Metacognitive strategies can be useful for students with anxiety in school — but not in the traditional “challenge the thought” or “think more positively” sense. The focus in metacognitive approaches is not the content of thoughts, but the student’s relationship to thoughts: how they respond to worry, rumination, and threat monitoring.

In an educational setting, this means supporting students in:
• spending less time mentally monitoring themselves
• letting go of the need to control thoughts and feelings
• returning attention to the task and the social context

Many anxious students invest a great deal of cognitive energy in:
• anticipating mistakes
• scanning for social threat
• thinking about how they are being evaluated

Metacognitive strategies here may involve:
• postponing worry (e.g., scheduled worry time outside school hours)
• normalising that thoughts can be present without requiring action
• allowing discomfort to pass without switching into problem-solving mode

The goal is not to make the student “calm” — but to reduce the time spent in the worry system, freeing up cognitive capacity for learning.

Hi there,

In MCT, we practice both passive and active forms of attention. We use the Attention Training Technique to actively shift attention and increase meta-awareness, while we use detached mindfulness to passively observe thoughts and feelings as they come and go.

Meta-awareness is developed over time.

Best of luck,
Simon Moesgaard

I have a question about attention and the role of attention control in MCT. Is attention control an active skill that one develops over time—specifically, the ability to consciously direct and shift attention away from internal events and emotions? Or is it more of a passive process?

Thanks !

Hi you,

I’m glad that you found it useful. It’s a good question, which I get a lot.
We want to engage as little as possible in prolonged thinking. In MCT, we practice ‘noticing’ or ‘observing’ trigger thoughts.
Indeed, it can helpful to label the thinking activity, such as “rumination”, “worry”, or “there is a another trigger thougt”. However, you don’t want to replace one thinking process (worry) with another (monitoring) because then overthinking just changes clothes.

Best of luck, Simon Moesgaard

Thanks for providing answers regarding MCT! I have a question about how we should internally react to the thoughts that arise.

Question: In the context of detached mindfulness and relating to thoughts in the right way, when we are burdened with worrying thoughts and obsessions, should we say to ourselves, “There is a thought about that,” or “There is a worry thought,” and then let it be and redirect our attention? Or should we do nothing internally with the thoughts, simply allowing them to come and go without any response at all—being aware that the thought is there but not engaging with it at all—and then redirect our attention to something else?

Thanks!

Hi you,
Thank you for that question. In metacognitive therapy, at least, we look at thoughts instead of from them, which allows us to engange or disengage from certain thinking patterns.

Perhaps it’s like bicycling, being aware that it is you who put effort into the bicycling, and not the bike itself. You can use a bike for a purpose, like moving yourself in a direction. In the same way, you can use your thinking to move yourself in a certain direction (to gain insight, solve a problem).

The meta-mode is about stepping back and noticing what is going on in a particular moment. To be able to disrupt a certain kind of problematic thinking, like the bike that loses its power, when we stop moving our legs.

You are in a meta-mode the moment you notice your thinking, and it’s not like you have to be there all the time to get better. I believe that getting better is more like, “The bike can go fast and slow, depending on what I do with it.”

Thanks for your question again, and good luck practicing ‘stepping back’, ‘noticing’, and ‘leaving some thoughts alone’. 


I am fascinated by the two modes in MCT—the object mode and the metacognitive mode. How does one acquire the skill of being in the metacognitive mode more, and is it possible for this mode to become one’s natural state, more so than the object mode, after getting better at it?

Hi you,
Thanks for that question. I have answered the same question as yours previously. You can find it at Ask Me Anything!.

Leaving a thought alone is about disengaging from any further processing and passively observe the thought in your mind. When you passively observe something, it is still there, and that’s okay, as you have flexible control over your attention.

I am trying to practice detached mindfulness but I keep running into the same problem. Which is, whenever I notice a thought, I tell myself to leave it alone. But that becomes a new obsession on its own. Like thoughtception. Because I tell myself to leave a thought alone. And the telling myself to leave it alone makes that I am engaging with the thought. Which causes more anxiety. What do I do? Because it very much feels like I have to resist not engaging and I don’t think that is how detached mindfulness works right? So what am I doing wrong here?

Thanks!