Host explains diffusion from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and leads guided exercises—visualizing thoughts on a screen or leaves on a river—plus labeling distortions and thanking the mind to create distance and respond calmly.
The host reintroduces the 15% Better series and defines diffusion within acceptance and commitment therapy, explaining its mindfulness-based approach and why it helps separate thoughts from actions. This sets up the problem of negative thoughts in chronic pain and leads into practical application.
A brief guided exercise asks you to visualize thoughts and feelings on a screen or as leaves on a river, promoting gentle observation and healthy detachment. It's a simple practice to notice experiences without getting pulled into them.
Introduces labeling techniques—asking whether a thought is helpful or if it's catastrophizing/black-and-white thinking—to reduce a thought's power. The host shows how naming distortions creates distance and prevents automatic reactions.
Presents a counterintuitive strategy of thanking your mind and body for signaling pain or anxiety, then responding pragmatically (e.g., taking it easy or preparing for a meeting). This acknowledgement can calm intensity and reduce stress.
The video recaps how to apply diffusion in daily life and points viewers toward the next episode on cognitive reframing. It encourages viewers to try these exercises and watch the follow-up for more tools.
Welcome back to 15% Better, my series on managing chronic pain and chronic illness. And today we're going to be diving into a very specific skill. And over the next couple of videos, I'm going to provide for you a couple coping skills on how to manage chronic pain and change your mindset around it. The skill we're going to talk about today is known as diffusion, and it comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, which is a type of cognitive therapy that takes more of a mindfulness approach. So basically, we're not trying to change our thoughts, feelings, or behaviors directly, it's more about noticing them, being aware of them, accepting them, and then being able to make commitments to making changes based on what your values are.
Diffusion is all about separating from these negative thoughts and feelings that come automatically in a more healthy way. We all have negative thoughts that cross our mind and we tend to latch on to them. We accept them as truth and we let them ruin our day, whether it's with our mood, anxiety, or just general stress. Where acceptance and commitment differs from a lot of other therapies is how it views negative thoughts. It tries to reframe them and say, well, these negative thoughts, when we call them negative, well, we're putting a judgment on them.
We give them more power. So instead, let's refer to them as natural thoughts because these negative thoughts or natural thoughts are going to be part of our day-to-day. There's no way of escaping them. So when we try to fight them, we put more emphasis on them and again, give them more power. When it comes to some of the issues with chronic pain and chronic illness and the things that we struggle with collectively that we've talked about in the problem video, there's going to be negative thoughts that are associated with it and that are going to be common amongst those who suffer.
For example, my family is burdened by me. My pain is going to prevent me from having a good life. I'm not going to be able to get up and go to the grocery store today because I know my pain is going to make it worse or there's no solutions to my chronic pain. The medical community does not care about me and there's nothing out there for me. So what diffusion teaches us is that these natural thoughts not necessarily true. Just because we feel them does not mean that they're truth and that we don't have to necessarily make decisions based on them.
And that's where the interaction of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors come in. If I'm having negative thoughts, well, then I feel bad. If I feel bad and I believe that these things are true then I'm gonna make decisions based on them like not even attempt to get medical care or not do the activities that I like to do and then what happens I have negative thinking and the cycle continues. So diffusion is a way to break that cycle at the point of our thoughts. So that's enough background how do we practically apply the skill of diffusion?
Well there are a ton of different exercises we could do and I'm gonna share three that are really practical easy and that you could do throughout your day. This first diffusion exercise Exercise helps you have a healthy detachment from your thoughts and feelings while still noticing and experiencing them. So close your eyes and imagine the thoughts and feelings coming in are on a screen in front of you. You're observing them. Or imagine those thoughts and feelings are leaves just rolling down the river.
Watch them come and watch them go. The next skill involves separating the distressing thoughts and feelings from the reality of the situation through using labeling. For example, asking, is this thought helpful? Is it catastrophizing? Is this black and white thinking? And by putting a label on it, you are taking some of the power away and separating the feeling from the reality. When we have distressing thoughts, we tend to skew negative. There's usually some truth behind them. However, they usually are distorted.
And in the next video when we talk about actually reframing these thoughts. We're going to go over a list of different cognitive distortions. But for now you can think of a label for what that negative thought is. Let's just say catastrophizing. And when that catastrophizing thought comes in you could look at it and say I'm having a catastrophizing thought. This isn't a catastrophe. So try this exercise and see if putting labels on the thoughts and feelings help give you a healthy separation so they do not have as much power over your day.
The next may seem counterintuitive but thanking your mind and body for doing its job. For example, if you're getting a pain signal, your body is telling you that you have an injury. Now with chronic pain, we wish we could get rid of that pain signal because it's like, yeah, we know. However, when you actually interact with those thoughts that you have and those communications from your body, it actually could help calm it down. For example, if you're having a pain signal coming from your leg, you could say, thank you.
I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take it easy. And for some reason that actually can help just like for stress. For example, if I'm having anxiety about a work meeting, I can say thanks for reminding me of the work meeting. I'm going to get there on time and sometimes that takes the stress and it takes the intensity away. Those are just a few ways you could apply diffusion to your day-to-day practice so you could have a healthy separation from those distressing feelings and emotions. So be sure to stick around for the next video where I talk about a really important skill I do with almost all my clients.
It comes from cognitive behavior therapy and it's called reframing. Reframing is a great way to take those thoughts and feelings that consistently come up that stem from your core beliefs about yourself and the world and making them more realistic through analyzing them from a more critical lens and continuing to practice them. So go ahead and check that out if you want to see some more skills.
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