Help! My Brain is Torturing Me: Six Steps to Tackle Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts.
In this blog post I explore the nature of unwanted intrusive thoughts, what they are, why they cause us so much trouble and what we can do about them.
All of us have unwanted intrusive thoughts. Purdon and Clark (1993) asked 293 people to list out the unwanted intrusive thoughts they experience and discovered that it’s completely normal to have thoughts of driving your car into traffic, have sex with an authority figure, push a member of your family in front of a train, or imagine complete strangers naked. If you’re interested, the full list of common unwanted thoughts is here – see how many of your own you can spot...
The brain produces thousands of thoughts every day, but if we notice a thought and it freaks us out, we’ll try and push it away (known as paradoxical effort) which then makes it stick even more. If you’ve ever tried not to think about something, you’ll notice how much stronger the thought gets. Try it now – spend a minute thinking about a giant pink rabbit, then spend another minute trying NOT to think of a giant pink rabbit and see what happens...
Unwanted Intrusive thoughts often come along with an impulse to act too, and this is what can also make them scary. If we’re having thoughts of jumping from a high place and there’s a seeming impulse in the body to act on the thought, it makes the thought feel doubly dangerous and will make us double our efforts to suppress it which will then make it even stickier and louder.
These are strategies of overcontrol; we're trying to stop the thoughts. In fact many clients I see in my clinical practice often say this is what they want to achieve in therapy. We can’t stop our thoughts, they are just going to keep on coming. We can however, change our relationship to our thoughts and turn down the volume so they aren’t blaring in our head all the time.
Many people believe their thoughts are out of control and double down on them because of the uncertainty around not knowing if they might then act on the thoughts! Impulsiveness on the other hand, is a trait of people who act first and think later, whereas intrusive thoughts are experienced by people at the other end of the spectrum; the over-thinkers (Winston and Seif, 2017)
We’re more likely to pay attention to unwanted intrusive thoughts when we’re tired, stressed, hungry, hormonal, caffeinated, medicated or when our stress hormones are high just after waking up, or as we “let go” into sleep.
We can also draw upon our personal experiences, media reports or even different types of entertainment to hook into the common themes of unwanted intrusive thoughts. These range from morally repugnant thoughts, harming/self-harming thoughts, disgust or humiliation-causing thoughts, nature of reality thoughts and bigger meaning of life thoughts. Identity based thoughts often show up too – am I losing it? Do I love my partner(s) enough? Am I straight/gay/trans? Am I going to do something humiliating or out there in a social situation? You name it and you can bet there’s an unwanted intrusive thought that can be conjured up by our incredible, tricky brain.
One of the key ways that unwanted intrusive thoughts trip us up is due to the neurology of anxious arousal. We have a disturbing thought and the alarm goes off in the brain, the whoosh of anxiety confirms that there is real danger around, and reinforces the sense that we need to be paying more attention to the thoughts which then creates more uncomfortable stress responses, which then amplifies the belief that there’s danger in the thoughts and we need to take them even more seriously. It’s a vicious cycle.
The recipe for anxiety caused by unwanted intrusive thoughts is:
a belief that thinking about something is the same as doing it (thought-action fusion), plus
a sense that the world is super dangerous and
a dash of a need to seek reassurances of guaranteed safety which is impossible because...life... (although we can get temporary relief through reassurance in the form of negative reinforcement, the discomfort then ramps back up again the next time we’re triggered);
folded into thoughts being sticky and an intolerance of uncertainty.
The net result of this is we end up entangled in our highly believable but inaccurate thoughts, which are powered by waves of anxiety in the body generated from the brain being hijacked by the amygdala screaming “danger, danger” like the robot in Lost in Space.
Internally, the mind also tries to reason its way out of anxiety caused by unwanted intrusive thoughts, but ends up making it worse. Watson and Seif describe three voices of the mind:
Worried Mind – the part of us that asks “What if....?” (the car crashes, a terrorist attack happens, I fail the exam, I stab my partner....)
False Comfort – the part of us that tries to reassure us, but in the act of reassuring simply lends more credence and legitimacy to unwanted intrusive thoughts which are nothing more than spam mail of the mind. (you’re right don’t get in the car, go to London, take the exam, use any knives...)
Wise Mind – the part of us that can step back, take a bigger view and see what’s going on. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy this is often called self-as-context. It’s like when you’re watching a film or playing a computer game and there’s a part of you that’s enjoying it and is absorbed in it, but there’s also a part of you that’s watching you enjoying it.
It’s the conversations between worried mind and false comfort that keep people locked into believing that their unwanted intrusive thoughts are true and accurate and also say something true about them: that they are bad, immoral or psychopathic. Wise Mind essentially says “take a chill pill, you’re just experiencing brain junk and need to let the thoughts pass by...”
Watson and Seif suggest that there are six steps that help to reduce the distress associated with unwanted intrusive thoughts. They are:
Recognise what’s going - name it.
Remind yourself they are just automatic thoughts that the brain has conjured up, not you;
Accept that this is happening and allow the thoughts to be there – no suppression, be willing to have the thoughts, remember “what you fight, fights back, what you resist tends to persist...”
Float and feel – come back to what you’re doing right now, rather than spinning out into the horrific future being created by your worries. Observe what’s going on without getting entangled.
Let time pass – like surfing a wave, the initial whoosh of anxiety will rise, peak, fall and fade away, just give it time. Remind yourself that anxious discomfort is not the same as an immediate danger. If it doesn’t involve (actual rather than imagined) fire, flood or blood it’s probably not an emergency.
Proceed – get on with, or keep going with what’s important for you.
The more you practice this new attitude towards your unwanted intrusive thoughts, the less alarming they will be. There are two theories that support this model, the first is emotional processing theory (where the exposure to triggering thoughts and the fear they generate eventually diminishes, and this then updates the fearful memory structures in the brain). Secondly, inhibitory learning theory suggests that learning to tolerate the anxiety generated by unwanted intrusive thoughts creates new fearless pathways in the brain which eventually inhibits the older fearful ones.
The first step though, is to decide to sit with your thoughts rather than avoid them, push them away or try not to think the unthinkable, the pink rabbit has already shown us that there’s no point doing that. Let the pink rabbit nuzzle up to you and make friends, and then when it’s had enough it will leave. A bit like unwanted intrusive thoughts.
Here at Rhizome Practice, we work a lot with unwanted intrusive thoughts. If you think we might be able to help with your frightening, obsessive or disturbing thoughts, get in touch.
