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Comment by SnacksOnAPlane | Hacker News Reader

I feel like CBT can be counterproductive because it encourages you to ruminate on negative thoughts instead of just not thinking them. You have to examine them and put them into categories like "mindreading" or "catastrophizing", but giving them time in your mind just reinforces that you should be thinking them.

I much prefer mindfulness methods where you immediately think "is this thought useful to me at all?" and if it isn't, you put it out of your mind. Meditation helps with this, as it trains your brain to be able to let go of thoughts.

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Ideally they won't be negative after working on them using CBT. In CBT, you have to be aware of your thoughts too, but instead of thinking "is this thought useful to me", you think "is this thought an accurate representation of my current situation". You then work on changing your thoughts until it is an accurate representation of your current situation. Categories like "mindreading" and "catastrophizing" mean that you are assessing a situation with incomplete information, and training your brain to not make snap judgments can be immensely more helpful than training your brain to just ignore those snap judgments. It does take a lot of work, but a lot of the time the thoughts you need CBT or mindfulness to work through, you get because there's an unresolved conflict in your life that you can't find a resolution for. It's better to train your brain to find a resolution for problems than to ignore them.

There are developments towards approaches that put less emphasis on the negative thoughts and which are more in line with mindfulness. From what I've read, they're at least as effective as CBT, and might well be more effective for people who already ruminate too much (autism, for one). But AFAIK it's too new a 'field' to be too confident about these things. Worth looking into though.

As a fan of zen/mindfulness and as I'm going through CBT currently, I definitely feel some friction between the two approaches.

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