Some therapists are using Songify, a music app, to have patients make recordings of their worried thoughts—and get rid of them.
The underlying principle is that singing your thoughts separates you from their meaning. Almost all people (something like 80 to 90 percent of the population), experience intrusive thoughts—weird little niggling things they don’t particularly want scrolling through their heads.
.. The underlying principle is that singing your thoughts separates you from their meaning. Almost all people (something like 80 to 90 percent of the population), experience intrusive thoughts—weird little niggling things they don’t particularly want scrolling through their heads.
.. By telling yourself not to think about something, he says, “you’re increasing the number of associates that remind you of it.”
.. Songify was only released four years ago, and it’s even newer to the therapists who use it. But the process behind the Songify technique, called cognitive defusion, has been around for decades. Before the app came along, therapists would have their patients sing their worries to common melodies.
.. “As you try not to think that, you have to remind yourself of it to see if it’s gone away,” Hayes said. “And there it is again.”
.. “As you try not to think that, you have to remind yourself of it to see if it’s gone away,” Hayes said. “And there it is again.”
.. He said it tends to work best with people who realize their fears are slightly irrational, or at least are being over-thought. (Someone who just lost his job and is facing very real worries about making rent, for example, might not be the best candidate.)
.. He said it tends to work best with people who realize their fears are slightly irrational, or at least are being over-thought. (Someone who just lost his job and is facing very real worries about making rent, for example, might not be the best candidate.)
.. Other people put their worst thoughts on t-shirts, or send themselves emails that say, “Did you know you’re unlovable?” “You start playing with your own dark side and give yourself some distance from it,” Hayes said.
.. The point isn’t to suggest that the person’s worries aren’t scary, says Winston, it’s to develop “a different relationship with the thought.”
Trust the River
We all want to manufacture an answer to take away our anxiety and settle the dust. To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that we usually have to let go of our attachments to feelings–which are going to pass away anyway (which is the irony of it all). People of deep faith develop a high tolerance for ambiguity, and come to recognize that it is only the small self that needs certitude or perfect order all the time. The Godself is perfectly at home in the River of Mystery.
A Drug to Cure Fear
What she found was remarkable. Those who got the propranolol alone and those who got the placebo had no improvement in their anxiety. But the arachnophobes who were exposed to the spider and given the drug were able to touch the tarantula within days and, by three months, many felt comfortable holding the spider with their bare hands. Their fear did not return even at the end of one year.
.. These studies suggest that someday, a single dose of a drug, combined with exposure to your fear at the right moment, could free you of that fear forever.
.. To the contrary, you still remember your biography, but your fear would be stripped of its force. The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.
The Anxieties of Impotence
The Republican establishment thinks the grass roots have the power but the grass roots think the reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall Street thinks the regulators do. The Pew Research Center asked Americans, “Would you say your side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of Americans, with majorities of both parties, believe their side has been losing more.
.. Americans are beset by complex, intractable problems that don’t have a clear villain: technological change displaces workers; globalization and the rapid movement of people destabilize communities; family structure dissolves; the political order in the Middle East teeters, the Chinese economy craters, inequality rises, the global order frays, etc.
.. Those institutions have been weakened of late. Parties have been rendered weak by both campaign finance laws and the Citizens United decision, which have cut off their funding streams and given power to polarized super-donors who work outside the party system.
.. The fact is, for all the problems we may have with Wall Street or Washington, our biggest problems are systemic — the disruptions caused by technological progress and globalization, mass migration, family breakdown and so on. There’s no all-controlling Wizard of Oz to slay.