You have certainly noticed something very strange and frustrating about your unwanted thoughts: the harder you try to not think them, the louder and more insistent they become. Effort seems to work backward. We have previously described this as the ironic effect—what happens when we try to control what is in our mind—but the more general principle is called “paradoxical effort.” If sticky mind can be compared to flypaper in the mind, then paradoxical effort can be seen as the old Chinese finger trap.
