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May 19 - December 27, 2022
Myth 6: Thinking Something Makes It Unlikely to Happen Myth 6 is almost the exact opposite of myth 5. Specifically, it is that thinking something will make it less likely to happen or make it less true.
Staying involved with worry thoughts seems like a way of remaining vigilant—and somehow more prepared—for danger.
Fact: Once again, thoughts do not change probabilities in the real world. While worrying about someone might make you feel like you are doing something to protect him or her, in reality you are only training your brain to reinforce a cycle of ongoing worry.
Myth 7: Only Sick People Have Intrusive Thoughts This refers to the mistaken belief that only disturbed people have intrusive or weird thoughts.
Myth 8: Every Thought Is Worth Thinking Myth 8 is that every thought is worth thinking about, so it makes sense to and it is worthwhile to explore the content of any thought that crosses your mind or comes to your attention.
In truth, all minds are chock full of junk thoughts not worth taking seriously. If we wander into junk thoughts and they are not granted meaning, they just pass on by.
Helpful Fact: Your attention may be hijacked by junk.
We will show you how it is possible to care so little about intrusive thoughts that they recede into the background and do not need your attention at all.
Myth 9: Thoughts That Repeat Are Important
Fact: The fact is that the importance of a thought has very little to do with how much it repeats. Actually, thoughts tend to repeat if they are resisted or pushed away. So if you have a repeating thought that you are resisting, that same thought will start to fade away when you stop trying to resist it. Any thought that you attempt to squish is more likely to keep repeating, like Don’t think about that itchy spot, Stop rerunning that commercial jingle through your mind, or Stop noticing the piece of food in her teeth.
Helpful Fact: Thoughts that repeat are stuck, not important.
Remember that anxiety loves ignorance, and the more facts you know about stuck thoughts, the better equipped you will be to deal with them. Some of these specific answers review topics we have introduced in earlier chapters.
Why do some of my thoughts feel like impulses? Even though unwanted intrusive thoughts are signs of overcontrol and not impulsivity, you may actually feel that you have to put a lot of effort to keep yourself from acting on the thoughts. This is an illusion. They feel like impulses even though they are not. You are actually feeling the effects of anxious thinking, which is an altered state of awareness.
One very consistent change is what psychologists call thought-action fusion: when the line between thoughts and actions becomes fuzzy and indistinct.
But when you are anxious, this difference seems to fade away. When you fight hard to avoid a thought, anxiety will skyrocket, and so will your perception of the profound differences between private thoughts, on the one hand, and actions in the real world that have real consequences, on the other.
But I get so scared; the fight to control myself feels so real. Why? Another reason why thoughts can feel like impulses is because of the fear the thought provokes. Here is how it works: When we are startled or surprised, or when something happens that tricks us into thinking there is danger, the alarm system part of our brain called the amygdala sends out a danger signal. It instantly makes many things happen in the body that enable us to run away or fight if there were a real danger. You may know this reaction as the fight-or-flight response.
But our brain has a second mechanism located in the higher brain or cortex that has the capacity to say, “Wait a minute—this is just a thought.” The cortex is where we think, reason, and judge. The problem is that the message from the higher brain gets there about a half of a second after the first automatic alarm has sounded.
Why do I have to fight these thoughts all the time? Here is the really great news: you don’t! That’s right. Not only do you not have to fight these thoughts, but fighting the thoughts is a major reason why they become stuck and cause so much psychological misery in the first place.
What is wrong with me? What is wrong with you is that you have unwanted intrusive thoughts—nothing
Psychologists know that about nine out of ten people experience intrusive thoughts at least occasionally. So you are one of the nine out of ten. What has gone wrong in your situation is that you have taken your thoughts too seriously and believed that the content of your thoughts meant something important about the person you are or the sort of behaviors that you might commit.
try to avoid things that trigger my thoughts, but some things are unavoidable. What can I do? You can try to avoid your avoidance. Reading about violent acts might make you have thoughts about violent actions. Or hearing a radio program about a suicide ...
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The suffering over your thoughts actually lies in the way you evaluate them and react to them, not the content of the thoughts themselves. Trying hard to avoid the thoughts will prevent you from learning this.
People with OCD experience obsessions, which are thoughts that arrive with a whoosh of emotion, feel dangerous or unacceptable, cause considerable distress, and are accompanied by a strong need to be neutralized or banished. Obsessions are one kind of repeating unwanted intrusive thoughts. There is an OCD cycle that consists of unwanted thoughts that raise anxiety and continuous attempts to lower anxiety by means of compulsions.
power than they deserve. If you have OCD, you probably have the tendency to feel very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
Do people go crazy when thoughts get stuck? Or does this mean that I am already crazy? Of course not! People probably get the erroneous idea that they can go crazy from how miserable stuck thoughts can make them because they don’t understand what is happening. Stuck thoughts do not drive people to psychosis, and having a stuck thought certainly does not mean that someone is crazy.
What are the root causes of this problem? The real problem here is the question because the question is based on false assumptions.
Instead, we now know that most psychological issues are a complicated interaction of what you inherit (genetics), plus maturational processes that go on throughout your life, plus your own personal history, which can include the way you were raised, the important events that occur, the stresses you encounter, and more. More importantly, we now know that determining the historical factors that contribute to unwanted intrusive thoughts are absolutely no help in getting rid of them.
That’s right. Learning about why you have intrusive thoughts will not help you stop them nor reduce your distress.
honestly and genuinely love life and like the life I’m leading. So why do I have these persistent thoughts about suicide? Remember that unwanted intrusive thoughts get stuck precisely because you don’t want them or agree with them.
Most people pay no attention to such passing thoughts, and the thoughts pass right on. But if you are anxious or worried about yourself, or feel extremely responsible for the care of someone else, and you think such a thought must be attended to, then harmless thoughts like these may suddenly feel threatening or abnormal. This sets up a struggle to resist the thoughts, and this is why they persist.
My therapist told me about thought-stopping. Why doesn’t it work? What about distraction? The thoughts just come back. I also have tried to meditate, to find a peaceful place, and to not have these thoughts, but I can’t do that either. Like most professionals, your therapist is probably not a specialist in this particular problem and can’t keep up with all the latest findings about how your brain works and how to help you recover from unwanted intrusive thoughts. Most
The key is not to try harder to stop thoughts; it is in changing your relationship with the thoughts and your beliefs about them. Then, they don’t need to be stopped and are no longer fed the energy that maintains them.
When you try to distract yourself from intrusive thoughts, you are reinforcing the idea that you need to keep away from them.
It is also not possible to meditate away or to intentionally clear the mind of unwanted intrusive thoughts using meditation. A mindful attitude (nonjudgmental, curious, self-observational) is certainly part of the solution, but using meditation as a technique for banishing thoughts will not be effective. A regular practice of meditation can—like exercise—be helpful in many ways, but it is not a technique for conquering thoughts.
How can it be that the content of my thoughts is irrelevant? That seems impossible. We know how odd this sounds, but the fact is that the content of your thoughts is quite important most of the time, yet entirely irrelevant at other times.
It is also important to understand that everyone has intrusive thoughts not worth thinking about. In fact, a great deal of everyone’s wandering mind is made up of uninteresting passing observations,
There was a time—not long ago, unfortunately—when people with unwanted intrusive thoughts were called weak, crazy, or out of control, or said to be lacking willpower. Now we know it is nothing of the sort, but your brain has inadvertently been programmed to keep these thoughts going.
can become so befuddled, in fact, that it can start to misidentify safe things as dangerous. We call this anxiety—when you react to and worry about something quite safe as if it is objectively dangerous.
As we have shown in earlier chapters, thoughts themselves are never dangerous—they are just thoughts. But the brain can become programmed to fear thoughts anyway. And this can happen to anyone.
When fearful pathways are triggered frequently, they become automatic.
a thought is followed by an anxious experience, the pathway from thought to fear gets established.
In other words, don’t believe the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks!
To understand how unwanted intrusive thoughts work, we start with the alarm response that is built into everyone’s brain. This response is sometimes called the stress response, the fight-or-flight response, or—most accurately—the fight, flight, or freeze response.
These responses include release of adrenaline, increased heart rate, changes in breathing, hypervigilance to possible danger, tunnel vision, and a host of other perceptual changes. You feel this as a whoosh of fear or terror. The alarm response is centered in the amygdala, which consists of two walnut-sized structures in your brain. The amygdala can be either on or off: it either triggers the alarm response or it doesn’t.
Clanging the alarm when there is no danger is called a false positive. Remaining silent when there is a real danger is a false negative. Your amygdala sends out many, many false positive responses because it never wants to risk a false negative.
Figure 1 shows the whoosh of fear people feel when the amygdala is triggered. The trigger might be the car coming toward you or the sudden sound of your friend yelling “Boo!” The whoosh response happens very, very quickly.
Even emotional reactions like feeling trapped, anticipating rejection, or having doubts can set off alarms. In other words, your amygdala will set off a whoosh of fear in response to triggers that constitute no real danger. Psychologists call this conditioned learning. In this manner, fear responses can become habits of the brain.
People with unwanted intrusive thoughts have an amygdala that has learned to become afraid (i.e., clang the danger-warning bell) of certain thoughts.
your amygdala sets off the alarm in response to a harmless thought, you get a false alarm of danger: the bell clangs, you get an instant whoosh of fear, and it is very easy to think that there is real danger.
The whoosh of fear triggered by your amygdala is sometimes called first fear, a term introduced by Claire Weekes (1969) in the 1950s. She described first fear as automatic.
