Podcast 366: Intrusive thoughts- what they are and how to not let them run your life

hello i am dr caroline leaf and i am the host of cleaning up your mental mess and i'm thrilled that you've joined me today and i am going to be talking about a globally widespread phenomenon and it's not covert it is intrusive thoughts do you know that 94 of people globally and it's probably more battle with intrusive thoughts and it's not actually a disease it is a global widespread phenomenon and it's something that we can actually learn to manage in other words it is part of our human nature to have these intrusive thoughts but when we don't manage them they manage us so i'm going to explain this to you today with some research and give you some tips for how to understand and manage intrusive thoughts which can be so bothersome as we all know but before we begin if you want to listen to this podcast and any of my podcasts ad free then you can subscribe to my patreon account the link and the details are in the show notes and also i give bonus content on my patreon account and i do live q a's and just before we begin one more thing that this podcast is for educational purposes and is not medical advice so if you need medical advice please contact the appropriate medical professional and now on to today's podcast about intrusive thoughts okay so as i mentioned and i'm going to actually read the study a research from concordia university and 15 other universities worldwide show that 94 of people examined across six continents experience unwanted intrusive thoughts images and impulses okay raise your hand if you in that category which is most of us okay so basically this is what they're going to say is that this is widespread globally and it's not the un and then this is now what i'm saying so it's not the unwanted intrusive thoughts that are the problem but the way that they are managed which is also what research is saying so instead of looking at intrusive unwanted thoughts and impulses and images and so on as being terrible see them as a way of understanding more about yourself everything you say and everything you do and everything you feel and every perspective you have about life is based upon thoughts that are physical structures in your brain which you know if you've been following me and those thoughts didn't just get there by chance they got there by an experience that you went through so whatever you've experienced has built into your brain by your mind and is producing how you function now we're building thousands and thousands of thoughts every day because we're having thousands and thousands of experiences so we have thousands and thousands and well not thousands we have trillions of thoughts with trillions of embedded memories so maybe it's billions of thoughts with trillions of memories because thoughts are made of memories inside of our mind and brain and in our body because we store every thought in three places mind as a gravitational field brain as those trees that i will show you pictures of or images of and in our bodies changes in our dna and our cellular structure so if you think about it like this every time you hear something not only are you building that into a thought but in order to build it into a thought you are actually bringing up existing linked and associated thoughts to help you process the incoming information so if you do the calculation and various people have done it and i've done some calculations we could have i mean honestly anything from 15 000 to maybe even up to 50 000 things going through our head in a day and we pretty brilliant we can actually manage this most of the time the problem with intrusive thoughts is as they are described they're intruding upon your peace and so they generally have a negative connotation but sometimes they can not intrude on your peace they can actually make you feel excited or whatever and be distracting but most of the time when we talk about intrusive thoughts we are thinking about those thoughts that are actually frustrating us or stealing or peace or making us irritated or whatever disturbing how we're functioning making us feel emotions that we don't want to feel and so on so generally are seen as something that are disruptive so that's kind of the broad definition so if this is such a common phenomenon and it makes so much sense because as i've just described we have so many thoughts going through our head why are some of those thoughts intrusive and some are okay you don't mind them popping up into your mind they make you feel good so there's the good the good ones that come up and the intrusive ones generally are the ones that are labeled that are disturbing your peace in some sense well the ones that are disturbing your peace the ones that are intrusive are the ones that are not processed properly so they have got elements to them where there's like why did this happen what is going on what does this mean you know what what is this it's just something that's just not right and it could be little stuff and big stuff you often hear me talking about seeing things on a scale from one to ten and so right where i say zero to plus 10 and zero to minus 10 but it's just easier now to look at it from a scale of one to ten and the one two three four five that's kind of just the normal things of life up and down day-to-day things but as things become more and more of an issue we move down the scale to the tens now whatever is in the sort of beyond five between five and ten is stuff that's worrying us and the more it's unprocessed and dealt with and re-conceptualized the more it shifts down the scale and be more becomes bothersome and the bothersome comes in various different signals and those signals are basically include things like intrusive thoughts and as a thought comes up it immediately triggers off an emotion and a body sensation and reminds you of certain behaviors or maybe you even suddenly behave in a certain way and perspectives and so it's it's this constant cycle and then if you don't deal with it and you push it back down it goes back down that thought with all its memories that is intrusive stronger than before and this is unfortunate you see the way that neuroplasticity works is that as soon as we gain a level of awareness as soon as we think of something a thought comes up from the non-conscious that we built whenever it then becomes weakened for the purpose of neuroplasticity in other words purpose of changeability it's you can change it so you can add to it you can take things away from it you can reconstruct it and so on so we have to weaken it so the consciousness of it weakens the protein bonds and the chemicals and and the actual it's all the content and the vibrations becoming moving to an unstable state and we can destabilize it in order to change it so hopefully the the whole issue that the whole way of brain and body and stuff are working for us is as soon as something's unstable we want to the non-conscious mind and the body collectively will push it into a conscious mind and say okay this is unstable it's not good for you do something about it okay and so that you telling you your inner life telling your outer life to work with the inner life to do something and intrusive thoughts serve in that realm they actually pretty useful so when i was still practicing as a clinician this was a very common complaint of as i said there's 94 of the population battle this is very widespread i mean i battle with intrusive thoughts but i've learned how to manage it so it's no longer a battle per se i know what to do about them because i've learned to manage them and so that's what i'll be sharing with you on this podcast so basically what i would do with my patients is i would help them to go into into train themselves to go into thinker moments where they would daydream and let their mind wander and then from there you can start you can start then isolating the the intrusive thoughts that are coming up during the course of the day and when you have very fixed pockets of time in your day where you do this and then as you do when you when you have these fixed pockets of time you start training yourself to be more self-regulated so when you're not in that specific pocket of time where you're having a thinker moment but you're going during the through the course of the day and you're in at work or doing whatever you do and then thoughts start popping up because you've practiced thinker moments which are deliberate intentional self-regulation what are my intrusive thoughts times you can actually catch because of those practice times you become you become more tuned in to an intrusive thought so as it comes up instead of throwing you off course you become aware of it you take note of it in mental make a mental note if you can write it down then you put that into your planning for when you spend time working on thinker moments so that's the kind of overarching philosophy but before i go into a little bit more about the technique i just want to give you a little bit more sciency stuff and a couple more studies and i'm actually talking from my book think learn succeed which i wrote a couple of years back and it's got a lot of sciency stuff in it but this is a really great book for understanding learning and memory and intrusive thoughts and mindsets and it's it's a lot of helpful stuff in your brain building and so it works beautifully with my other book and i've got to stretch across my table here to get this one cleaning up your mental mess everything that i create always works together to help you and then obviously there's the app which is putting these principles into a more therapeutic or self self-therapeutising where i like walk you through the process in a therapeutic way so i'll put all these links in in the show notes okay so what i'm going to do is just just read from a couple of sections of this book and talk you through it so i'm actually if you have this book and you want to pause and grab the book i'm actually reading from page 48 at the moment and i'm going to be just talking through a couple of things on page 48 and 49 and 50 in this book which deals pretty much with these intrusive thoughts okay so remember that the brain is neuroplastic i just said that to you and it's kind which means it's constantly changing because our mind is constantly changing because life is constantly changing and every moment is a new experience your mind processes the experience into your brain changes your brain that's neuroplasticity and that change impacts your body basic principles of what i teach all the time okay so we also need to understand then that whatever we focus on the most we're going to merge with actually called the quantum zeno effect whatever you focus on the most you building your brain it makes sense i'm paying attention i'm thinking about this repeatedly it's going to build into my brain okay so principle there so an intrusive thought is going to tell you about what you focused on a lot because whatever you focused on a lot has built into a thought in your brain these are the thoughts that can become intrusive so when it's healthy they're not going to worry you but these are the things that still you'll steal your joy and your peace and that kind of thing and pop up and down it's the undealt with stuff and they can be huge and complex on the eight nine ten or they could just be on the one two three but anything i'm dealt with on that scale they're going to pop up and down every time they pop up they're malleable they invade your life and if you don't manage them they manage you they go back stronger so you don't want to ever have that happen so how do i find and deal with these intrusive thoughts okay so we need to have what i call thinker moments deliberate thinker moments in the course of our day if you've listened to me you've heard me talk about thinker moments there's different types i just previously last week's podcast i talked about how you can use thinker moments to help rebut your energy now we're going to talk about thinker moments and using them to actually find and deal with invasive thoughts intrusive thoughts okay so basically we think a thinker a moment is a downtime and contrary to prop your belief your brain doesn't switch off when you're going to downtime it actually reboots itself so we need down time to function optimists what i say here to cope with the demands of life our minds and brains need to intentionally reboot which only happens when we are alone with our thoughts so thinker moments teach you to be alone with your thoughts which many people in this day and age don't like studies have been done showing that people would rather hurt like rather shock themselves than sit for 16 minutes thinking of themselves which is one of the studies i quote in this book and so people fill up their time with all kinds of things but being alone with your thought is the most enriching experience and it grows your brain and it helps you with yourself it helps you self-regulate it helps train mind management helps with mental health and so many things so think of moments deliberate intentional thinker moments which is allocating periods in your day where you just switch off to the external switch onto the internal and let your mind wander and daydream for a specific amount of time are excellent ways to train yourself to be alone with your thoughts in order to find the intrusive thoughts that are bugging you that need work okay so the intrusive thoughts that are really coming up a lot you're going to as they come up in your thinker moments as they come up a lot you're going to find those you're going to track the flow of those you're going to identify which ones are the like scale them like this is a number this is like really worrying me a lot it's like i need to work on this first this is priority number one this is priority number two this is priority number three so you prioritize those thoughts and then you go through the process of the neuro cycle over 63 days you can also learn about the neurocycle in this book so maybe you've got this book ready maybe you've got the app maybe you want to get them maybe you want to get both because they both work together you can then take this thought that you've found that's coming up you've prioritized thoughts you've prioritized them and then you can work through them sequentially so contrary to popular belief the mind doesn't grind to halt when you're doing nothing spontaneous thought process including mind wandering creative thinking and daydreaming arise when our thoughts are relatively free from focused thinking and external influences so i think a moment is where you're not focusing on something where you are switching off from focusing on something and you're allowing the free flow of thoughts in order to find the good ones to grow to and to find the toxic ones that need attention some are massive and need multiple cycles of 63 days and some are smaller and just need one cycle that depends okay so this type of internal thinking actually plays an important role in contributing to the richness of intentional thinking so you increase your richness of your in thinking your thinking you improve your learning skills it's you improve your creativity in you can enhance your your life at work such school mental health all aspects relationships without the spontaneous thinking mode as part of your routine okay you um you wouldn't be able to reach those insights and inspirational highs that change our world okay so it's those times where you dream off into the future where your mind is wandering off that you are getting another inspirational high that will take you to another level and we lose that if you don't learn to be alone with our thoughts so there's tremendous richness that gets added to our thought when we do think of moments in addition to catching intrusive thoughts just a quick one another university of british columbia they did a review of mind wandering research and it highlighted the importance of allowing our minds to just think just let the free flow of thoughts okay so instead of reading something or scrolling through instagram close your eyes and just let the flow of thoughts happen okay so what i would do is i would basically in my experience helping and i'm just going to read the student and explain it helping my patients analyze and write down their thoughts in a self-reflective way in those thinker moments when they were potentially ruminating and getting stuck was an effective way to develop the imagination and manage the toxic issue so i am telling you now that intrusive thoughts will tell you stuff about what you stuck with that's keeping you holy and it's holding you back and that's worrying you so that instead of being scared of intrusive thoughts if you embrace the intrusive thought you can then deconstruct it and reconstruct it to make it work for you knowing now that each time that intrusive thought pops up and you ruminate on it or overthink around it because talks intrusive thoughts lead to ruminations lead to overthinking lead to over generalizations so instead of being scared of all of that those scared the intrusive thoughts if you're scared of them then the chances are you will move into rumination overthinking over generalization and make yourself feel worse whereas if you say okay intrusive thoughts i'm gonna catch you i'm going to item and list you prioritize you and i'm going to go through a systematic neuro cycle to manage you you are getting empowering yourself to get control the intrusive thought then turns from being something that is invasive in your life to something that is actually something that bringing you information about your life so instead of being invasive it's informational and that improves your self-reflection your insight the depth of your creativity the richness of your thinking and you learn to be alone so let me give you a little bit of brain science and then we'll look at the actual technique when we go into our thinker moment which is switching off to the externals i've been saying switching onto the internal allowing your mind to wander in daydream for specific amounts of time which is going to be the last part of this podcast we'll explain the specifics you activate what we call the default mode network to work in a very balanced way with the task positive network so the dm n works with a tpn the default mode network is a whole lot of circuitry across in neural networks across the different structures on the inside in the brain that work differently when you are not focusing on something and basically they search they clean up they give a reboot they kind of wipe down the counter do a bit of vacuuming do a bit of charging of the cell phone do all kinds of incredible balancing things to help bring things into perspective so what the way i've described it let me read it to you the default mode network works with the task positive network and basically work together the networks form the brain's inner life and with a and the default mode networks network dominates when you when you inner think a moment and thinking deeply in this directed rest or idling state it's a primary network that we switch into when we switch into this thinker mode it activates even to even higher levels when a person is as you as you flow go from switching off and just mind wandering into day dreaming and introspecting and letting your mind one day in a very organized and exploratory way through the endless myriad of thoughts within the deep spiritual and unconscious part of you in the task positive network when you've had this kind of lovely default mode network stuff happening then that moves into action so the task positive network then is leads to an action so it's all accumulated you're thinking feeling and choosing in this way and then that brings up a relevant thought and action happens so as we focus on thinking and activate the default mode network at some point in our thinking we move into active decision making and this activates the task positive network and we experience this as action so what i'm describing here is that when you take at least i would love it if you could try and take up to 16 minutes in a day now in the previous podcast i spoke about doing 30 to 30 seconds to two minutes every 45 to 60 minutes and then taking a 30 minute break during the course of the day now i'm saying add to this routine so listen to that previous podcast because that reboots energy now i'm talking about getting intrusive thoughts under control to get intrusive thoughts under control you need to allocate around about 16 minutes where you are not doing anything you're not eating walking talking on your computer on your phone everything's away from you you're in an environment where you can close your eyes and you can completely and utterly switch off which to the external which then activates that default mode network in a very balanced way with a task positive network and in that you just close your eyes and you just let your mind wander the only thing i want you to have with you is a pen and paper and if you really want to type it on your phone you can but then you need to be disciplined and not look at your phone it's just have your notes up so that you can type on it or on your computer and the reason i say that is that you want to in this 16 minute block where you're switching off initially it's all over the place and then start observing yourself start observing okay what am i thinking about what what's that thought what's that thought what's that thought as you observe yourself thinking which we can do which activates a lot of frontal lobe activity then what we'll start seeing is oh this is coming up all the time goodness this thought's coming up like five six times okay open your eyes write it down or quickly type it in your phone or your computer close your eyes again and carry on and track it and what other ones are coming up and then maybe you you might catch another one maybe the whole 16 minutes you're just thinking and you're right at the end maybe there's a couple of breaks in between the idea is very self-regulated standing back and observing yourself in this state where you are letting the mind wander and daydream and you're leading this flow of thoughts because it will go all over and you'll get ideas and and you know things 60 minutes will rush by when you do this and it's incredibly informative if you can build this into your day if you can build 16 minutes into your day every day it would honestly improve your creativity help you manage those intrusive thoughts because as you see as you write down and you see gosh today dude do it over just a few days and you'll see that thoughts coming up every day that's the major intrusive thought and it's associated with that net network so you'll start seeing a pattern of the intrusive thoughts then you can take the neurocycle and you can start doing that working on that intrusive thought every single morning but you need to find them first now once you've found them and you're working on the most the top one it exclusively on the top one for 63 days and then you can work on the next one and the next one so you know just keep going with your cycles of 63 days it doesn't mean that you stop your 16 minutes i still and listen guys i'm not being anal about 16 minutes you can you know just that's a great guideline research wise if you only make five that's fine if you make a little bit more that's fine but try and allocate a decent portion of your day where that's longer than the little two one thirty second to two two minute breaks that i talk about during the course of the day but we i want you to allocate a more fixed time and i'd love you to try and do 15 to 16 minutes a day and it's transformative i'm telling you this is transformational it changes your brain it increases your resilience it that when that default mode network is working like that wonderful things in resilience are happening inside of your brain okay so i've said a lot in summary you're going to allocate 16 try to allocate at least 15 to 16 minutes a day where you not eating drinking walking talking on the phone you can have your phone or a computer or a pen and paper with you you're going to sit somewhere where you understood where you can close your eyes and you just let your mind wander daydream explore and follow the flow as you're doing it it's intentional to deliver it i'm gonna close my eyes i'm gonna sit down and do this you stand back and you observe yourself doing it so you're literally watching your thoughts and as you pick up a pattern of something that keeps popping up write it down a creative idea write it down so you can open and close your eyes during the process or keep it closed the whole time and write what comes up at the end if you find something that's really toxic and that's really worrying you immediately over a few things prioritize and then start 63 day cycles using the neuro cycle to re to embrace process and reconceptualize them to make them work for you while you're doing that keep on don't stop doing these think of this batch of 15 minute thinker moments during the course of the day there we go i hope that helps you it helped so many of my patients and thousands of people around the world thank you for joining me today and i look forward to connecting with you next time

Channel: Dr. Caroline Leaf

Views: 37,960

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Id: 8JoHKAfueHs

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022