Defusion

The mind's tendency to ruminate isn't a personal failing, it's a well-documented pattern with an identifiable neural signature, and it responds to specific, learnable practices.

In the last reflection, we considered the “choice point," or the moment when we can turn either toward or away from our values. We can choose actions which move us towards living in line with our values and goals, or we can choose actions which move us away from them. Here in lies a fundamental problem of being human. It's just not easy. Or, summarized by St. Paul in Romans: "What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate." In our imperfect

In the past few posts, we’ve been exploring the ACT skill of cognitive defusion, or the ability to notice thoughts without getting tangled up in them. Defusion helps us take a step back from the swirl of mental chatter so we can see thoughts for what they are: words and images passing through the mind, not absolute truths we must obey. But once we’ve learned to step back from our thoughts, we inevitably run into the next challenge: our feelings. Fear, sadness, anger, loneline

In which I take something pop psych off the internet and dissect it. There’s a lot of content online that presents itself as solid...

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts". Psalm 139: 23 Being in the here-and-now, connected to our true self - it's something which sounds wonderful yet impossible for many. Our intellect is a gift, but things go awry. Why? Lock in, because this is going to be a bit of a long one. The Problem Solving Mind In an earlier post, I wrote about the mind as a problem-solving work of art. We can analyze the past, think about what went wrong, and cons