Here’s where mindfulness really helps.

A mindful approach to thoughts doesn’t involve suppressing or ‘fixing’ thoughts.

Instead, thoughts are recognized as mental events or phenomena that arise in the mind all the time. Imagine a thought that comes to you in a difficult situation (something like “I’ll never be able to do this” ). Instead of initially grasping onto the thought as something that’s concrete, real or true (and thereby strengthening it by elaboration), we can practice simply observing our thoughts as they occur and then pass away. We begin to see that thoughts are temporary; they come and go. We can gain more perspective on our thinking.

Attention can shift to the meta-level process of ‘thinking’ instead of clinging on to specific thoughts.