As long as you have a functioning brain, you can NEVER stop thinking. The brain never shuts off, even when asleep. Unfortunately, thoughts can often be pretty damn powerful and even hijack neurochemical and hormonal processes. Fear-based thoughts, repeated over a long period of time, can eventually wreak havoc on the body. Constant depressive ruminating, can result in physiological responses (stress) to the body.
Many individuals require constant external focus on outside activities to avoid internal activation. The very moment they pause from external focus they become tormented by interior dialogue or ego scripts. One way to alleviate that internal suffering is through ego defusion.I often work with folks who find leaving their house extremely difficult, because of the fearful thoughts that seem to automatically arise, not only upon leaving the house, but in just thinking about the potential of leaving the house. Yet, eventually, these fears magnify and manifest even in the safety of the home, to where the home loses its status as a safe sanctuary.
Thought suppression - Seeking NOT to think specific thoughts that are painful and elicit an uncomfortable emotional reaction can result in experiential avoidance in which you avoid settings, events and even people who might provoke the thinking that you don’t like or that literally torments you. But the thoughts still arise. This was proven in Wegners White Bear Experiment in which subjects were informed to think about anything but a "white bear" and if they did think about a white bear they were to ring a bell which, as the video below demonstrates, they could not stop ringing.
Wegner's White Bear Experiment
Once a thought somehow becomes dangerous (activates your 'fight or flight' hormones) you magnify the need to think it because you've alerted the brain to watch out for it, thereby, reinforcing its appearance, resulting in a negative feedback loop that grows stronger each time the thought arises.Intrusive thoughts - thoughts simply arise. But often can become fixated themes (like musical earworms). The thought of running your car into a telephone pole, throwing your child out a 3 story window, stabbing a co worker, etc, etc, just rise and fall, a momentary lapse into irrationality. However, when these thoughts occur and hijack the stress response, resulting in prolonged physiological experiences, they can be reinforced in the brain circuitry and become repetitive and evoke rumination or dwelling on the thoughts and can even radically change behavior.
Characterizing Pure 'O' and OCD
Exposure and response prevention and ACT processing: With ERP you engage the compulsion and do not respond in the usual way. With Acceptance and commitment therapy you accept the thoughts and commit to continue acting and behaving in accordance with your values.
In other words, if you have intrusive thoughts, rather than anticipating the brain allowing these thoughts to arise and dreading the experience, you actually engage the experience over and over again to desensitise and extinguish the emotional (limbic/amygdala) response.
With ACT therapy there is an ongoing acceptance (operative term) of the thoughts and that the thoughts will arise, due to being consistently reinforced through the HPA axis or stress response. Hence, through repeated exposure the brain (amygdala) becomes “habituated” and is no longer emotionally “charged” or affected by the stimulus. There are many stimuli that occur all around you that the brain is habituated to ignore and ERP seeks to cultivate that same habituation through repetitive exposure.
Irrational vs Rational Worry
EGO DEFUSION: Turning Down the Volume on Suffering
SUBCONSCIOUS SHADOWS: You can run, but you can't hide
Lost in the Matrix of Your Mind
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