I’m going to share something I genuinely never thought I’d put on the internet.
When I was suffering with anxiety, I’d be standing in the kitchen making dinner and my cat would walk in begging for food.
And out of nowhere I’d get this thought: “I’m going to stab my cat.“
I really didn’t want to do that. Not even a little bit. And that’s exactly what made it so terrifying.
Why would I think that? What does that say about me?
I started fighting it. Analyzing it. Checking whether it was still there. And the more I checked, the more it kept showing up.
For years I was too ashamed to tell anyone about it. Until I learned what intrusive thoughts actually are. And now I’m talking about it on the internet.
And it turns out many, many, people can really relate.
So let’s talk a little about that today.
What They Actually Are
Intrusive thoughts are unwanted thoughts that show up randomly. They feel completely out of character.
They’re usually about the things you care most about, like hurting someone you love, losing your faith, doing something you’d never in a million years actually do.
And here’s the thing that most people don’t know, and the thing that changed everything for me…
The fact that the thought disturbs you is the proof that it isn’t you.
People who actually want to do harmful things don’t lie awake terrified by the thought of it. They don’t Google “why do I keep thinking about hurting my cat” at 3am feeling like a monster.
The distress you feel is not a warning sign. It’s evidence that your values are completely intact.
Your brain isn’t broken. It’s just doing what anxious brains do.
So we gotta learn more about how the brain works to recover…
The Polar Bear Experiment
There’s a study where researchers split people into two groups – and it’s one of my favorites that always highlights the importance of and the direct link between our response to thoughts and the manifestation of them.
One group was told they could think about anything they wanted, including a white polar bear.
The other group was told not to think about a white polar bear. Anything else was fine, just not the polar bear.
When they checked back later, the group who was told not to think about it couldn’t stop thinking about it. The group with full permission barely thought about it at all.
Because the moment you tell your brain “don’t think about this”, it has to retrieve the thought just to know what to suppress. And every retrieval makes it more accessible, more present, more sticky.
This is exactly what happens with intrusive thoughts. The moment you decide the thought is dangerous and needs to be fought, you put it on repeat.
There’s another story I read about, which was very interesting. It was of a man of deep Christian faith who kept getting intrusive thoughts about Jesus in a sexual context.
Completely against everything he believed in. He was horrified. He started doubting his faith, wondering if he was sinning, whether something was fundamentally wrong with him – or whether it was the devil.
The thoughts got worse and worse, turned into nightmares.
His therapist reframed it within his own faith. Told him these weren’t his thoughts, they were just thoughts, and his challenge was to allow them to exist without giving them power.
He was even asked to consciously think the thought on purpose, not to enjoy it obviously, but to just sit with it without fighting it.
And once he stopped fighting it, it stopped having any hold over him.
Same mechanism. Every time.
A Thought Is Not the Same As Thinking
This is one of the most important distinctions I can give you, and once you get it, a lot of things start to make sense.
A thought just arrives. It doesn’t require a response.
Thinking is when you engage with it. When you analyze it, argue with it, check whether it’s still there, try to figure out what it means about you. That’s active. That’s what keeps it alive.
And here’s something that might surprise you. Non-anxious people get weird thoughts too.
Dark thoughts, random thoughts, strange thoughts. The difference is they don’t find them threatening, so they float through and disappear.
You never hear about them because they didn’t mean anything.
If I get a strange thought now, I may not even register it, or I may laugh at it and waive it off.
But when your nervous system is sensitized, your brain is on high alert scanning for threats. And it grabs onto whatever feels most dangerous and waves it in your face going “is this a threat, should we be worried about this?!”.
Not because the thought represents something true about you, but just because that’s what a sensitized brain does.
The thought is anxiety’s, not yours.
Why Fighting Makes It Worse
Most people’s instinct when an intrusive thought shows up is to push it away, prove to themselves it isn’t real, or avoid anything that might trigger it.
And some people go further than that. I’ve spoken to parents who started avoiding their own children because they were so terrified of their own intrusive thoughts. Sitting in the same room but not allowing themselves to pick up their kids. Suffering in complete silence because there’s no one they could possibly tell.
That’s what the loop does. That’s what fighting it costs.
Every time you treat the thought as a genuine threat that needs resolving, you confirm to your nervous system that the alarm was justified. So it keeps sending it. Louder. More often.
The more you fight an intrusive thought, the louder it gets.
What You Actually Do
You allow the thought to be there.
You don’t have to like it or agree with it. You just have to allow it because it’s a thought, and thoughts don’t need action.
When it shows up, you notice it. You recognize it as anxiety doing its thing. And then you don’t engage. You don’t argue with it, analyze it, seek reassurance that you’re not a terrible person.
You let it float in the background and you get on with what you were doing. You refocus to something else.
You can even go further. Invite it in. Give it more. “Go on then, show me what you’ve got.”
When you genuinely remove the fear around the thought, it has nothing to feed on. It shows up, gets no reaction, and eventually gets bored and leaves.
I know that sounds almost impossible when you’re in the middle of it. Because everything in you wants certainty that you’re okay. But chasing certainty is exactly what keeps the loop going, because a sensitized nervous system will always find the next thought to worry about.
The discomfort of allowing the thought to be there is temporary. The loop you create by fighting it is not.
You Are Not Your Thoughts
The thoughts that disturb you the most are the ones most removed from who you actually are. That’s exactly why they disturb you.
A violent thought terrifies a gentle person. A blasphemous thought terrifies a person of faith.
A thought about harming a loved one terrifies someone whose whole world revolves around protecting the people they love most.
That’s the paradox of intrusive thoughts, and it’s also the way out.
You’re not going crazy. You’re not dangerous. You’re someone with a sensitized nervous system that has found your deepest values and fears and is using them to get a reaction out of you.
Because that’s the most effective way to keep you on high alert.
Stop giving it the reaction.
Allow the thought. Disengage. Refocus. And remember what this is, just anxiety doing anxiety things. And the more you respond that way, the less it needs to keep testing you.
Hope this was helpful to read – because I know how scary intrusive thoughts can be. And it’s easy to spiral over.
But once again, the key is within yourself. It’s within your response to it.
