The insight that can stop a spiral before it takes hold
You’re having a perfectly ordinary morning. Then a thought arrives.
Maybe it’s something your boss said yesterday, replaying on a loop. Maybe it’s a worry about money, a conversation you handled badly, or a creeping sense that you’re falling behind. Within moments, the thought has company: more thoughts, each one adding weight to the last. By the time you reach for your coffee, what started as a passing concern has become a full story, and the story feels entirely real.
This is one of the most common ways stress escalates. Not through the original difficulty itself, but through what we do with it in our minds.
There’s a teaching in mindfulness that I find myself returning to again and again, both in my own practice and with the people I work with: your thoughts are not facts.
It sounds deceptively simple. But for many people, it lands like a genuinely new idea, and once it does, it’s hard to unsee.
Why the Same Moment Can Feel So Different
Here’s a small illustration I use when teaching, drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy. Imagine two versions of the same moment. A colleague walks past you without saying hello. In scenario one, you’ve just had some good news and you’re feeling buoyant. In scenario two, you’re already feeling flat and a bit insecure. Same external event, same colleague. But in one version you barely register it, and in the other you immediately wonder what you did wrong.
The external event was identical. What changed was the thought that arose to meet it, shaped entirely by the mood you were already carrying. And once that thought appeared, the story felt entirely true: they’re ignoring me, I must have upset them, something is wrong.
The insight that our interpretation of events, not the events themselves, drives our distress was central to Aaron Beck’s original work in CBT. When Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was developed by Segal, Williams, and Teasdale in the 1990s, this understanding was woven together with meditation practice to create something more sustained: not just catching unhelpful thoughts in the moment, but gradually transforming your whole relationship to the thinking mind.
John Teasdale, one of the founders of MBCT, calls this quality decentering: the ability to step back and observe your thoughts as passing mental events rather than accurate reflections of reality. The practice is simpler than it sounds. Instead of “I’ve ruined everything,” you might notice: I’m having the thought that I’ve ruined everything. That small shift in language creates a tiny gap between you and the thought. Not distance, exactly. More like breathing room.
When the Story Feels Like Truth
I think of a woman in one of my groups, someone who had been caring for her husband for a long time, navigating an exhausting landscape of appointments and assessments that never seemed to move fast enough. For weeks she had been carrying a steady weight of frustration and judgement: about the systems involved, about the people within them, about whether anything would ever change. And because she had come to expect things to be hard, she had become finely tuned to noticing every moment that confirmed it, each delay, each unhelpful phone call, each letter that seemed to miss the point entirely. The judgements had become a lens, and the more she talked about them, the more entrenched they grew. These felt like facts. And in many ways, they were. Anyone who has tried to coordinate care for someone they love through complex and overstretched systems knows how genuinely difficult it can be. The delays and gaps are real, and the frustration entirely understandable.
What Shifts, and What Doesn’t
But when we came to this teaching, something shifted. She stopped mid-conversation, visibly struck. She’d heard the phrase before, she said, but in that moment it landed differently. She saw those weeks of frustrated certainty, that whole solid story about what was happening and why, as a thought, perhaps for the first time. One interpretation of her situation, built from tiredness and worry, not an unchangeable truth about it. And as that recognition settled, something loosened. She described feeling lighter, as though a weight she hadn’t quite realised she was carrying had shifted just a little. The practical difficulties hadn’t gone away. The appointments were still slow, the letters still frustrating. But the constant rumination, the layer of anticipated difficulty she had been adding on top of each setback, had eased. The situation hadn’t changed. Her relationship to it had. And that, she found, made the actual navigating feel a little more possible.
For some people, this kind of recognition arrives suddenly, as it did for her. For others, it builds more quietly, over weeks of practice, until one day you notice yourself catching a thought spiral earlier than you used to. The thought still arises. But something in you recognises it before it fully takes hold.
This isn’t about positive thinking, or telling yourself that everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s something quieter and more honest: the recognition that the mind generates thoughts constantly, and that not every thought deserves to be believed without question.
A Simple Place to Start
If you’d like to try this, you don’t need to set aside time to meditate, though that helps. You can start simply by noticing, the next time a thought causes you to tighten or worry, whether it might be just that: a thought. You can even try the phrase: I notice I’m having the thought that…
It won’t dissolve the difficulty. But it may change your relationship to it. And that, quietly, changes everything.
If you’d like to explore this kind of practice in more depth, my Thursday evening drop-in is a welcoming space to do just that, online or in person in Barnet, 6.15pm, no experience needed. You can find out more and book via North London Yoga.
Ruth McDonald is a BAMBA-registered mindfulness teacher. She teaches weekly drop-in sessions and works with individuals and groups in London and online.
