Watching Thoughts Pass: What Meditation and ACT Therapy Have in Common

Many people who come to counselling for anxiety describe feeling trapped by their own thoughts. Worries appear suddenly and feel convincing, urgent, and difficult to ignore. A common instinct is to try to push these thoughts away or argue with them. Unfortunately, this struggle often makes them feel stronger. Two very different traditions offer a surprisingly similar way of approaching this problem: meditation and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

ACT is a modern psychological therapy that helps people develop a different relationship with their thoughts and feelings. Rather than trying to eliminate uncomfortable thoughts, ACT encourages people to notice them and recognise them as mental events rather than facts.

In therapy, this process is often called cognitive defusion. Instead of becoming entangled with a thought such as “I’m going to fail” or “Something terrible will happen”, the client learns to step back slightly and recognise what is happening: “I’m having the thought that I’m going to fail.” The thought is still present, but it is seen more clearly for what it is — a product of the mind.

Interestingly, many people who practise meditation recognise something very similar. I often recommend meditation to my clients, originally because my own experience of it was so that it is hugely beneficial in calming the mind, and also because there are so many reported benefits of meditation to mental health (https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation). It wasn’t until a recent interaction with a client that I made the connection to ACT, and how the practice of reifying ones difficult thoughts and feelings can be clarified via meditative practice.

In many mindfulness-based meditation practices, the instruction is simply to observe what arises in the mind. Thoughts appear, pass through awareness, and fade away. The meditator is encouraged to notice them without chasing them, judging them, or trying to force them to stop. Over time, this practice can lead to an important realisation: a thought is not the same thing as reality. It is something that the mind produces.

ACT works with a similar insight. When we stop fighting thoughts and instead allow them to be present, they often begin to lose some of their power. The struggle itself is frequently what keeps anxiety alive. Trying to suppress thoughts can actually make them return more strongly, a phenomenon well known in psychology. By contrast, when we are able to observe thoughts with a little distance, we create more space to choose how we respond. The thought may still be there, but it no longer has to dictate our behaviour. I deal with this in more detail in this blog post here.

One small difference between meditation and ACT is that ACT places particular emphasis on continuing to act in ways that matter to us, even when difficult thoughts are present. Rather than waiting for the mind to become quiet, we learn to carry our thoughts with us while still moving towards the things we value.

For many people, recognising this connection between meditation and psychological therapy can be reassuring. It shows that the goal is not to eliminate thoughts — something that is almost impossible — but to change our relationship with them. When we learn to watch thoughts come and go, rather than getting caught up in every one of them, the mind can begin to feel like a more manageable place to live.

If this sounds interesting to you, there are free meditation apps readily available such as Medito (https://meditofoundation.org/medito-app/) – though for richer content, there are subscription-based apps such as Headspace.