Aiming it#
Overthinking as a skill you can point, and the provenance of everything here.
I’m having the thought that I’m going to fail this#
Not “I’m going to fail this.”
The whole technique is six words#
Cognitive defusion, from Steven Hayes’ work on acceptance and commitment therapy.
It does not argue with the thought, disprove it, or replace it with a nicer one. Those all take the thought seriously enough to fight it.
It puts a gap between the thought and you. It sounds ridiculous the first few times. That is fine.
Aim it at the good#
Run the full layered-analysis machinery on the best realistic version of something you are waiting on.
Same rigour. Same refusal to stop early.
Watch what resistance shows up (this feels indulgent, isn’t this just wishful thinking) and treat it as data rather than a reason to stop.
Act anyway#
Shoma Morita, Japan, c.1920, for shinkeishitsu, a nervous and self-scrutinising disposition.
Western approaches reduce the feeling first, then act. Morita’s position was that unpleasant feelings are natural features of having emotions, not malfunctions to remove. Accept the weather. Do what needs doing.
Pilot RCT by Sugg, Richards and Frost, 2018. Promising, not established.
The next time you are waiting to feel calm enough to start, notice that you are waiting, and start anyway.
Other people close your loops#
Chibanda and colleagues (2016, JAMA) in Zimbabwe ran six sessions of problem-solving therapy delivered by trained grandmothers, on wooden benches outside clinics, in Shona.
Greater reductions in depression and anxiety than usual care, still there at six months.
Built for its context rather than imported into it. And the mechanism is another person, not a technique you apply to yourself.
Borrowed and renamed#
The ten minutes was not invented by the researchers who measured it.
Kabat-Zinn (2011) does not hide the lineage. Husgafvel (2019) shows the tidy “MBSR = Vipassana” story is too simple. Mahāyāna, Zen and Dzogchen teachers all shaped it.
The accurate sentence is the less quotable one. Adapted from Buddhist contemplative traditions, plural, and then renamed.
The pattern to watch for#
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | A practice lives in a community, with a teacher and obligations |
| 2 | A Western populariser compresses it into a graphic or a mantra |
| 3 | It recirculates as ancient authenticity, minus the community |
| 4 | The point moves from repairing something between people to optimising an individual |
The four-circle ikigai was made by a British blogger in 2014. Four-phrase hoʻoponopono is a 2000s self-help product.
A framework that disagrees with this course#
Gee, Dudgeon, Schultz, Hart and Kelly (2014) describe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing, built on seven domains of connection. Body; mind and emotions; family and kinship; community; culture; Country; spirituality and ancestors.
Mind and emotions is one of seven. Almost everything this course does lives in that single domain.
Not resolved here. Deliberately left standing.