![]() Today, Prof Adam Radomsky, the lead author of the 2014 study, who is based at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, says he believes we all have intrusive thoughts. The results suggested that 94 per cent had had at least one intrusive thought in the previous three months. The team interviewed each person to check that they were really having intrusive thoughts as opposed to worries or other types of thoughts. Then, in 2014, a multinational team of researchers looked further afield, studying intrusive thoughts in 777 people across 13 countries and six continents. Researchers carried out similar surveys over the years, but they were still limited to Europe and the US. While Rachman’s study profoundly influenced the next half a century of research on intrusive thoughts, the data on which it was based was from a relatively small group of UK students. In clinical patients, intrusive thoughts tended to crop up more often they were also more intense and harder to dismiss. Surprisingly, when the intrusive thoughts experienced by both groups were written down, a panel of psychologists found it difficult to work out which group a lot of them belonged to. They compared the content of these thoughts to those of people being treated for obsessions. In the 1970s, he and colleague Padmal de Silva surveyed 124 people with no known psychiatric conditions and found that nearly 80 per cent of them often had thoughts that would be classed as intrusive. Psychologist Prof Jack Rachman was the first to show experimentally that intrusive thoughts are ‘normal’. Yes, although we didn’t always realise this. ![]() © Kyle Smart Are intrusive thoughts normal? 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. Worries are considered more ‘egosyntonic’, meaning they’re more aligned with our beliefs. Psychologists refer to this as an ‘egodystonic’ thought. 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. Whereas, in OCD, the thoughts may be fears of contamination, or in PTSD, they may be memories or flashbacks of a traumatic event. “In social anxiety, the intrusive thoughts would likely be ‘How are other people seeing me?’, ‘Is my hand shaking?’” says Freeston. Then there are the intrusive thoughts that are very much unwanted, in mental health complaints such as OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social anxiety. We might not think of it as ‘unwanted’, because it’s just a thought that we quickly forget about. The sort of thing that we all think about from time to time. An example might be a sudden panic that you’ve left the oven on and your home is going to burn down. ![]() Technically, an intrusive thought could be positive, but it’s more often than not the negative ones that we notice. ![]() 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… What are intrusive thoughts?įrom 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. But for some people, at certain points in their lives, dismissing intrusive thoughts can become more difficult. Ideally, we acknowledge these thoughts before simply setting them aside and moving on with our days. 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. 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?” Intrusive thoughts: Why they happen and how to deal with them
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