Managing Your Sticky, Anxious Thoughts
CBT and ACT have given us many contributions towards improving excessive anxiety. ’Sticky Thoughts’ has been a subject I’ve learned more about lately as I help clients with anxiety and excessive worry. We are all prone to struggle with worry and anxiety as part of being a human being. Your ability to plan into the future and reassess the past is a gift and a burden. It provides us unique opportunities to learn from our past and plan for our future. However doing that dance with past, present, future can make our running narrative of thoughts complicated to sort through. Some people have highly charged ‘intrusive thoughts’. They get very focused on eliminating them, which causes the reverse to happen. The information below is all from the book Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts by Martin Seif, PhD, and Sally Winston, PsyD.
Typical thoughts that we are upset by are:
Morally repugnant thoughts- harming/ self harming thoughts, sexual, impure religious, and disgust causing thoughts
Big Issue thoughts; future uncertainty preoccupation, questioning reality, purpose-of-life thoughts, questioning our beliefs (trying to make sense of inconsistencies or changes).
Nonsensical thoughts; Losing Your Mind thoughts, Mental Checking - with thoughts things don’t feel right, doubts about your relationship.
Scrupulous thoughts- fears that God will judge us for our thoughts.
Sexual orientation and sexual identity thoughts.
Intrusive visual images: crazy humiliating acts, illness, death or dying scenes, traumatic memories
Worry: single topic to multi-topic worry, and worry about worry
Not entirely unwanted intrusive thoughts: revenge, bereavement, love sickness, resentment.
Personal loss, failure, or mistakes
Somatosensory intrusions bodily feelings/ sensations.
Myth 1: Our thoughts are under our control:
Many people believe our thoughts are under our conscious control, and so we should be able to control them.
Fact: The fact is that many of our thoughts are not under conscious control. Thoughts just happen. You can’t make them go away at will. You cannot simply replace a negative thought with a positive thought. What you resist typically just gets stronger- its only when we allow them and don’t get ‘hooked’ that the thought passes on through.
Myth 2: Our thoughts Indicate our character:
Character is about the choices we make in life, not what thoughts we have. But when we have alarming thoughts that are opposite of our values, they can get our attention.
Fact: Thoughts have nothing to do with character- character is a reflection of how you live your life. It relates to your choices. What passes through your mind just happens.
Myth 3: Our thoughts indicate the inner self:
This belief comes out of some old stereotypes regarding therapy; that therapist ascribe every detail with ‘hidden meaning’. Sometimes a tomato is simply a tomato.
Fact: Everyone has passing weird, aggressive, or crazy thoughts. They come from what we’ve read, seen on TV or movies, or heard in everyday life. It doesn’t go through the filter of our values until we make conscious choices.
Myth 4: The unconscious mind can affect actions:
Fact: our random thoughts are evidence that we are thinking. The thought that you could fall to your death doesn’t mean you will make that choice to leap- it means you are concerned about safety. These are not messages from a deeper, wiser more perceptive unconscious.
Myth 5: Thinking something makes it likely to happen:
This is the essence of magical thinking. Thoughts by themselves have no effect on the world. Thoughts do not change probabilities in the real world.
Myth 6: Thinking about it (pre-worrying) will make It less likely to happen:
It feels like you are staying vigilant, and that it may lessen the scary thing from happening, but that’s not necessarily true.
Myth 7: Only sick people have intrusive thoughts:
The fact is no-one is entirely free of weird, repugnant or disturbing passing thoughts. Having them, or being so alarmed that they stay in your consciousness for longer, is not an indictment of your character or value as a human being.
Myth 8: Every thought is worth thinking:
Like television, we all have many different channels of thoughts at the same time. You can’t think about all of them, and all of them are not worth your attention.
Myth 9 Thoughts that repeat are Important:
The importance of a thought has little to do with it repeating. If we resist them, they hang around longer. Anything you exert effort towards gains more energy, and this is true of any thought. Thoughts that repeat are ‘stuck’- not important.
There are some physical reasons this process happens. The authors explain that fear has two pathways in our brain- the first is the automatic rush to the thalamus, which sets off the alarm signal. The second, sent at the same time but slower, goes through the cortex, which evaluates the source of the danger signal. Hopefully that feedback loop works - and either calms the ‘false positive’ signal of danger, or helps plan your reaction to the danger. But you can imagine how easily this can go off track and become a problematic feedback loop if your thoughts are continuing the distress pattern by questioning if what you see or hear is really there, or what it means. This creates the secondary ‘worry’ habit. And your brain stays in distress.
They also outline a basic plan (after explaining the reasons for each other the steps.
Recognize: Pause and label. Say something like ‘right now I’m having a thought, it is intruding into my awareness, and is disturbing because of how it feels’.
Remind yourself: ‘These thoughts are automatic and I can leave them alone’.
Accept and allow the thoughts in your mind. Don’t try and push them away, because they will gain more power. Don’t try and reassure them away- if you get hooked by using false comfort, the thoughts will gain energy.
Float and feel: float above the fray and allow the feelings to just stay there. Return to the present when you find yourself in the future. Floating above is connecting to your wise mind.
Allow time to pass- don’t urge it on. Observe your anxiety from a curious, disinterested point of view.
Proceed. Even when you are having the thought, continue whatever you were doing prior to the intrusive thought. This is the practice that allows it to slowly move more and more into the background of your mind.
If you want to learn more about these myths and intrusive thoughts, this book by Winston and Seif is a gem. The authors helps us remember truths we know are logical, but struggle to remember during obsessive thinking.
Sally Winston & Martin Seif, Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts, New Harbinger Publications, 2017.
