Intrusive thoughts, according to the Anxiety and Depression Society of America, affect six million Americans. Mental health experts in TIME describe these troubling reflections as unwanted and repetitive thoughts, images or urges. “Intrusive thoughts can range from a thought that makes you feel a little bit uneasy to being wholly disturbing,” says psychiatrist Lauren Edwards, MD, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “And usually it’s the last thing you want to think about.” Intrusive thoughts can bring troubling images or suggestions of a violent, sexual, frightful or even blasphemous nature. Imagine something as startling as pushing your boss off the roof of a building, cursing at your priest in the middle of mass, or finding yourself in a nest of tarantulas. According to Nebraska Medicine, many intrusive thoughts can be considered normal, and pass through a person’s mind without leaving an imprint. But what happens when these intrusive thoughts linger, crowding out other ideas, and making it hard to focus or function?
“Intrusive thoughts tend to reflect our greatest fears or most unwanted scenarios, so you can treat it as a signal of something important to you,” Dr. Edwards says. But our thoughts are not always predictive. Often, thoughts are quite random, and inexplicably so. Just because a train of thought shows up doesn’t mean you have to ride that train. Thoughts and actions are two very different things. No matter what you are thinking, or how intrusive a thought may be, it’s just a thought. Here are three ways to consider dealing with intrusive thoughts in your career:
- Thoughts Aren’t Real: what are thoughts made of, anyway? Impulses inside our brains, right? But where do those impulses come from? David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist and the host of the podcast, Inner Cosmos, says that “For all our research, we still don’t know where thoughts come from.” Intrusive thoughts and random ideas don’t make you a bad person – they are a sign that you are not a chatbot. Intrusive thoughts are part of the human operating system – not a glitch, but a feature. Consider the thoughts that show up in your dreams – we know better than to think those thoughts are real. Random ideas are not a reason for shame or blame, that’s a part of being human.
- You are Not Your Thoughts: Freud proposed that thoughts are innately related to who we are, woven into an intricate tapestry of repressed memories and expressed in the id, ego and superego. However, modern behavioral therapists identify that thoughts are not fixed indicators of the self. Thoughts are often in direct opposition to the thinker – that’s how being human works. In her blog, Bizarre Thoughts and Me: Confessions of an OCD Therapist, Stacey Kuhl Wochner shares this: “I am a therapist who treats Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I have bizarre thoughts. Here is my big revelation. We all have them. It’s not just you.” Our minds, like our surroundings, are constantly changing. Wochner breaks open the misunderstanding that our thoughts are meaningful links to our interior being. The key, Wochner says, is to see thoughts for what they are – just thoughts – and let the negative and intrusive ones float on by.
- Acceptance Is the Key: For those suffering from OCD, intrusive thoughts can be particularly troubling. Wochner tells her clients, “Your fear is simply your brain’s response to a particular thought, because you have OCD. The thought is not special and you have absolutely no control over its arrival or departure.” What she shares is true for human thought, not just for those with an OCD diagnosis. If we are going to be effective in our jobs, we have to acknowledge that yes, intrusive thoughts exist. And if intrusive thoughts persist, by all means seek medical attention. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but the thoughts about it,” best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, says. “Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking”, is his guidance. He doesn’t say “control your thoughts” or “disallow your thoughts” or “shame yourself over certain thoughts”. Be aware that we all have intrusive thoughts from time to time.
Canadian researchers have determined that we have over 6,000 thoughts per day. Not all of them are going to be productive or useful. Some thoughts will interrupt us randomly, but are they intrusive thoughts? Stress can lead to triggering intrusive thoughts, Dr. Edwards says, including disruptions to normal routines, lack of sleep and hormonal shifts.
“People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on,” states Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now. “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them”, he shares.
Intrusive thoughts don’t have to hold you back in your career, your relationships or your life. If they are, you might want to consider talking to a professional about it. Perhaps this simple understanding of how thought works can let us in on a little secret: thoughts come and go. That’s why we don’t have to attach to our thoughts. Even the intrusive ones.
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