Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Question the thought
Some thoughts you could defend all day, and debating whether they are true only gives them more of your time. Try a different question: is this thought kind to me, and does it take me anywhere I want to go?
This one earns its place when you have already proved the case to yourself and feel worse for having done it. You are not conceding the thought is accurate and you are not pretending it is false. You are working out what carrying it costs, what it buys you, and how much room to give it today.
Qur’an and Sunnah
who listen to what is said and follow what is best (Quran 39:18). Best, rather than merely arguable, is a fair test to put to your own thoughts.
ٱلَّذِينَ يَسۡتَمِعُونَ ٱلۡقَوۡلَ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ أَحۡسَنَهُۥٓۚ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ ٱلَّذِينَ هَدَىٰهُمُ ٱللَّهُۖ وَأُوْلَٰٓئِكَ هُمۡ أُوْلُواْ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ
who listen to what is said and follow what is best. These are the ones God has guided; these are the people of understanding
Qur’an 39:18read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Work developing a measure of cognitive fusion, meaning how bound up a person is with their own thinking, found that this relationship to a thought predicted distress over and above whether the person believed the thought was true. It is measure development rather than a treatment trial, so it shows the two things come apart, not how much loosening one will help. It does support asking about a thought's function as well as its accuracy.
Gillanders DT, Bolderston H, Bond FW, Dempster M, Flaxman PE, Campbell L, Kerr S, Tansey L, Noel P, Ferenbach C, Masley S, Roach L, Lloyd J, May L, Clarke S, Remington B. (2014). The development and initial validation of the cognitive fusion questionnaire.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
How tightly you hold a thought changes what it does to you, even when the thought itself does not budge.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
At the end of a stretch of thinking like this, ask yourself plainly what you believe about yourself now, and how that differs from an hour ago.
Take the thought that is upsetting you and ask: what is another way to read this?
Notice when you have jumped to the worst story, and hold it as a guess, not a fact.