Have you ever had an uninvited thought creep into your head that was so irrational, anxiety-inducing, or disturbing you wanted to shake your head until it fell out? And, when you least expect it, does that same negative thought reinvade your brain and psyche you out? If so, you are by no means alone. You’re simply coping with what mental health experts refer to as “intrusive thoughts.”
According to a post on the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) website co-authored by Sally Winston, Psychologist and Founder/Co-Director of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland, intrusive thoughts are sudden onset “stuck thoughts that cause great distress,” often focused on scary, sexual, violent, or socially unacceptable images, or even thoughts that go against one’s belief system. They can be anything that strikes you as truly horrifying.
But the good news is, for most of us, these thoughts hold no significance whatsoever, and they can — and do — happen to everyone. “Everybody has thoughts that kind of go against who they are,” says Jonathan S. Abramowitz, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an author of studies on intrusive thoughts.
Abramowitz says intrusive thoughts can be made up of all kinds of troublesome scenarios. “A normal intrusive thought would be, you’re sitting around and your wife told you that she was going to be home by 4:00 and now it’s 4:15. The thought goes through your mind — what if she had a car accident? You get an image of her body thrown on the street and broken glass everywhere. It’s a terribly upsetting idea. Or, you’re married or involved in an intimate relationship, and you think — what if I cheated on my partner? Or, people who are very religious will often have some sort of blasphemous image about who they worship, or about acting out in their house of worship,” he explains.
Why do we have intrusive thoughts?
Abramowitz says intrusive thoughts are just part and parcel of how our brains work. “It’s one of those things your brain just does, like a natural exercise of some sort. We have thoughts about great stuff, like What if I caught the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl? Then we have thoughts about really dark, unpleasant stuff that we would never tell another person. That’s just normal. It’s just how we work,” he says.
It’s whether or not you can move past these thoughts without developing rituals to try and combat them that can signal the difference between your regular, run-of-the-mill intrusive thoughts, and whether or not you are dealing with the possibility of anxiety-driven Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
“If someone has OCD, it will be very difficult to shake an intrusive thought out of their head,” explains Monnica Williams, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, Associate Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Culture & Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa School of Psychology, and Clinical Director of the New England OCD Institute/Behavioral Wellness Institute in Tolland, CT. “They’ll often worry that it is a true representation of a hidden desire or warning of a possible disaster. The person with OCD will then engage in some sort of behavior called a compulsion or ritual to exterminate the thought or reverse any actions they believe would happen as a result of the thought. Without the presence of compulsions, there is no OCD.”
