Quote Originally Posted by coppersocks View Post
Heya Mike, good to see you here!
I actually will disagree with CD here as it sounds like a good idea in principle to me. Part of mindfulness is disassociating yourself from the paths of thought that your mind is led down and realising them as just that - where your attention is at any one moment. There's a mindfulness technique called "labelling" that is designed to help this and it is taught to people who have trouble with anxiety in some cognitive behavioral therapy cases; simply put whilst meditating, when your mind drifts you simply label what it was that caught your attention as a "thought" or an "emotion" and then direct your attention back to the breathe. The labeling of the what it was your mind was following allows you a brief enough window to enable you to disassociate from it and then refocus on the breathe. The important part here is that the "labeling" must be done extremely lightly - not much though must go into it at all. The visualization is often described as touching it with a feather, and it must be done without judgement or afterthought - you simply go "oh thats a thought I've been following" or "I've been following that emotion, now back to the breathe"..it must be done lightly. So yeah, theoretically I can imagine this technique working with labeling your thought patterns as names.:

*Want to talk to a girl but your nervous about it envisioning all kind of bad things that can go wrong
"Oh hi anxious Dave, can't talk right now got stuff to do" - and then back to the present moment.
Doing this enough could really help by allowing you to realise how often these things are happening as simply recording the amount of times you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts about yourself is proven to greatly REDUCE the amount of negative thinking you do about yourself when done over time. And it would also help by catching yourself from following that negative thought path in the moment, declare it unhelpful to yourself and help return you to the moment. Really this is all just different techniques of getting your mind to the same place but yeah it does seem an interesting experiment to try.
Obviously, I'm of the mind here of what ever works for someone, is what they should do. That's going to be different for everyone. But in my opinion....and you stated it in the beginning here "Part of mindfulness is disassociating yourself from the paths of thought....etc." In my opinion, it's just that...but it's dissassociating yourself from paths of thought....PERIOD. To me all of those mental gymnastics just sound like more thought, not less. I guess I just don't see how adding more thought when you're trying to get less makes sense. For me it was always easier to just push the thought out when it came....no matter what it was. I just focused on "nothing"

If other people have success with doing all of that, then for them it makes sense.