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Intrusive thoughts when writing can stop you cold. Try these six defusion techniques, from silly voices to thanking your mind.
I have a thought that shows up at roughly the 400-word mark of every first draft I write. It says: your readers will find this boring.
Six words, and they can stop me cold.
For years I treated that thought as an argument I could win. I’d line up my evidence: two books on writing, 10 years as a senior editor at a daily newspaper, many years of coaching writers. I won every time, and then I’d sit there with my hands on the keyboard, writing nothing.
Fighting a thought keeps it in the room
It took me a long time to learn that when you argue with an intrusive thought, you’re still holding it. You’ve picked it up and handed it 20 minutes of your morning. The thought doesn’t care whether it wins the argument because all it really wants is the microphone.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner identified the problem back in 1987. He found that people told not to think about a white bear kept thinking about one anyway, and they thought about it even more once the ban was lifted. Telling your brain to avoid something turns out to be a pretty good way of reminding it.
The alternative comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, where it goes by the name cognitive defusion. The idea sounds a bit weird at first. You don’t need to decide whether the thought is true; you just need to stop treating it like a verdict handed down by a judge.
Akihiko Masuda, Steven Hayes and their colleagues tested one version of this in 2004. Participants boiled a self-critical thought down to a single word, then said it out loud as fast as they could for 30 seconds. Both the discomfort and the believability of the thought dropped, more than they did for people who tried distraction or thought control. The word itself didn’t change. But after half a minute of rapid-fire repetition, it had lost much of its hold on them.
Here are six ways to put defusion to work in your own writing.
1-Say it in a silly voice
Take the sentence your mind hands you and read it aloud in the voice of Kermit the Frog. Or try a sportscaster calling a playoff game: “She has nothing to say, folks, nothing at all.” The words stay the same, but they stop sounding like a ruling from on high. It’s hard to feel crushed by a thought that sounds like a kazoo.
2-Repeat it until it’s noise
This is the Masuda exercise, and it starts with boiling the thought down to a single word, such as fraud or boring. Then say that word out loud, fast, for 30 seconds. Somewhere around the 15-second mark, it stops sounding like an accusation and starts sounding like noise, something between a duck call and a plumbing complaint. You’ll feel ridiculous doing this, so shut the door first and then do it anyway.
3-Put a label on the front
Instead of “I’m a terrible writer,” try “I’m having the thought that I’m a terrible writer.” Then go one step further: “I notice I’m having the thought that I’m a terrible writer.” Yes, it’s clunky, but the clunkiness is what makes it work. Those extra words put a pane of glass between you and the sentence. Once the glass is there, you can look at the thought rather than through it.
4-Ask how old the story is
Try dating the thought by asking when you first heard it and whose voice it was in. Many of the cruellest sentences in my clients’ heads were written by somebody else long ago, often a teacher with a red pen or a workshop leader having a bad decade.
One client told me her thought was 30 years old. So, I asked whether she’d take career advice from a Grade 8 English teacher who retired in 2003 and now mostly golfs.
She laughed. Then she wrote 900 words.
5-Thank your mind
Say it out loud and mean it: “Thanks, mind. Noted.” Your mind isn’t sabotaging you for sport. It’s trying to protect you from humiliation, an instinct that made sense when humiliation could get you thrown out of the group. It makes less sense now that the worst case is a lukewarm review from a stranger with a cat as an avatar. Treat the thought the way you’d treat a colleague who keeps forwarding you articles about the collapse of publishing. Say thanks and otherwise ignore it.
6-Let them ride, but keep the wheel
Picture yourself driving a bus. Every critic you’ve ever let into your head is riding in the back, and they all have loud opinions about your route and your commas. Let them shout as much as they like because nobody back there has a licence.
What this is not
This isn’t positive thinking. I’m not asking you to answer “I’m a fraud” with “I’m a genius,” because your mind will reject that the way a body rejects the wrong organ. Defusion asks for something easier. Let the thought stay on the bus and say its lines while your hands keep typing.
I’m not aiming for a silent mind. Mine still tells me my readers will find this boring, right on schedule, at about the 400-word mark. These days I say, “Noted, thanks,” and then I write the next 400 words.
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