Let's take a closer look at that thought.

Thanks for checking in! Please write the brief content of your intrusive thought on the line below.

Examples include "I'm such a failure" or "I'm so stupid."

Before we continue

Before we continue, a quick reminder:

If you are experiencing an emergency and require medical or psychiatric care, call 911 or go to your nearest emergency department.

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis and need to speak with a professional, call 988.

This program is designed to help you through your own decision-making process and is not a substitute for therapy. You may think through things with this program but are responsible for your own actions.

Your thought

Click to begin

You can press the button as many times as you like. Notice what happens as the thought changes while the words themselves remain the same.

  • This activity promotes something called cognitive defusion. Often when we experience an intrusive thought, we try to banish it from our minds, but that rarely works because we are actively thinking about what we want to stop thinking about. Inspired by Russ Harris’s intervention of imagining a computer screen and distorting the letters of the text of the thought, this intervention allows your brain to still hold the content of the intrusive thought, while manipulating it outside yourself. This subtly trains your mind to understand the thought as an object it has access to, rather than a fundamental truth of the present reality. With repeated practice, interventions like this can help to move intrusive thoughts from disturbing to neutral.