INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS

Occasionally, you’re minding our own business when a weird – and sometimes disturbing or upsetting – thought pops into your head. Why does your brain do this, and does it mean that you’re a bad person?

WORDS: HAYLEY BENNETT

Have you ever been driving along a motorway, listening to the radio, when your brain suddenly piped up with, “Hey, what if I just turn into the central reservation?” Or perhaps you picked up a knife to slice some bread and wondered, “What if I was to hurt someone with this?” These are examples of intrusive thoughts – just thoughts that pop into your head, either of their own accord or maybe because of the situation you’re in, such as driving a car or slicing bread. Ideally, we acknowledge these thoughts before simply setting them aside and moving on with our days. But for some people, at certain points in their lives, dismissing intrusive thoughts can become more difficult. Here, with some help from the experts, we explain what intrusive thoughts are, what happens when they get out of hand and how to deal with them…

ILLUSTRATIONS: KYLE SMART

WHAT ARE INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS?

From the broadest perspective, an intrusive thought is anything random that “pops into mind”, says clinical psychologist Prof Mark Freeston, who specialises in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders at Newcastle University in the UK.

Technically, an intrusive thought could be positive, but it’s more often than not the negative ones that we notice. An example might be a sudden panic that you’ve left the oven on and your home is going to burn down. The sort of thing that we all think about from time to time. We might not think of it as ‘unwanted’, because it’s just a thought that we quickly forget about.

Then there are the intrusive thoughts that are very much unwanted, in mental health complaints such as OCD, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social anxiety. “In social anxiety, the intrusive thoughts would likely be ‘How are other people seeing me?’, ‘Is my hand shaking?’” says Freeston.

Whereas, in OCD, the thoughts may be fears of contamination, or in PTSD, they may be memories or flashbacks of a traumatic event.

In psychology, what marks out an intrusive thought as different to a worry or other type of thought is that it’s at odds with what you generally believe to be true, or your values. Psychologists refer to this as an ‘egodystonic’ thought. Worries are considered more ‘egosyntonic’, meaning they’re more aligned with our beliefs. For instance, if you have been reading about the rising costs of energy and supermarket essentials, and are starting to spend more than you earn, you might understandably be concerned about how you’re going to pay your bills, but that would be a worry – not an intrusive thought.