Thoughts are not facts

Three psychologists, Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale, had a problem in the 1990s. Their patients recovered from depression and then, a year or two later, half of them relapsed. The treatments worked; they just didn't last. So in 2002 they took Kabat-Zinn's eight-week course and wove into it the tools of cognitive therapy, and built Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. In people who'd had three or more episodes, it cut relapse roughly in half.

What they discovered about why is the key for everyone, not just for people who've been depressed. Relapse didn't begin with a bad event. It began with a bad mood, which triggered a familiar train of thought, "I'm useless, this always happens, nothing will change," which the person believed, which deepened the mood, which strengthened the thoughts. A loop. The loop ran on one error: treating the thoughts as facts.

Mindfulness breaks the loop by changing the relationship to the thought, not the thought itself. You don't argue with "I'm useless." You notice it as a thought, a mental event, like a cloud passing, and you let it pass. The phrase they teach is thoughts are not facts. Once you've seen a thought as a thought, it has less power to run you.

I'll say the clinical thing clearly. If you've had episodes of depression, the course is designed for you and your coach will point you to it, and to a therapist if you need one now. For everyone else, the method is the same. Every mind runs loops. The practice is to catch the first thought, call it a thought, and watch where it was trying to take you.