How To Defuse From Unhelpful Thoughts With Dr. Diana Hill

Welcome back to the Wise Effort Show.

I'm Dr.

Diana Hill.

I'm a clinical psychologist and host of this show.

And sometimes it can be a little tough to focus your genius energy when your mind is getting in the way.

Our minds can be such wonderful things and also our biggest barriers to wise effort both at the same time.

So today we're going to talk about thoughts,

It's what psychological research shows us about thoughts,

How to work with our minds so that our minds don't run us but we run our lives.

And we'll be drawing from act,

From contemplative science,

And from what I learned on a surf trip with four 16-year-old boys this past weekend.

I took my son for his 16th birthday down the coast of California.

And we started in Santa Barbara and we went down five surf spots in two days,

12 hours of driving.

And it was a great experience in observing the mind,

Observing my mind,

Because most of the time I was sort of a fly on the wall.

And one of the things that I learned about surfing,

I didn't know this before,

I knew it kind of,

But I learned it really solidly,

Which is you don't always want to trust the surf report.

We would go to a spot,

We'd drive there,

We'd unload the boards,

We'd get out of the car.

And when a surf report told us it was going to be great,

It was often not great.

And what I learned about that is that you got to go experience it for yourself.

You have to see the waves with your own eyes.

And that is very similar to our minds.

Most of the time,

We are not seeing our experience through our very own eyes,

Through our present moment.

We are observing life through the lens of our history,

The symbolic relating that our mind has done that can really skew our experience.

So here are some facts about your mind.

One,

Your mind is always producing thoughts.

It is an unstoppable relating machine.

Your lungs breathe,

Your heart beats,

Your mind thinks.

And it's fascinating when you stop long enough to pay attention to your mind,

How ridiculously busy it is,

Which is the second fact about your mind.

It is a double edged sword.

It can do wonderful things like plan a surf trip and solve all sorts of problems.

We had a kid that got a stingray bite.

He comes home,

He's got a sore foot,

And he got bit by a stingray.

And guess what?

My mind was very helpful in that moment.

Who do I call to get some help?

Minds are great.

Where minds get us off track is when they create rules,

When they worry,

When they are just looking for problems to be solved,

When they can't help but always see something is wrong,

When your mind tells you that you are inadequate,

Or that your experience right now is not okay as it is.

Is your mind doing that?

Stephen Hayes talks a lot about how our mind develops and why it becomes,

As he describes it,

Like a spider web.

That when you try and go in and clean up your thoughts or think differently,

It is like trying to rearrange a spider web.

You are going to get entangled in it.

Our mind creates associations,

It creates stories,

It adds on.

And as Jack Kornfield is well known for saying,

Your mind is a very dangerous place to go alone.

So if our mind has no delete buttons,

We also cannot unlearn things.

We hear this a lot,

Like I need to unlearn X,

Y,

And Z.

You don't unlearn.

What you can do is learn new things.

You can strengthen new associations.

And we know this from Rick Hansen's work in terms of taking in the good and maybe focusing our attention on compassionate thoughts.

We can shift our attention.

We just can't delete certain aspects of our mind.

So my son turned 16 and one of the things that I did,

As parents do when their kids turn 16,

Is I went back and I looked at my old photos of him.

So cute.

And I was reminded of when he was four or five,

I was pretty new out of graduate school,

Pretty new out of my postdoc,

When I had my son.

And one of my favorite things to do when he was a young kid was all the psychological experiments from the developmental period that he was in.

So of course I did the marshmallow experiment on him.

You may remember the marshmallow experiment from Stanford in the 60s and 70s where they would put four or five-year-old kids in a room and the experimenter would leave a marshmallow on the table and would say,

You have a choice.

Either you can have the marshmallow or you can wait until I get back or wait a little bit longer and you'll get more marshmallows if you wait.

And then they followed these kids longitudinally into high school.

And in those early experiments,

What they reported was that the kids who waited,

Who delayed having the marshmallow,

Ended up having higher SAT scores and doing better educationally.

Now some of that has been debunked.

The association isn't quite as strong as what they reported.

And there's lots of other factors that actually impacted the results.

Things like how much they trusted the experimenter.

If you trust your experimenter,

You're more likely going to wait,

Right?

So that makes a lot of sense.

And then things like SES and culture were kind of skewing the data.

But one of the things that I did like about that experiment was they looked at the kids while they were waiting.

What were their tactics?

Like,

What did they do?

You can imagine the mind of a little four-year-old with a marshmallow,

The thoughts that are going on inside that little mind,

Right?

And we can all relate to that as sort of like how you feel when you wake up in the morning and you don't want to go on your phone,

But you end up going on your phone.

So what's happening there?

The kids that were able to delay the marshmallow were usually doing one of two tactics,

Which is kind of interesting.

So the first tactic,

You can actually see it when you watch videos of these kids.

They're looking around.

They're covering their eyes.

They're doing everything possible to not think about the marshmallow,

Right?

So they were pretty effective short-term in not eating the marshmallow by doing these,

You know,

Mental acrobatics of avoidance,

Which we all do.

Don't think about that thing that you're worried about.

Don't think about that project that you're procrastinating on.

Don't think about that person that you are obsessed with.

Don't think about that mistake you made,

Right?

Don't think about that thing that you really want to do instead of doing this thing that you have to do.

We do this all the time,

And it's quite effortful.

It's actually not wise effort.

Avoidance is not wise effort.

It takes a lot of energy.

You can't sustain it for long.

But the other thing that the kids were doing was something else,

Which was they were looking at the marshmallow,

But they were thinking about it in what the experimenters called in a more cool way,

Like cool thoughts.

And what they would do is look at it like a white fluffy cloud or squishy or rectangle.

This is very close to what an act we teach with cognitive diffusion,

Your capacity to step back from the content of your thoughts and just see them as thoughts.

You can step back from the content of the marshmallow and just see the shape and the squishiness and the cloud-like features.

And in doing so,

It goes from a hot item to kind of a cooler item.

It has less charge to it.

You get less entangled in it.

A friend of mine introduced me to Stephen Bodane,

Who is a Zen teacher,

And he teaches about something called the direct approach,

Which is a non-dual approach.

And in it,

He teaches this practice of how you can do that instantly.

How instead of being in your thoughts and all kind of wrapped up in your head,

You can step into awareness just instantly.

It's not trying to do anything with your thoughts at all,

Except step out into a broader view,

A view which is true and more transcendent.

There is nothing missing in the present moment,

Nothing lacking,

No problem to be solved.

There's three things that I think are really important for you to know about what makes you inflexible and three practices that I think could be really helpful for you to become more cognitively flexible so that your mind isn't running the show,

But your heart,

Your wisest efforts,

Your values,

The way you want to be in the world are.

The three C's of cognitive inflexibility come from Stephen Hayes' A Liberated Mind.

So the first is the confirmation effect.

Your mind distorts reality.

It filters out experiences and it looks for information to confirm what you already believe,

What you already think is correct.

So consider that in your relationships.

Consider that about a thought that you may have about a person in your life that you have a struggle with.

How does your mind look for confirmation?

What are the thoughts that reinforce that belief and discounts other information that may be counter to it?

We can have a confirmation effect with ourselves.

I went into a podcast interview recently with a pretty big podcaster and going in,

I was like,

I know I'm going to do poorly.

I just know it.

I'm going to do a bad job.

I always do bad in these types of situations.

I'm not going to be myself,

Right?

So I was preloading my confirmation effect.

And then I went in.

I haven't listened to it yet.

It hasn't come out yet.

So I don't even know how it went.

But I only remember the parts that went badly.

I only remember those parts.

I cannot remember any part that went well.

So then I come out of it and I'm rehearsing all of my mistakes.

And anyone who asks me about this podcast interview,

Because a few of my friends and families knew I was on the show,

I only tell them about the bad parts.

So what am I doing there?

Reinforcing my thoughts.

I'm strengthening the associations.

I'm not unlearning.

I'm relearning the stuff that I don't want to have learned,

Right?

So I'm not giving myself the chance to do something different,

Which is what I want you to do,

To get more flexible with your mind,

To break up this confirmation effect.

You are going to need to do that direct approach.

Look through new eyes.

Look at the experience.

I could look at that experience of the podcast interview from a four-year-old's eyes.

I could look at it through a 16-year-old's eyes.

I could look at it through a 60-year-old's eyes.

And I would see something very different than what I look through with my eyes right now.

This is a perspective shift.

This is cognitive flexibility.

Look through new eyes.

Look at the direct experience,

And in particular,

Most beneficially,

If you can look through it with eyes of compassion and look through it with eyes that there is nothing to be fixed because your mind always wants to fix things,

Drop it for just a minute.

What if there's nothing to be fixed?

What if it's exactly how it's supposed to be?

Because it is.

We can also think about the second effect.

So we have the confirmation effect.

The second thing that makes us cognitively inflexible is something called the coherence effect.

We simplify our explanations to fit our rules.

The mind is very metabolically expensive to hold two truths at the same time.

It just wants to simplify things and put it in a neat box with a nice little bow.

So your mind doesn't want to hold the paradox.

Part of you doesn't really feel like you know what you're talking about,

And a part of you feels like you're a complete badass and you know exactly what you're talking about.

A part of you feels really unhappy in your marriage,

And a part of you is really committed to staying in the marriage.

A part of you really does not want to get up and exercise,

And a part of you really wants to get up and exercise.

These multiple things that are happening all the time.

We are complex humans because we have all these associations and networks.

We have a network in our brain that is associated with the good feelings of exercise and health and movement and how much your day shifts when you do it.

Then we have an association in our mind with how hard it is to get started and what a drag it is to get out there and how cold and dark it is early in the morning.

All of that can coexist.

So what the coherence effect does is it tries to simplify it.

It forces you to choose one instead of moving into both and.

Katie Bowman and I in our book talk a lot about shifting from either or to both ands that you can say,

It's cold outside and I'm going to go for a walk.

I don't have enough time and I'm going to move my body right now,

Right?

We can put any excuse in there and if you move the either out and you put an and in,

All of a sudden it can kind of work.

So to get over the coherence effect and to become more flexible in your thinking,

Move into both and thinking,

Enter the paradox,

Both can be true,

Multiples can be true.

You can hold all of it,

It all can be true.

Many different perspectives,

Many different associations.

And then what you're doing is not getting entangled in that web,

But you're stepping back and seeing the glistening many,

Many layers and threads that make up the web of your mind,

Of your life experience,

Of the possibilities for you.

Similarly,

Going out to the ocean,

I can believe the surf report or I can go look at the waves and see the complexity of the surf.

The waves are big and the conditions are bad.

It's a beach break that my kids don't love,

But it's a really nice,

Beautiful rolling wave that they want to get on.

You know,

All of it is possible,

Both and,

Both and.

Okay,

The third thing that makes your mind inflexible is something called the compliance effect.

Compliance or pliance in act is basically that we follow rules and we follow rules often to maintain social approval.

One of the things that taking four 16-year-olds in a car trip,

Boys,

You may notice if you ever do this many hours in the car with four 16-year-old boys is that these boys need to move.

They need to be loud.

They need a lot of space.

They've got like testosterone,

You know,

In their blood.

They need to eat a lot.

And you're in a small confined car,

Right,

While this is happening.

So we would do things like we'd stop at the Arco station and one of the kids would be like,

Where's the pigskin?

And then they'd all jump out of the car and they would start throwing the football.

Now at one point,

They were throwing the football across the gas station and other cars were starting to get mad.

Like,

What are you doing?

These like crazy wild animals.

And I cannot control four teenage boys and their need for movement,

But what I can do is help direct them to a spot where they could move.

So we'd go to the back of the Arco station and let them go at it.

At one point,

We stopped at Dick's Sporting Goods and they all like put on helmets and ran around the store.

It was wild.

You know what?

I was not maintaining social approval in those circumstances.

I was trying to limit anyone getting harmed by not having them run around the gas station where cars are moving in and out.

But these kids need to move.

And if I didn't stop and allow them to move,

It would all explode within our car.

We got to break our mind's rules.

And at certain points,

It's really helpful to break your mind's rules,

Especially if your rules are preventing you from living your values.

If you haven't noticed,

I really value movement and I value expression and freedom and I value my kids having that experience.

So I'm willing to break some social rules.

I'm willing to break my own mind's rules of being embarrassed or am I doing something wrong here.

No one's getting hurt as long as it's safe,

Right?

Especially when they're throwing the football right outside the Arco station and next door is the In-N-Out in the middle of LA where people have been in their cars forever and then they go and they drive and they sit in the car for like 45 minutes in In-N-Out to go get a hamburger.

Get out of your car,

Throw a football,

Get a pigskin.

It's good for you.

Okay.

So the compliance effect.

Our mind is creating these rules to maintain social approval.

You can think about for yourself,

How many rules does your mind have that you are just blindly following to keep someone else happy,

To keep someone else liking you?

You remember from our last episode,

The facts of life,

Not everyone's going to like you.

Not everyone's going to like you.

And you need to break some of those rules to test them out,

Especially if those rules are preventing you from wise effort.

If they're preventing you from using your energy and focusing your energy in ways that you value,

You got to break the rules and you got to practice breaking rules.

I want you to pick one of your mind's rules and I want you to break it.

How about you get to choose,

Not your rule?

So the three things that make us cognitively inflexible are the confirmation effect.

We distort and filter out our experience to confirm what we believe.

The coherence effect.

We simplify things.

And the compliance effect.

We follow rules that our mind makes to maintain social approval.

And the three ways that you can start to become more flexible is first,

Practice marshmallow mind.

Practice seeing things through another perspective.

And rather than getting entangled in your thoughts or trying to change your thoughts,

Just shift your view.

Just shift your view.

So practice holding both and.

Practice sitting in the paradox,

Allowing for complexity without having to solve a thing.

What if there is no problem to solve?

What is left?

What if there is no problem to solve?

What is left?

That's a meditation question.

Drop it into your belly.

And then finally,

The compliance effect.

Start breaking some of your mind's rules.

Disobey your mind.

If you say you have to exercise in the morning,

Try exercising in the afternoon.

If you say that you have to get through a work project before you can go to a social hour,

Go to the social hour and try doing the work later.

Just experiment.

Break some rules.

And you will find that you are the chooser.

The big knowing you.

The wise you.

The compassionate you.

The you that can see through your heart.

Maybe it's you that's sitting at the back of the heart.

That wise version of you.

The you that's bigger than just you alone.

The you that sees more than what your mind and thoughts say are true.

That you.

The you that knows what's right for you.

That you is what decides.

Not your thoughts.

All right.

I hope you enjoyed this episode looking at thoughts,

Exploring thoughts,

Stepping back from thoughts,

And actually call it defusing from thoughts.

And let me know if it's helpful for you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort Podcast.

Wise Effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you.

And when you do so,

You'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.

I would like to thank my team,

My partner in all things,

Including the producer of this podcast,

Craig.

Ashley Hyatt,

The podcast manager.

And thank you to Bangold at Bell and Branch for our music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.