Hello Fabulous Traveler,

If you labeled every thought you had as either helpful or not helpful, how many thoughts do you think you would be better off without?

In the Cold War spy thriller Bridge of Spies, a Russian spy named Abel is captured in America. Abel finds himself in a very tricky situation.

If he doesn’t cooperate with the Americans, they will most likely kill him, but if he does cooperate with them, the Russians will most likely kill his family. Yet, somehow he remains calm throughout the whole ordeal.

His lawyer, constantly surprised by his serenity asks him,

“Do you never worry?”

Surprised by the question, Abel asks in return,

“Would it help?”

Being able to calmly and intelligently question the usefulness of your own thoughts will allow you to focus on what really matters.

Certain emotions and thoughts only hold us back, preventing us from doing what we set out to do or tempting us into doing things we shouldn’t. If we’re not careful, these poisonous thoughts are able to influence and control our actions, the opposite of self-control.

It’s a good idea to ask this question whenever you encounter a negative or distracting idea: “Are these thoughts helpful?”. When you observe and question the utility of a thought, it becomes easy to detect and deter these “Self-Control Hijackers” that can sabotage your plans.

Here’s an example of a “Self-Control Hijacker” you may have encountered before.

It’s the night before a big exam and you’ve just sat down to start studying. As you start looking over your notes, you start to panic because you realize you don’t know nearly as much as you thought you did. As the fear of failing overwhelms you, you take a deep breath and ask yourself:

“Is this fear going to help me on my exam?”

Clearly, it can only stress you out and distract you from studying. With this realization, the fear dissolves and in its place you find only motivation and determination.

“Regardless of what happens during the exam tomorrow, my friends and family will still love me, I’ll still be breathing, and I always have next semester!”

Learning to distance yourself from your thoughts and to judge them as they truly are will allow you to make the right decisions and gain control over your mind.

The Strangers Living in our Brain

One study from the British Journal of Health Psychology compared multiple methods for resisting temptations.

The researchers gave participants a bag of chocolate to carry around for 5 days and asked them to avoid eating them if they could. They split the volunteers into a few groups and taught each group, except the control, a different method of resisting the temptation to eat the chocolate.

The group that practiced something called Cognitive Defusion ate the fewest chocolates by far.

Cognitive Defusion is the act of distancing yourself from your thoughts. It’s the process of realizing that a thought is just that, a thought, and you have no obligation to listen to it or act on it.

Emotions are essential to our lives, but when we let them hijack our decision making it can feel like we are spectators in our own lives.

By understanding the ways in which our emotions and thoughts influence us, we can learn to use our brains more effectively.

Imagine being able to focus the full power of your mind on whatever you wish, expertly dodging the distractions it throws at you, learning to detect the tricks it tries to pull.

Cognitive Defusion is a learnable skill, and like all other learnable skills, it takes practice to master. Here’s a visualization technique perfect for practicing, it’s the same one used in the study mentioned above. It’s called The Mindbus.

Everyone off the Mindbus

It’s sometime early in the morning and you’re driving a large sluggish bus with a handful of very cartoonish characters. Each is very different and all are quite ugly with exaggerated features.

Near the front of the bus you see Anger. He’s short and round with a v-shaped unibrow and glowing red skin. Behind him sit Distraction, Embarrassment, Hunger, and Boredom, each as different as the next.

You see a bus stop up ahead with a big sign that says ANGER. As you open the door, you look back and Anger saunters off grumbling. As he steps off, the bus springs upward a few

centimeters as the load lightens.

You pull up to 4 more stops and at each one a passenger steps off and the bus becomes lighter and more nimble. With the bus now empty, you zoom off towards your day as the sun rises. You know it’s going to be a great day now that you’ve offloaded your passengers.

This technique is a great way to distance yourself from your most common “Self-Control Hijackers” because you assign each thought a memorable character. This way, each time you encounter a thought from one of these characters, the image of their face pops into your head and you can simply visualize yourself hitting the breaks and offloading the hoodlum.

A study on how emotions shape behaviour showed that they can often automatically trigger a response, such as a smell but by replacing the automatic response with this visualization, you can stop the Hijacker.

For example if, while out shopping, you walked by a bakery and the smell of freshly baked muffins found its way up your nose, you would instantly crave the taste of a warm blueberry muffin dissolving in your mouth.

If you aren’t careful, emotions like these can easily hijack your mind and before you realize what happened, you could find yourself with a bloated stomach and feeling of regret for having failed your diet.

However, if the smell instead were to conjure up an image of a large green monster named Hunger that you’d created, you’d hit the brakes and order him off the bus and be on your healthy way.

This Week’s Plan

One Time Action

Get out your favorite notebook and write down the 3 negative thoughts or temptations that you struggle with the most.

Using the Mindbus technique we discussed, create a character to go along with each thought/temptation. Write them down in vivid detail.

Watch the movie Inside Out by Pixar for inspiration for characters. Otherwise, here’s a few examples to help you brainstorm.

Distracting thoughts could be either a hyperactive little boy who can’t stop talking about whatever pops into his head.

Embarrassed thoughts could be either a tall slender man who jerks his head at the slightest noise and yelps whenever someone says his name.

Be creative when creating each Hijackers profile. The more unique the imagery and the more detail you use to write about the thoughts they represent, the easier it will be for you to remember them in the heat of the moment.

Place the notebook or sticky note somewhere near your bed so that when you wake up in the morning, you can remind yourself of the thoughts to visualize during your habit.

Your goal

For the next week, practice the MindBus technique as a part of your morning routine.

During your Get Inspired habit, sit down in a comfortable position and start the visualization. Make sure you address all 5 of the emotions you wrote down. It’s ok to look back at the descriptions you wrote until you have them memorized.

When you’re ready to commit to this challenge, press Accept below.

Once you’ve sent each negative thought on its way, announce to yourself outloud that if you encounter any of these thoughts later in the day that you’ll recognize it and send it along again.

What Are We Doing?

We often trust our own ideas as much as we trust our own decisions. But thoughts can be random and everyone produces bad ideas sometimes. By distancing ourselves from our thoughts, we can learn to judge them unbiasedly and make more rational decisions as well as stick to our goals and maintain self-control.

Until next week Fabulous Traveler, when we’ll give you a great scenario to practice Cognitive Defusion.