Mindfulness and ACT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwxXdVxPBf4

Mindfulness is a state of being aware, open and focused. When you are in the state of mindfulness, you become completely focused on whatever it is that you are doing. You are able to let go of unhelpful thoughts and not be controlled by your emotions.  Acceptance and Commitment Therapy enables people to spend more times enjoying their life instead of getting caught up in their head.

Mind is the great story teller. Our mind just loves to keep busy. It is in the constant state of talking to us, telling us things. Mind loves to be negative. It loves to criticize, judge, tell us the things that we are not doing right, comparing ourselves to others. It’s doing it all the time. It’s not about that you are negative, but the fact that our mind evolved to think that way.

Back in the day, mind helped to keep us safe. Back in the day, there we a lot of dangers to our survival and mind evolved to be negative. But now, we are spending way too much time caught up in our thoughts. Naturally, negative thoughts are able to grab our attention over positive thoughts and lift us out of being in the present. 47% of our time is spent caught up in the thoughts. Most of these thoughts are negative and they don’t help us move closer to living that rich and meaningful life that we want and they don’t leave us feeling positive, inspired and motivated to do amazing things.

Mindfulness is leading us to get out of our heads and into our lives, by not getting caught up in that negative story all the time. Negative thoughts are not the problem, the fact that we are getting these negative thoughts is not the problem but it is more of what we do with them and how much we buy into their story. It’s when we are hearing these thoughts and treating them as gospel. When we completely believe that they are true or we are fighting with them, getting caught up, we are letting them to take control over us and tell us what to do. That’s when thoughts become a problem.

Cognitive Fusion is a technical term for the process of us completely entangled with our thoughts. And when we are in that state is when they completely take over our lives.  De-fusion is the opposite of Fusion. In Cognitive De-fusion we are capable of letting our thoughts come and go, so that we are able to be mindful that they are there but not let them have control over us. It’s almost like taking the step back and being with peace and accepting of those thoughts being there. It’s not like meeting and greeting, bearing it “Argghhh, I know that you are there, but I hate that you are there”.  It is saying “I accept that you are there but it is my choice whether I want to engage with you”. To think “Is that thought helpful?” “Is that helping me live rich and meaningful life?” and if it is not, letting it go. Bring into your mind a thought “I am blah”, something that really hooks you, something that has a tendency to come back over and over. When it comes to your mind, completely believe that thought. Let your mind go wherever it wants to go and just marinate in that thought.  Notice how you are feeling. Now, take that exact same thought and in front of it just state “My mind is having the thought that I am blah”. Now you feel lighter. You got more space. It provides some distance between yourself and a thought. It enables you to start to realize that they are just thoughts and feeling and words. So they are just thoughts, which are not you and whether they are true or not is not important any more. Start to be more aware of the thoughts you are thinking throughout the day. When you are engaging with that thought too much, just take a step back and say to yourself “Hang on a second. My mind is having a thought that blah.” Start to experience distance between yourself and that thought.