Hi, welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. You know, one of the most important abilities that we want to cultivate in meditation and in life is the ability to unhook from our thoughts, especially the unhelpful ones that get us caught up in stress and suffering. So let me give you an example of why this matters so much. Let's say you wake up one morning and you look out the window and you see rain coming in. And then this thought comes in.

What a dreadful day. Now, is it true that the day is dreadful? No, of course not. It's just raining. However, if you believe that thought, if you get hooked by it, then you will experience that day as dreadful, you know. So in other words, a thought like that can pull us into negativity.

Uh, other thoughts can draw us into experiencing anxiety, anger, or low self-worth. Now, when we're hooked by our thoughts, they pull us into a kind of hypnosis. Now, when we're hooked by our thoughts, what happens is we tend to really take them very seriously. We mistake them for the truth. Now there's a term in psychology for being hooked by our thoughts in this way and it's cognitive fusion.

So there's this experience of being fused with our thoughts. So how can we unhook? How can we diffuse? Well, we don't need to get rid of all of our thoughts. We don't need to actually change them or struggle with them. All we need to do is change the way that we relate to them. So in cognitive diffusion, we see our thoughts for what they are, mental events, bits of language that pass through our minds and we don't take our thoughts to be the truth, we don't play them out as if they're real or we don't take them too seriously.

So in that way, the hypnosis is broken. So let's go back to the same scenario as before. You know, you're laying in bed, you look out the window and you see rain coming down. And then the thought comes in, what a dreadful day. But what you see is you see that thought arise and fall away, just like you see the rain falling.

Doesn,'t there's no negativity, no problem. So you're free to just lay there, enjoying the pitter patter of rain on the roof. We can continuously cultivate this capacity to unhook from our thoughts by practicing meditation. But you can do this in daily life too. If you ever find yourself caught up in an unhelpful thought, simply take a pause for a moment and just remember your thoughts are not reality.

They really are just thoughts. As soon as you do that, you break the hypnosis. This practice of recognizing unhelpful thinking and learning to unhook is well worth the effort. So the more you practice it, the more it's going to free you from stress and suffering and restore in a piece.