Overcoming Attention Biases 59
how you distract yourself, however, distraction doesn’t con-
stitute a form of mindfulness per se. As described earlier,
mindfulness techniques focus on changing your relationship
to internal thoughts rather than changing the content of your
thoughts. Using distraction doesn’t necessarily teach you
how to confront your emotions. Instead, it encourages you
to alter what you are thinking about in the first place.
Therefore, distraction certainly can be helpful, but we don’t
advocate using it often or long term.
A mindful approach to attention requires you to culti-
vate a nonjudgmental and nonreactive stance toward your
emotions. The negative emotion itself can still be present in
your mind. In other words, you are being asked not to avoid
thinking about unwanted thoughts and distress, but rather
to change your relationship to such mental events. As figure
2.1 indicates, observation of your fear and your physical
symptoms of anxiety can lead you to try to control your
emotions by engaging in negative, repetitive thinking strate-
gies such as worry and rumination. These strategies,
however, result in heightened anxiety and might confirm
self- defeating beliefs that you are unable to handle scary sit-
uations. W hen you pay attention to your thoughts, emo-
tions, and bodily sensations in a nonreactive manner, you
will worry and ruminate less often.
Though this will be explained in greater detail in the
next section, nonjudgmental and nonreactive attention
comprises a number of important features. The first is that
there’s no great need for you to distract yourself from nega-
tive thoughts. It’s fine for you to accept random negative
thoughts as a part of normal mental phenomena that require
no further action on your part. Second, whenever negative