughts is never easy, however, and in this post we’ll look at how simply watching our thoughts can help us let them go.

Thoughts pop into our heads all the time, and usually we don’t pay any special attention to them: they enter and leave our minds all on their own, just like a car that drives into our line of sight, remains in our field of vision for a few moments, and then drives along and passes out of our line of sight again.

But certain thoughts tend to attract our attention. They grab us, suck us in, and we get stuck on them. Often it is thoughts that have a particularly strong emotional pull to them that we having trouble letting go of and allowing to just pass by on their own. It’s like our emotions are an adhesive that make thoughts related to a particularly strong emotion stick in our mind, where they stay stuck and don’t go away no matter how hard we try.

For instance, if we’re feeling anxious, we’ll tend to get stuck on worrying thoughts; if we’re feeling sad, we’ll get stuck on thoughts of regret and disappointment; if we’re angry, we’ll get stuck on thoughts of having been treated unfairly or wronged. But if we can learn to just watch these thoughts despite their emotional pull, they don’t get stuck, and we can let them go as freely as any other thought that we don’t give a lot of attention to.

The opposite of watching thoughts is to engage with them. We engage with thoughts by trying to understand them, respond to them, change them, judge them or react to them in any way. However, when we watch our thoughts, we simply notice that they are present in our mind, and just watch them as they come and go. We allow then to enter our minds and stay there for a while, and then let then go on their way.

As soon as we engage our thoughts, they tend to stick around, and lead to more thoughts, and before we know it we’re back to ruminating or dwelling or worrying. But if we can just let the thoughts come and go as they please, they tend to go away on their own, without us having to do anything special.

There are a number of metaphors that describe this process of watching our thoughts, including the ones below:

The next time you find yourself caught up in your thoughts, unable to stop ruminating or worrying or going over the same thoughts over and over again, see if you can’t try to step back a bit and watch your thoughts. Instead of engaging them, just let them go, allowing them to pass out of your mind just like a cloud passing through the sky or a leaf floating down a stream.

Letting go of thoughts is often something we can’t do easily. The more stuck a thought or line of thinking gets in our head, the more difficult it becomes to let it go. In the next post, on cognitive defusion and letting go of thoughts, we look at some more ways to take a step back from your thoughts and get unstuck from them, and some additional strategies to help you watch your thoughts rather than engaging and getting caught up in them.

I’m a Toronto therapist and counsellor who uses mindfulness to help people deal with issues such as depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

It’s easy to get swept away by our thoughts, especially in the face of strong emotions. We get stuck ruminating and dwelling about the past, filled with guilt or regret. Or our minds start racing and we can’t stop worrying about the future and imagining all the things that could go wrong. Or we replay conversations over and over again in our heads, trying to make sense of them or figure out what we could have said differently.

When our minds get going like this, not only is it exhausting; these patterns of thinking tend to make us feel bad, intensifying the emotions we’re already feeling and generating additional negative emotions as well. Because this experience is so unpleasant, it’s natural to want to these thoughts to stop, and to be able to prevent yourself from even having them in the first place. We often wind up trying to make these thoughts go away, and shut them out completely and make sure they don’t come back. But just like we can’t control our emotions or suppress our emotions, neither can we control or suppress our thoughts.

So what can we do when our thoughts start racing, we get stuck ruminating, or we just can’t quiet down our minds? One way of approaching negative and disruptive thinking is to examine our thoughts and see if there aren’t some alternative ways of thinking about the situation. We looked at how we might deal with distressing and negative thoughts in this manner using cognitive therapy (CBT) in a post on cognitive therapy and challenging negative thoughts.

An alternative approach is to bring mindfulness to our thoughts, and learn how to just let go of them. “We do not need to fight with thoughts or struggle against them or judge them. Rather, we can simply choose not to follow the thoughts once we are aware that they have arisen,” write Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, John D. Teasdale and Jon Kabatt-Zinn in their book The Mindful Way Through Depression, about the Mindfulness-Based Congitive Therapy (MBCT) approach to depression.

Mindfully letting go of thoughts is something we learn to do when we meditate. Many people think mediation involves having a blank mind completely void of any thoughts. However, in mindfulness meditation, the idea is not to shut out thoughts altogether, but simply to not allow yourself to get carried away by your thoughts.

In mindfulness meditation of the breath, for example, we bring our attention to our breath, and try, as best we can, to keep our attention focused on our breath. Despite our intentions, our mind inevitably does wander from the breath, and we start thinking.

When this happens, we simply acknowledge that our attention has wandered to our thoughts, and then let go of those thoughts and return our attention to our breath. And when our mind wanders again and we start thinking about something else, once again we acknowledge our thoughts, let go of them, and return our attention to our breath.

Just as we learn to repeatedly let go of our thoughts and return our attention to our breath when we meditate, we can do the same thing as we go about our every day life. When we practice letting go of thoughts in everyday life, we don’t always need to return our attention to the breath (though taking a breathing time out or returning to the breath for a few moments is always a great way to relieve stress). Instead, we can let go of a thought and return our attention to the work we were doing, or the book we were reading, or the person we were talking to, or whatever else we were doing when our thoughts began to steal our attention.

Another way to we can let go of a thought is to refocus our attention from our thoughts to our senses: the taste of the food we’re eating, the sound of the music we’re listening to; the sights around us; or the sensations of our feet striking the ground as we walk. Letting go of thoughts is as simple as acknowledging that our mind is off thinking about something other than the present moment, and then allowing that thought to pass out of our mind as we return our attention to whatever it is we are doing and whatever is going on in the present.

In theory, letting go of thoughts is simple. In practice, though, it’sis not as easy as it sounds. It can seem like as soon as we let go of a thought, there it is again, back in our head. In the next post, we look at how watching your thoughts can help you through the process of letting go of thoughts.

I’m a Toronto therapist and counsellor who uses mindfulness to help people deal with issues such as depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

Have you ever felt anxious and noticed yourself being extra vigilant, looking for any signs that something bad may be lurking nearby, on the lookout for all the things you might need to worry about?

This may seem like a good way to protect yourself from the things you’re anxious about, but it usually backfires. Since there is never any end to the list of “what ifs?” you can find to worry about, if you’re constantly looking out for things that could go wrong, you’ll usually find them, and this keeps you in a state of worry and anxiety.

Or have you ever been depressed, and found yourself focused on all of the negative things in your life, trying to figure out how they happened and how to
solve them? Again, this sounds like a good way to fix what’s wrong in your life, but it often ends up making things worse. You keep finding more and more things to regret, more disappointments, more ways you don’t measure up to other people, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the negatives that keep adding up.

The more we’re on the lookout for something, the more likely we are to find it. But just as it is easy to find things to worry about or feel badly about when that’s what we’re focused on, it’s also easy to find some things to feel good about when that’s what we’re looking for and paying attention to.

Lately, a type of therapy called Positive Psychology, has been gaining popularity as research continues to demonstrate the effectiveness of positive psychology in helping people feel better and increase their well-being. Compared to many other approaches to therapy, positive psychology focuses less on identifying and fixing deficits, and more on recognizing and building on positives—looking at “What’s right with you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”

I’m a Toronto therapist specializing in counselling and therapy for depression, anxiety, stress and low self-esteem. For more information about how I can help you use positive psychology to increase your well-being, or to make an appointment for counselling or therapy, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

Why is it that when we’re feeling anxious, we tend to worry so much, even though worrying tends to do nothing except make us feel even more anxious? One reasoin is that it’s easy to regard worrying as something that can be productive: that it either helps us deal with anxiety, or protects us from the thing we’re feeling anxious about.

If worrying actually did have these effects, it would be quite beneficial. But unfortunately, worrying usually only increases anxiety. So why do we continue to do it time and time again?

Worrying tends to feel a lot like problem solving. When we problem solve, we identify a problem, come up with some possible solutions, weigh their pros and cons, and then take some sort of action to resolve the problem. Problem solving is a very constructive, rational thought process to help us deal effectively with a problem at hand.

On the surface, worrying resembles problem solving. There is some “problem” that’s leading us to feel anxious, and we want to get rid of what’s causing the anxiety so we can be safe and feel better. So we worry about what’s making us anxious as a way of trying to solve our anxiety and make it go away.

The trouble arises when the things we’re worrying about are outside of our control—often they haven’t even happened yet. In these cases, problem solving doesn’t work because there is nothing yet to solve. If what we’re worrying about is outside of our control, there is little we can do about it, especially if what we’re worrying about something that exist only as a future possibility.

If you find yourself worrying about questions like “what if this happens?” or “what if that happens?”, then your worrying is unproductive: you’re worrying about something that has no solution yet, because it hasn’t even happened yet, so there’s nothing you can do about it. Except worry even more.

Worry is often triggered by difficulty tolerating uncertainty. Worrying might seem to be a good way to cope with uncertainty as it allows you to plan for things that might happen in the future. But worrying is different from planning, because when we worry, there is usually so much uncertainty involved that there really isn’t anything concrete to plan for.

It’s one thing to want to have a “plan B,” but when we worry, we end up trying to answer “What ifs?” for every possible outcome. No matter how many “What ifs?” we manage to figure out, there are always more. The number of things that can happen in the future is limitless, and so once we start worrying about the future, our worries also become limitless. Coming up with a plan B still doesn’t resolve all the uncertainty, so we try to come up with plans C-Z, and even those aren’t enough.

Just as with we noted with regards to negative thinking and racing thoughts, there are two ways to deal with worrying thoughts: reappriasing and reframing them in a different light; or letting go of them altogether. We’ll look at letting go of worries in another post. Below are some questions to ask yourself that can reduce your worrying and the anxiety you’re feeling by helping you reappraise and reframe the things you’re worrying about:

• What am I worrying will happen?
 
• What am I predicting will happen?
 
• Am I predicting the worst case scenario?
 
• How likely is it the worst case scenario will happen (rate from 0-100)?
 
• What evidence do I have that the worst-case scenario will come true?
 
• What evidence do I have that the worst-case scenario may not come true?
 
• If the worst case scenario did happen, what could I do to help me cope with it?
 
• What are some other possible scenarios? Some other outcomes? Some other ways the situation might turn out?
 
• What is the most likely thing to happen?
 
• If that were to happen, how could I cope?
 
• Have I ever been in a similar situation? How did that turn out? How was I able to cope then?
 
• What have I learned from similar situations in the past that can help me deal with what I’m going through now?
 
• What advice would I give to a friend or loved one who was in a similar situation?
 
• What advice might a friend or loved one give to me?

Asking questions such as these is a way of stepping back and getting some perspective about your worries. Even if you can’t let go of what’s on your mind and stop worrying about it altogether, these questions can help make the worrying less consuming and reduce the anxiety you are experiencing.

I’m a Toronto cognitive behavioural therapist who uses CBT and cognitive therapy to help people overcome depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from CBT/cognitive therapy to help you manage worrying and anxiety, or to make an appointment for cognitive therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

When we’re feeling distressed about something or going through a difficult emotional experience it can feel like our thoughts are running out of control. Our minds start racing and we find ourselves dwelling in the past, worrying about the future, or just spinning our wheels trying to think ourelves out of our problems.

At times, our thoughts can become so powerful and consuming that it’s difficult to focus on anything else. Reading, being productive at work, or even just carrying on a conversation seems impossible. The thoughts become so persistent that nothing can distract us from them and nothing else can hold our attention, and it can feel like there isn’t anything we can do to slow down these thoughts or get some peace of mind.

Because it’s natural to want thoughts like these to go away and to have some control over what’s going on inside our heads, we often wind up trying to will these thoughts away and shut them out completely. But just like we can’t control our emotions, nor suppress our emotions, neither can we control or suppress our thoughts.

Usually the more we fight our thoughts and try to block them out or force them to go away, the stronger we make them and the more resolute they become. However, when our thoughts start racing, we get stuck ruminating, or we just can’t quiet down our minds, there are a few strategies we use to calm our thinking.

A cognitive therapy (CBT) approach to calming our thoughts entails examining and challenging the thoughts we’re having to find some alternative ways of thinking about the situation. This can involve things such as positive reappraisal, or reframing a negative event in a more positive light, or putting things into perspective and considering the negative event or emotion in a broader context that makes it easier to manage.

A mindfulness approach entails accepting the presence of these thoughts, and, as best you can, simply letting go of them. In the remainder of this post we’ll look at some CBT techniques to deal with negative thinking. In another post we’ll look at how to let go of negative and racing thoughts with mindfulness.

In cognitive therapy we learn to assess negative thoughts when they arise, rather than taking them for granted as being true, and considering if there might be other ways of looking at a situation. Asking yourself some of the following questions, grouped below into three categories, can help you to reframe a distressing situation and see it in a different light.

By taking the time to ask these questions, you can disrupt the thinking-in-cirlces pattern that typically occurs when we allow negative thinking to go unchallenged. Asking these questions gives you the opportunity to step back from your thoughts a little, slow down your mind, and consider things from a fresher and calmer perspective.

What are the facts?

• How do I know that my thought is true? What is the evidence (or proof) that my thought is true?
 
• Is there any evidence that disproves my thought? What’s the evidence that this thought might not be true, or not completely true?
 
• Are there facts that I’m ignoring or I’ve overlooked?
 
• Am I using any words or phrases that are extreme or exaggerated such as always, never, forever, should, must, can’t, etc.?
 
• Are there any small things that contradict my thought that I might be discounting as unimportant?
 

Are there any other possible explanations?

• Can I see any other way of viewing this?
 
• If my best friend or someone I loved had this thought, what would I tell them?
 
• If my best friend or someone who loves me knew I was thinking this thought, what would they say to me?
 
• What evidence would my friend point out to me that would suggest that my thought is not 100% true?
 
• When I am not feeling this way, do I think about this type of situation any differently? How?
 
• Five years from now, if I look back at this situation, might I look at it any differently?
 
• Am I blaming myself for something over which I do not have complete control?
 
• Have I had experiences that show that this thought is not true all the time?
 
• Are there any strengths in me that I’m ignoring?
 
• Are there any positives to the situation that I’m ignoring?
 

What can I do to help me deal with the situation?

• Have I been in this type of situation before? What have I learned from prior experiences that could help me now?
 
• When I have felt this way in the past, what did I think about that helped me feel better?
 
• What is the worst that could happen?
 
• What is the most likely thing that will happen?
 
• If the worst did happen, what would I be able to do to cope?
 
• What is the effect of thinking this way?
 
• Will this view help me to deal with the problem? Would another view be more helpful?

Once you’re able to gain a broader perspective, things tend not to be as overwhelming, your mind quiets down, and you can start to see things more clearly. Once you have some clarity, then you can find concrete ways to deal with whatever is troubling you.

Often it helps to actually write out your answers to these questions, as writing thoughts down helps get them out of your head and slow down your mind. And seeing the answers written out in front of you can make them sink in and seem more real than if they are just more thoughts added to whatever is going on in you mind already.

This technique can be particularly helpful when you’re worrying a lot. In another post we look at a similar set of questions you can ask yourself to help reduce worrying and catastrophic thoughts.

I’m a Toronto cognitive behavioural therapist who uses CBT and cognitive therapy to help people overcome depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from CBT/cognitive therapy to help you slow down your mind and deal with negative thinking, or to make an appointment for cognitive therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.