Try to see your thoughts as cars driving past on a road and don’t focus on any one of them in particular. Similarly, with intrusive thoughts, as soon as you put effort into trying to forget them, they will likely come into your head more often. Practice MindfulnessĪs the old adage goes: try to not think about a polar bear in the corner, and a polar bear is all you can think of. While it is thought that the cause of intrusive thoughts is the result of a combination of factors, shared characteristics between sufferers are that they tend to have a heightened sense of responsibility and interpret these thoughts as being very important and significant. Allow Yourself a BreakĪre you the type of person who always does the right thing? Do your friends often refer to your diligent or perfectionist nature? If so you might be a prime candidate for having intrusive thoughts. Understanding intrusive thoughts and speaking about them with others can reduce this embarrassment. Usually, people do not obsess about thoughts of being too nice to people or of giving their money away to charity. After all, intrusive thoughts can be downright embarrassing! The thoughts that get stuck are usually in conflict with our true beliefs and can feature ideas of harming someone weaker than ourselves. ‘What if someone finds out about my thought? What does this mean about me as a person?’ These are common worries for a person who has experienced intrusive thoughts. When your brain lands on a thought, reflect for a moment that it was a strange thought, then move on. Try not to give in to the temptation to check things or avoid certain situations surrounding the thought. Avoiding situations and following compulsions to ‘check’ things can lead to life-limiting behaviours, which is detrimental to your long-term freedom and happiness. How your brain focuses on these ideas is what makes the difference. Sometimes the ideas it generates may be unpleasant. Think of the brain as an ideas generator or a roulette wheel that could stop anywhere. Long term sufferers of intrusive thoughts will often try to keep the socially unacceptable thoughts a secret for fear of judgement or reprisal. So how can you cope if you have intrusive thoughts that won’t go away? Here are five ways to better understand intrusive thoughts 1. Common compulsions to try to control the thoughts include: washing hands, turning on and off a light switch or avoiding certain situations. For one in fifty, these thoughts get stuck on a loop and won’t go away so the person will often compulsively try to make them stop. Statistics from show that 4 out of 5 people have intrusive thoughts on a regular basis. Yet intrusive thoughts are surprisingly common. Often ideas of a violent or sexual nature, these thoughts have no relation to intention or ever meaning to do them. These thoughts can take many forms and often pop up when we least expect it. These thoughts we find weird, surprising or deeply uncomfortable, especially when they don’t follow our usual patterns of thinking, are deemed ‘intrusive’ thoughts. For instance, you can be standing on a train platform thinking about what to eat for dinner when suddenly the thought pops in, ‘What if I push the stranger beside me out in front of the train?’ You can be working on a quarterly report for work when you suddenly, out of nowhere, picture your brother-in-law naked wearing a Santa hat! You may even find yourself carrying your baby and wondering, ‘What if I throw her down the stairs?’ With our brain moving so fast they can change in the blink of an eye. What we do all know is that our thoughts can range from humdrum to downright weird. There is great popular interest in neuroscience and the workings of the human brain, but the thoughts we have and why we have them remains, largely, a mystery.
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