Hello, intrusive thoughts!

Have you ever been minding your own business, living your life, and your brain suddenly asks you, “what if we drove into oncoming traffic?” Or, “what if you threw your phone in the ocean?” (Tempting, actually–maybe not the best example). These thoughts are completely normal, although they can feel extremely distressing. They’re called intrusive thoughts, a charming symptom of anxiety or OCD.

For some people, they’re just random and fleeting. Of course you aren’t going to swerve into oncoming traffic; silly brain! For others, intrusive thoughts aren’t fleeting at all. They stick around; they repeat; they destabilize. Worst, they feel incredibly shameful, which only makes them louder.

One “cure” for anxiety–inasmuch as there is one–is talking about it out loud. Everything sounds worse in the echo chamber of your brain. When you share your scary, shameful thoughts aloud, they lose some of their power over you. An example: I used to have a terrible intrusive thought about accidentally throwing my dog out the car window. I would never actually do this, as I love my dog. But the thought would come every time we drove somewhere with the dog and it was, as you can imagine, incredibly distressing. When I finally screwed up my courage and told my best friend about it, she laughed out loud. She immediately apologized but actually her laughing was helpful! It was a ridiculous thought! The second I named it and she laughed, it became just silly instead of frightening. And now I have it rarely, if at all.

The point of this self-disclosure is that sharing our fears is actually one way to diminish them. Intrusive thoughts trick our brains into thinking there is danger when there is none. Checking those thoughts by telling them to someone else takes away their power and allows us to accept emotionally what we may know rationally: our thoughts cannot hurt us unless we let them.

I don’t mean you should minimize or diminish your thoughts, intrusive or otherwise. Rather, try meeting them with curiosity instead of fear. Try sharing them with others instead of letting them echo in your brain. You might find you can let them go. And if you can’t, that’s ok too; that just means it’s time to talk to a therapist.

You know where to find me.