Defusion changes your relationship to a thought instead of arguing with what it says. Type the one that has you hooked and the exercise walks five steps with you — in this tab, nothing uploaded.
Only the runs you pressed Save on. They live in this browser’s local storage under the key na.defusions, on this device — never uploaded, no account, no sync. Remove one with its delete link, or all of them with Delete all saved runs; both ask you to confirm first, and neither can be undone. Download writes a JSON file to your device and Plain text gives you something to copy or print.
Not therapy, not a crisis service; if you are in danger, contact your local emergency number.
A thought you are fused with is not experienced as a thought. It is experienced as the situation. “I'm going to embarrass myself” arrives with the authority of a weather report, and you start planning around it — rehearsing, avoiding, scanning the room. You are looking through the sentence at a world it has already coloured in.
Defusion is the shift to looking at the sentence. Same words, no rebuttal, no attempt to delete them — just the added recognition that this is language happening in a mind. In acceptance and commitment therapy the standard framing is that you stop trying to change what the thought says and change how tightly you are holding it.
That is the whole distinction, and it is worth being precise about, because the other obvious move — take the thought seriously as a claim, list the evidence for and against it, write a fairer version — is a different technique. That one is cognitive restructuring, it comes from classical CBT, and it lives in the CBT thought record on its own page. Both are useful. They are not the same operation, and doing one while believing you are doing the other tends to end in an argument with your own head.
Defusion is one of the six processes in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by Steven C. Hayes and colleagues from the 1980s onward and grounded in relational frame theory, an account of how humans learn to relate words to each other and then respond to the words as if they were the things. ACT groups defusion with acceptance, contact with the present moment, self-as-context, values, and committed action, and calls the whole set psychological flexibility.
The exercises themselves are older and stranger than the framework. Repeating a word until it turns to noise was described by Edward B. Titchener in A Beginner's Psychology in 1916; the name “semantic satiation” comes from Leon Jakobovits James's 1962 doctoral dissertation. This page describes that provenance and no more: it does not tell you what the exercise will do for you.
Say the thought you typed is I'm going to embarrass myself in the meeting. Here is the sequence the tool above runs, and the mechanism each step is reaching for.
You can move backwards and forwards between the steps, and re-run the whole thing on the same thought or a different one. Nothing carries over between runs unless you ask it to: step five has a save button, and the only thing saving changes about a later run is that step three shows you the story titles you have used before.
Nothing typed here is ever uploaded. There is no server to upload it to: the exercise is a few hundred lines of JavaScript running in your tab, and the file it runs from — tools.js — is served unminified from this domain, so you can read it. By default the thought lives in the page's memory and nowhere else, so closing the tab is the delete button.
The one exception is a button you press yourself. At step five, Save this run to this device writes a single entry to your browser's localStorage under the key na.defusions — the story title, the thought, the two 0–10 hook numbers and the date, and nothing else. It is never automatic, never silent, and it never leaves the device: the same browser on the same machine is the only place that entry exists. It is there because step three asks you to name the story so you can spot it next time, and an instruction that spans sessions needs something that survives the tab. The newest 30 runs are kept; save a 31st and the oldest drops off.
Removing what you saved is one click and a confirmation, in both directions: every entry under Saved runs on this device has its own delete, and Delete all saved runs empties the key. You can also take the runs with you — Download my saved runs writes a JSON file, and Plain text renders them for copying or printing. If your browser has site data blocked or you are in a private window, saving is simply unavailable and the page says so; all five steps still run exactly as they do otherwise.
What the page deliberately does not do with those numbers: it never charts them, averages them, totals them, or tells you a run of falling scores means you are getting better. A 0–10 self-rating taken minutes apart by someone who knows what the exercise is for cannot support that claim, so the saved list shows titles and dates and leaves the reading to you. The one network request this page makes is a self-hosted page-view counter that records the URL, never your text; /privacy.html lists every key the site writes.
If the thought is about wanting to hurt yourself, please stop here and contact your local emergency number or a crisis line. This exercise is not built for that, and no exercise on a web page is.
The tools page has the box-breathing pacer and the Pomodoro focus timer; the CBT thought record has its own page too. The field guide covers the psychology underneath all four in plain language — predictive processing, the standard list of cognitive distortions, defusion and the observing self, and the physiology of slow breathing — including a section on where the evidence is thin.
Cognitive defusion is a change in how you hold a thought rather than in what the thought says. When you are fused with a thought you look through it, as if it were a straight report on reality. Defusion is the shift to looking at it — same words, seen as words. Nothing is argued with, disproved or deleted.
Defusion comes from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by Steven C. Hayes and colleagues from the 1980s onward and built on relational frame theory. ACT lists defusion as one of six processes it groups under psychological flexibility. Disputing a thought and weighing the evidence for and against it is a different technique — cognitive restructuring — which belongs to classical CBT and lives in the thought record on its own page.
Nothing is ever uploaded. Nothing is stored either unless you press the save button at the end of a run — the exercise otherwise lives in the page's memory, and closing the tab deletes it. If you do press save, five things are written to this browser's local storage under the key na.defusions, on this device only: the story title you gave at step 3, the thought, the two 0–10 hook ratings and the date. Step 3 then offers those titles back on your next visit, which is the point of naming the story. Saved runs can be deleted one at a time or all at once, downloaded as a JSON file, or shown as plain text to copy or print. There are no accounts and no login. The single network request the page makes is a self-hosted page-view counter that records the URL, never your text.
About three to five minutes. Four of the five steps are read-and-consider; step four asks you to repeat one word out loud for roughly thirty seconds, which is the slowest part. You can move back and forth between steps freely.
No. It is a self-help exercise based on a published psychological technique, not treatment, and it is not a substitute for a licensed therapist or for any care you are already receiving. It is also not a crisis service. If you are in danger or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line now.