Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health.

You have a million thoughts a day, but you don't even notice them. You just believe them.

We swim through our thoughts like a fish swims through water. We don't even notice that the way

we think colors our view of the world. Or sometimes we do notice, right? Sometimes we notice

thoughts we don't like. And then we don't know what to do with them. Sometimes you fight them or you struggle against them, but, you know, if, for example, you think,

oh, I'm such an idiot, and then you tell yourself, no, I'm the smartest person in the world,

that doesn't necessarily feel any better. So sometimes you get stuck in an endless loop of

overthinking, obsessively struggling against a thought, or obsessively

worrying about something. But that's not any better because struggle steals your attention

and your energy. Our thoughts are like glasses. They are the lens through which we see the world.

If you think the world is a terrible, mean place, that's what you'll see. If you think people

are inherently good, that's what you'll find. In this video, you're going to learn how to get

unstuck from your thoughts. You're going to learn how to look at your thoughts instead of through

them. You're going to learn how to take off your glasses, how to look at them, and then decide if you

want to hang on to them, or if you want to

choose a different pair. This skill is called cognitive diffusion. It's the difference between

having a thought and buying a thought. This is such a powerful skill for processing emotions and

fighting depression and anxiety. If you want to improve your mental health, the skill of cognitive

diffusion teaches you to separate yourself from your thoughts.

And this can give you power over your thoughts instead of letting them run the show.

...