These intrusive thoughts can feel shocking and shameful, totally at odds with who you are as a person. Anxiety about unwanted thoughts can increase if you believe they say something terrible about who you are. For instance, you might wonder if thinking about harming someone means you must secretly want to do it or makes you dangerous.
While over 90% of people experience intrusive thoughts occasionally, people dealing with certain mental health conditions sometimes find they dominate their day and interfere with their ability to remain in the moment.2
Thankfully, treatment exists that can reduce the power these thoughts hold over your life. If you’re concerned that intrusive thoughts are spiralling out of control, a mental health professional can help you get to the root of the issue and find relief.
This page can also help you better understand intrusive thoughts and how to manage them, as it explores:
What intrusive thoughts are and why they happen
Intrusive thoughts are unwanted ideas, urges, or images that pop into your mind without being invited. They feel intrusive because they interrupt your normal flow of thoughts and can contradict your values and sense of self. Their content usually involves themes you find disturbing and frightening.
These types of thoughts are different from having worries or negative thinking. Worries typically involve realistic concerns about actual problems in your life, but disturbing intrusive thoughts involve scenarios that feel totally different from who you are.
For example, you might suddenly imagine pushing someone in front of an oncoming train or harming a child. The automatic nature of these thoughts can be difficult to deal with – you didn’t choose to think about them, but they also can’t be easily forgotten.
Your brain is constantly generating thoughts, images, associations, and more as part of normal cognitive function. Most of these mental events pass through your awareness without gaining much traction.
Intrusive thoughts, however, can become problematic when your mind flags certain thoughts as important, triggering your natural threat detection system.3 For instance, if you value being a good parent, you would naturally struggle with harm-intrusive thoughts about your children. They target what you usually care about most, which is what makes them so distressing to experience.
Anxiety and stress can also increase these thoughts’ frequency and intensity.4 When your nervous system is activated, your brain becomes hypervigilant for threats, searching them out. This can make you more likely to notice random thoughts and make them seem significant.
AMFM is here to help you or your loved one take the next steps towards an improved mental well-being.
Common types of intrusive thoughts include:5
Harm-intrusive thoughts: Violent images of hurting yourself or others
Intrusive thoughts are one of the most common symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. People with OCD experience both obsessions (ongoing and unwanted thoughts) and compulsions (repetitive actions that are done to reduce the anxiety their thoughts cause).
People with OCD can become consumed with their intrusive thoughts. This is because these thoughts feel extremely threatening and important, demanding their attention. So they might spend hours analyzing whether having these thoughts says something awful about them or perform rituals to prevent their outcome. Common compulsions can include seeking out reassurance or repeating certain actions until they feel “just right.”
Additionally, anxiety disorders also frequently involve unwanted and intrusive thoughts, though their patterns usually differ from OCD. For example, generalized anxiety disorder typically sees people engage with ongoing worries about realistic concerns that can spiral out of control. Panic disorder involves intrusive fears about having a panic attack or losing control. Social anxiety, on the other hand, can leave you preoccupied with thoughts of being judged by others.
For anxiety disorders, the anxiety about unwanted thoughts usually involves actual situations, even if your level of concern is exaggerated or out of proportion. In OCD, these intrusive thoughts usually involve unlikely or impossible scenarios that you know don’t make sense – but still feel compelling and demanding of your attention.
A Mission For Michael (AMFM) provides treatment for adults experiencing various conditions. OCD support is a phone call away – call 866-478-4383 to learn about our current treatment options.
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Intrusive thoughts can be difficult to manage, but there are strategies that can help you cope in your daily life. They usually focus on changing how you respond to the content of disturbing thoughts, rather than trying to make them go away.
The following strategies may help you bring these intrusive thoughts under control:
The more you tend to fight disturbing thoughts, the more power they usually gain. Trying to suppress or argue with these thoughts can make them more frequent.
Instead, practice noticing the thought without giving it meaning or importance. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with the thought, or that you’ll act on it – it means that you’re practicing mindfulness in denying that they require your immediate attention or action.
Speaking of mindfulness, practicing it can help you observe your thoughts and become more aware of your processes. Try to note your thoughts with a neutral stance, combining this with grounding exercises to keep you focused in the here and now. Focus on your breathing, name all the things you see around you, or engage your senses to interrupt ruminations.
Thought control strategies via compulsions are a hallmark of OCD, demanding action to deal with intrusive thoughts. They often provide temporary relief but also frequently require more elaborate actions over time to achieve the same results.
Try to resist the urge to engage in your automatic responses to automatic thoughts. The anxiety will likely feel uncomfortable, but it can also peak within a half hour and help you work on breaking ritualistic patterns.
While these strategies can provide some relief, they can’t replace professional help for anxiety disorders and OCD.
Some people spend hours every day performing rituals or reviewing their automatic, intrusive thoughts. They might even become housebound due to worry, losing their ability to engage with the world. If this sounds familiar, inpatient mental health for intrusive thoughts can help you interrupt severe patterns and start the healing process.
Residential treatment for OCD provides you with intensive services in an environment where you can feel supported. You’ll work with trained clinicians who can guide you in learning new skills to fight back against unwanted thoughts. Through these skills, you can learn more about what causes them and how to better manage them in your daily life.
Inpatient care can also be extremely valuable when unwanted thoughts co-occur with other mental health conditions like severe depression, suicidal ideation, or other conditions requiring psychiatric support.
Living with intrusive thoughts can be incredibly isolating and overwhelming. A Mission For Michael partners with you to fight back, with the specialized care and holistic support you need to start the recovery process and regain your potential.
Our residential programs offer a blend of evidence-based and holistic care, delivered by experienced clinicians in a relaxing and serene setting. If you or a loved one is struggling, you don’t have to face this alone. Contact AMFM and let us show you how we can help reclaim your peace of mind.
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If intrusive thoughts are something you deal with, it’s normal to have some continuing concerns or questions about how treatment could help. For this reason, we’ve provided the following answers to FAQs we commonly receive.
Psychiatric medications might be able to help reduce the frequency and intensity of intrusive and unwanted thoughts, though they are not designed specifically to do so. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most commonly prescribed meds for OCD and anxiety disorders. They can help to regulate serotonin levels in the brain, which can decrease obsessive thinking and racing thoughts.
Medication always works best when combined with other interventions, and your psychiatrist can help you determine if medication might benefit your situation.
Trying to actively suppress intrusive thoughts can create a rebound effect that actually makes them more frequent. Your brain may treat the attempts to stop them as evidence that your thoughts are, in fact, both important and dangerous. The more you try not to think about something, the more your mind can check to see you’re not thinking about it – which ironically brings the thought back to attention.
On the whole, this is why thought control strategies usually fail. Treatment helps to teach you to better tolerate the presence of intrusive and disturbing thoughts without engaging them in a power struggle. This can make them lose their power and happen less often.
Some people might experience this, and it can blur the line between memory and imagination. In such cases, these thoughts may also be indicative of flashbacks, which are a common symptom of PTSD and other trauma-related disorders.
The goal of treatment for these kinds of thoughts remains to help you tolerate them without having to engage in them endlessly. If you genuinely did something harmful in the past, therapy can help you make amends with others and with yourself without getting trapped in ruminating thoughts.
