Many of us experience thoughts that we’d rather not have on a regular basis. I think that’s just part of being human. For all I know, it might also be part of being other types of animals as well. In any case, as many people know, the research on stopping or getting rid of your thoughts is not particularly encouraging. There has been a lot of research on whether it works to suppress or try to get rid of thoughts that we don’t want to have. One of the pioneers of this research, Dr. Daniel Wegner (check out the following link for a brief article on his research: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/10/unwanted-thoughts.aspx), conducted a series of experiments in which people were instructed not to think of white bears. Most of us probably don’t think of white bears too often, and when we do, we probably don’t have much of an emotional reaction to these thoughts, unless we live in the Arctic Circle and need to be vigilant about polar bears. As a result, white bears are fairly neutral kind of thought. Even so, it turns out the people are not very good at suppressing thoughts about white bears. More specifically, while they are trying not to think about white bears, people can generally keep these bears out of their minds, but there tends to be a rebound effect. As soon as they are allowed to think about white bears again, they have more such thoughts than people who were allowed to think about them all along. Since these early white bear experiments, many studies have supported the idea that suppressing thoughts is a losing battle. This is bad news if you are someone who worries or ruminates a lot. If you have a lot of repetitive, negative and distressing thoughts, wouldn’t it be much nicer if you were able to stop them somehow? Of course, in modern cognitive behavioural therapy, we often teach people the opposite: It may be more valuable and effective to learn how to experience and accept your thoughts than to try to suppress or get rid of them. I believe in this approach, which is very consistent with the mindfulness and acceptance oriented skills that we teach at the DBT Centre. There are times, however, when I have been in the throes of rumination and wished I could find some way to simply stop the thoughts from flowing through my mind. I imagine most of us have had this experience. Mindfulness of thoughts can be helpful under these circumstances, but a little bit of light distraction or thought stopping is not completely unreasonable. One of the skills that we teach in DBT is called pushing away. The skill of pushing away involves temporarily ignoring, avoiding, and getting your mind off a problem that is bothering you. It’s kind of like, if you were in a house full of chaos, yelling, laughing, and screaming noises everywhere, you might need to move to a quiet room in order to calm down and gather your thoughts before going back into the chaos and finding a way to sort it out. This, I think, is the real value of pushing away. It is a temporary strategy to give yourself a break from the cascade of thoughts and emotions that are making it hard to see a clear, effective path forward. If you can get a short breather from what’s happening in your mind, you might be able to return to it with a fresh perspective, a calmer emotional state, and some new ideas about how to tackle the problems you’ve been thinking about. The trick is not to use pushing away for too long or to overuse it as your go-to coping strategy. Just use it when you need a break from what’s going on in your own mind, make it temporary, and then return to the problem and find a way around it. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.