Struggling with unwanted intrusive thoughts can really make life difficult to bear. The nature of these kinds of thoughts is that they are incredibly distressing. Having unwanted intrusive thoughts can lead you to doubt yourself, your sanity, your morality, your safety, or the safety of those you love.
These recurring distressing thoughts can easily lead you to make your life smaller and smaller, and more and more controlled. The unfortunate irony — as you will read about in this article — is that it is your very efforts to control, suppress, stop, and avoid these distressing thoughts that can fuel them and increase their intensity.
This is a counter-intuitive reality that is really worth learning more about. Take heart — if you, or someone you know, struggles with intrusive thoughts, there are ways to reduce the struggle significantly, or even extinguish them.
The Isolation of having unwanted intrusive thoughts
Part of the high pain of experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts is that they also have the effect of being highly isolating. If you have them, you KNOW why. The thoughts are so highly distressing because their content is usually something you do NOT want to tell others about:
thoughts or impulses that are sexually inappropriate, violent, destructive, taboo, anxiety provoking or self-disparaging.
This means you probably feel very alone with this struggle because the thoughts feel so very shameful. It typically feels like these nasty thoughts mean something very bad and true about you. It feels like a shameful, terrible secret. A secret like this is very painful to hold.
Due to their isolating, secret nature, people struggling with these types of thoughts do not get the opportunity to commiserate with others and find out, by comparing notes, that this is a fairly common and recoverable psychological challenge!
We can all Increasingly talk about our depression feelings, our anxieties, or our relationship problems because talking about mental health is slowly becoming more normalized and less stigmatized (thankfully! It’s about time.), but intrusive thoughts typically feel way too scary to talk about with your friends.
I have worked with numerous clients struggling with intrusive thoughts, but usually they tell no one else. I want you to know that you are not the only one — struggling with unwanted intrusive thoughts is so much more common than you think. I hear about it very frequently in my work with clients.
If this struggle sounds familiar to you, then I am happy to say — spoiler alert — there is good news! These distressing thoughts DO NOT mean something bad about you! (I know it can be difficult to believe this, but keep reading, more on this later.)
Intrusive thoughts
The reason why intrusive thoughts become intrusive actually makes sense once you know the mechanism happening in one’s brain. Once you do, you can work towards reducing their power in your life and stop inadvertently making them worse. In this article I explain what unwanted intrusive thoughts are, how thoughts become intrusive, and how to begin to make changes in how you interact with your thoughts and reduce their negative impact in your life by learning to manage your mind more effectively.
This article, however, is just a sketch and does not stand in for therapy or a more comprehensive resource. I include a great resource at the end for those who want to dive more deeply into learning about intrusive thoughts and how to change them. My intention is to demystify the phenomenon of unwanted intrusive thoughts, reassure you that you are not alone — many other people struggle with this too — and to point the way finding resources helpful for improving your experience.
Intrusive thoughts are painful and sometimes very debilitating, but they do not have to be!
What are intrusive thoughts?
Intrusive thoughts are uninvited thoughts that jump into a person's mind. They might show up as thoughts, maybe as a feeling, they could be images, or even as an impulse — like something that feels like it’s heading towards an action. Intrusive thoughts are common — we ALL have them. Intrusive thoughts are not only the distressing ones: thoughts about our grocery list, a phone call we have to make, a memory, and other mundane content also intrude — but these ones do not disturb us, so we typically pay them no mind. They just leave.
Disturbing, unwanted intrusive thoughts are also common to ALL of us. One may think:
I could step off this cliff, or, I could step on this kitten.
Typically these disturbing thoughts are fleeting, and we can easily brush them aside, forget them, and not think they mean anything significant about us. It is normal to have these fleeting, even if disturbing, thoughts — it is just part of how our brains work. Thoughts just pop in randomly! Our brains just generate thoughts, with lots of meaningless junk thoughts included. For most of us, most of the time, these thoughts are quickly forgotten. We can usually dismiss them as irrelevant and not meaningful. This is business as usual and the way we want our thoughts to operate.
If you are frequently bothered by unwanted intrusive thoughts, however, this is NOT the way your thoughts are working right now — they feel too relevant, too meaningful, and you cannot brush them away. You cannot quickly forget about them. Since everyone has unwanted intrusive thoughts, it is a matter of difference when they become recurring and life inhibiting — some folks can dismiss them easily, some can’t dismiss them easily (yet!). In these cases, the disturbing thoughts stick around — they become sticky.
WInstin and Seif, the authors of the book, Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts (the book that inspired this article), tell us that “unwanted intrusive thoughts could reoccur and often increase in intensity over time when they are not intervened with. They can stir up doubt about your own safety, morality, and self-control” (p. 9).
How do thoughts become intrusive and so sticky?
In essence, a person with recurring unwanted intrusive thoughts has inadvertently taught themself to have these thoughts and inadvertently keeps them going when trying to stop them — often trying to stop the thoughts even intensifies them. While these thoughts feel really bad and definitely do not feel normal, they are actually a function of a normal brain doing its job of learning. Our brains are learning machines. This good news because what we can learn, we can also unlearn. We can use our mind to change our brain.
Some circumstances can create the conditions for unwanted intrusive thoughts to be more likely to stick around. Some humans are somewhat more susceptible to intrusive thoughts emerging because genetics can plays a role, but a major trigger is when conditions arise that lead to our minds to become more sticky: the stress of fatigue, overwhelm, dealing with health challenges, or emotional conflict may all lead us to being more vulnerable to intrusive thoughts taking hold (Winstin and Seif, p. 92). Sticky simply means: the conditions where thoughts can more easily take hold — they stick.
Know this: intrusive thoughts might happen to anyone.
We are especially good at learning things that trigger the fear centre in our brain. The fear centre in your brain — also known as the amygdala — is trying to protect you, not keep you comfortable, so it sets off the alarm at anything that may seems like a threat, real or not. Winstin and Seif tell us, “an unwanted intrusive thought starts as just an ordinary intrusive thought — weird, funny, or repugnant as it may be. But not wanting the thought, worrying about it, or fighting with it stops it from passing quickly” (p.8). The distressing thoughts trip our fear centre into action, doings its job of alarming us. When we have thoughts that bother, upset, or disturb us, our feelings about the thought give the thought more power.
It’s as if the thought, when we are trying to push it away, actually pushes back! (Winstin and Seif, p. 9). Then it can become a recurring thought or image, intruding more and more. It can become a self-reinforcing loop — “your brain has inadvertently been programmed to keep these thoughts going” (Winstin and Seif,p. 76). The more upset we are by the thought, the more we want to get rid of it. “When your brain inadvertently reacts to thoughts as if they were dangerous, it sets the stage for unwanted intrusive thoughts to take hold” (Winstin and Seif, p. 76). With thought content like I mentioned earlier — sexually inappropriate, violent, destructive, taboo, anxiety provoking or self-disparaging — it’s easy to see how our emotions get stirred up by them. That emotion is the fuel that keeps the intrusive thoughts going.
What do intrusive thoughts mean?
Earlier I mentioned that the good news is that these thoughts actually do not mean something bad is true about you, let me explain now.
The thoughts that emerge when having unwanted intrusive thoughts are by their nature the opposite of your values (Winstin and Seif, p.15). For example: if you fear jumping off the balcony, it is because you value your life; if you fear you might hurt your baby, it is because you really love your baby; if you worry about being sexually inappropriate, it is because you really do not want to be sexually inappropriate. The thoughts that emerge reflect the opposite of your values and what you really feel.
This opposite nature is what makes the thoughts so distressing, but also what makes them confusing! When you KNOW you don’t wish these distressing thoughts to be true, it can be confusing to find yourself thinking them over and over again. This leads you to one of the most challenging aspects of experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts: you may doubt yourself, your safety and your sanity. These thoughts are so disturbing because you care deeply, not because they are true.
As a learning machine, our brain is always looking for clues about what it should pay attention to and learn well. Our emotions are one of the mechanisms our brain uses to understand what is important. So, when you become distressed about a thought — Oh no! I just thought about stepping on the kitten! I must be a monster! Stop thinking that! — our brain wakes up and notices — Ooh! This thought must be really important — look at all the attention it is getting! Let’s go back to that thought.
Our brain also learns by association: this means things get paired together. So, in the above example, when we next see a kitten, our brain can make the connection:
Oh, look, a kitten — what was that really important thought about the kitten I had recently? Oh right: let’s step on it! Oh no! I AM a monster!
And the vicious cycle can begin, continue, or become stronger.
What can you do about intrusive thoughts?
You can learn to manage your mind. This is not something we are typically taught, which is unfortunate because learning to manage your mind can help with way more than intrusive thoughts and do a lot to prevent much general psychological distress. I wish we learned about this stuff in high school!
You can learn to manage your mind in at least two ways:
The first is to educate yourself: you can read reputable, evidence-based materials on intrusive thoughts (or any other mental health struggle that shows up for you). Reading a book on the subject is a great place to start (I recommend a great one at the end of this article).
The second way is to work with a licensed therapist like a Registered Clinical Counsellor or licensed Psychologist. This has the added benefit of having someone to safely share your disturbing thoughts with. Sharing with another human being — especially within the safety of a therapeutic relationship — helps to normalize the thoughts and remove the shame of them. This makes a huge difference in how you feel about yourself. Very important! As highly social animals, we tend to heal and grow in relationship with another person.
Managing your mind consists of guiding your mind on what to pay attention to, understanding the psychological mechanism of intrusive thoughts, increasing awareness, coaching yourself, and practicing. A therapist familiar with working with unwanted intrusive thoughts can help with this.
While there is much more detail to learn from a good evidence-based book or with a therapist to be able to actually carry out a plan to grapple with unwanted intrusive thoughts, here is a sketch of how to recover from your unwanted intrusive thoughts:
Have an attitude of willingness to allow the thoughts (yes, I know, this seems counter-intuitive right now)
Believe the thoughts are unimportant — they are just thoughts
Believe the thoughts do not mean anything about you
Believe the thoughts are just one result of a sticky mind
Believe the thoughts represent the opposite of your values and actual desires, and do not deserve attention
Interact with the thoughts in a nonjudgmental, effortless, disinterested way (this probably seems impossible right now, but it IS possible and necessary) (Winstin and Seif, p. 161)
As you can imagine, being able to do all this over night is not likely. “Getting over unwanted intrusive thoughts involves creating new pathways that are not fearful” (Winstin and Seif p. 76). Creating new pathways takes time and repetition because they need to become stronger than the old, stubborn ones that likely took a long time to become entrenched. Like anything that is worthwhile learning, it takes practice, repetition, and new knowledge to incorporate it in to our lives. I encourage you to learn more and seek the assistance of a Registered Clinical Counsellor or other licensed mental health profession who is familiar with working with unwanted intrusive thoughts.
Become empowered
If you are experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts, know that you are not alone — it is very common — but also very isolating. It is very normal to believe you are the only one and that there is something very wrong with you. This isolating factor makes reaching out to a therapist incredibly helpful, of course, but self-education by reading a great, evidence-based book on the subject is accessible to most everyone. Know that you can learn numerous ways to reduce the intensity of the intrusive thoughts to a more manageable level like the rest of us, who can dismiss them as unimportant.
You CAN teach your brain to learn something new — you are a learning machine. You can feel so much more empowered to actively manage your own mind and reduce your distress. You can feel more empowered and knowledgeable in grappling with the painful unwanted intrusive thoughts.
You CAN teach your brain new tricks.
Resources:
Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts by Sally Winston and Martin Seif