Thought Matters: What to Do When Your Thoughts Keep Playing Over in Your Mind

March 2025

Mental Health

"It is when your inner experiences and thoughts have less of a hold and influence on you, that you can be present and are able to take effective action."

 

A quick Google search tells us that on average, human beings have as many as 60,000 thoughts a day. Interestingly, it has also been suggested that 90 percent of these thoughts might be repetitive thoughts, meaning they are thoughts that we have had before, through the day or from previous days. Many of our human thoughts can be random, seemingly “coming out of nowhere”, and can be either positive or negative. Normally, these thoughts come and go, much like passers-by on a street. 

What happens however, when we give too much weight to negative thoughts, and become fixated on them? When we start to repeatedly dwell on negative or distressing thoughts, repeatedly thinking about them, their causes, effects and consequences? This is known as rumination. A more concrete definition of rumination is that it is a maladaptive thought process where one is trapped in a cycle of negative thoughts that endlessly loops in the mind. 

Such a preoccupation with distressing thoughts has many consequences for our mental and emotional health. Rumination has been shown to be a risk or vulnerability factor for future mental health conditions, such as depression and generalised anxiety disorder. Quite a few of us would have been through such experiences before – where we feel unable to break out of a thought cycle that loops over and over again, struggling to break free or just “stop thinking about it”. 

Here is where the concept of thought defusion might actually come in handy. Thought defusion is a therapeutic technique that is part of a larger therapy modality called Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) which is used to treat various forms of psychopathology. Broadly speaking, ACT focuses a great deal on acceptance – everyone goes through pain and hardships, but that should not prevent us from living a full and meaningful life. ACT prioritizes mindfulness, flexibility, and a committed focus on changing how we relate to our feelings, thoughts and emotions; and not by changing them. Within ACT, thought defusion is a specific technique that seeks to address ruminative thought patterns. 

Think of what it means for something to be fused with something else – they become intertwined, inseparable. What happens to one thing, will inevitably affect the other. This is what it feels like with our thoughts when we are ruminating. Our thoughts feel so tightly attached to us that we forget that our thoughts are in fact, separate from us. When our thoughts become so fused to ourselves, they WILL influence and manage us. 

Defusion is then the opposite of that. This does not mean we don’t have negative thoughts anymore, nor is it about avoiding these thoughts. In fact, it is about accepting that they are present, but they are separate from ourselves. When we realise our thoughts are not us, and are actually a distinct entity, much like words and pictures, we can take a step back and “watch our thoughts” instead. Rather than looking at things “from” our thoughts because we are attached to them, we try looking AT them. 

We can understand this a little better with a simple metaphor exercise. 

Imagine you are sitting by a stream of water that is filled with leaves, gently flowing down the current of water. Now, imagine placing your thoughts on each leaf floating on the water. As you sit by this stream, gently imagine your thoughts flowing down the river on the leaves, watching them just go by after acknowledging their existence. 

This is what it feels like to defuse from our thoughts. It is not about suppressing, avoiding, or pushing them away, but accepting them, recognising them as they are and watching them go by. It puts distance between ourselves and our thoughts and emotions, and it can be applied to our attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and even our memories. 

It is when your inner experiences and thoughts have less of a hold and influence on you, that you can be present and are able to take effective action. This is the objective of defusion and ultimately you will be able to ask yourself questions such as whether a thought or belief is helping you, or preventing you from leading a more purposeful and fulfilling life. 

Thought defusion is something that does take time and practice, especially when it sometimes feels and seems counterintuitive. However, it does work better over time, and is ultimately a useful tool that can help us break free from cycles of rumination. 

The next time you find yourself on the brink of getting trapped in a negative thought cycle, try these simple thought defusion exercises: 

1. Pause and recognise you are HAVING these thoughts, but your thoughts are not you
2. I notice that I am having (insert thought here)
3. Slow down your thoughts – imagine hearing your thoughts in very, very slow motion
4. Practice the leaves on a stream exercise

Remember, what we are thinking about matters less than how we relate to these thoughts. Let’s work on changing our relationship with distressing and negative thoughts that pop up, by accepting and defusing from them! 

 

By Tammy 

Tammy is graduating from her NUS psychology course and aspires to be a clinical psychologist. Passionate about mental health issues, she hopes to be able to help as many as she can. She empathizes with those who are experiencing such struggles, as she herself has had to deal with ill mental health. Reading, dancing and going to the gym are activities that she enjoys, and she shares that her favourite carbohydrate is bread.