Intrusive thoughts

As humans, we have thousands of thoughts a day. We all have unintentional thoughts. Our brain naturally produces multiple automatic thoughts. Studies argue anything from 6,000 to 70,000 a day is “normal”.

That’s A LOT. This means most thoughts aren’t even in our conscious awareness.

Something that isn’t really spoken about openly, is that we all have weird and/or disturbing thoughts too. Sometimes these are deliberate, and sometimes they pop into our minds completely randomly, unintentionally and sometimes they can be alarming.

Normal intrusive thoughts have been studied over and over. As part of my CBT training, I’ve studied OCD and intrusive thoughts. One of the most well know psychologists David A. Clark has a done a lot of research (and written a lot of books), especially with anxiety and OCD. I cite one of his studies all the time, as he and a colleague (Purdon C. & Clark D. 1992) surveyed nearly 300 students (198 women and 95 men) with no diagnosed mental health problems. They asked if they had experienced 52 different examples of intrusive thoughts, below is a table of the percentage of people who admitted to having experienced different intrusive thoughts.

	Intrusive Thought	Admitted to	experiencing
		female %	male %
1.	driving into a window	13	16
2.	running car off the road	64	56
3.	hitting animals or people with car	46	54
4.	swerving into traffic	55	52
5.	smashing into objects	27	40
6.	slitting wrist/throat	20	22
7.	cutting off finger	19	16
8.	jumping off a high place	39	46
9.	fatally pushing a stranger	17	34
10.	fatally pushing friend	9	22
11.	jumping in front of train/car	25	29
12.	pushing stranger in front of train/car	8	20
13.	pushing family in front of train/car	5	14
14.	hurting strangers	18	48
15.	insulting strangers	50	59
16.	bumping into people	37	43
17.	insulting authority figure	34	48
18.	insulting family	59	55
19.	hurting family	42	50
20.	choking family member	10	22
21.	stabbing family member	6	11
22.	accidentally leaving heat/stove on	79	66
23.	home unlocked, intruder there	77	69
24.	taps left on, home flooded	28	24
25.	swearing in public	30	34
26.	breaking wind in public	31	49
27.	throwing something	28	26
28.	causing a public scene	47	43
29.	scratching car paint	26	43
30.	breaking window	26	43
31.	wrecking something	32	33
32.	shoplifting	27	33
33.	grabbing money	21	39
34.	holding up bank	6	32
35.	sex with unacceptable person	48	63
36.	sex with authority figure	38	63
37.	fly/blouse undone	27	40
38.	kissing authority figure	37	44
39.	exposing myself	9	21
40.	acts against sexual preference	19	20
41.	authority figures naked	42	54
42.	strangers naked	51	80
43.	sex in public	49	78
44.	disgusting sex act	43	52
45.	catching sexually transmitted disease	60	43
46.	contamination from doors	35	24
47.	contamination from phones	28	18
48.	getting fatal disease from strangers	22	19
49.	giving fatal disease to strangers	25	17
50.	giving everything away	52	43
51.	removing all dust from the floor	35	24
52.	removing dust from unseen places	41	29

Sometimes these thoughts can cause a lot of anxiety

part of the problem is then a vicious cycle

My favourite analogy/helpful explanation of this is the Struggle Switch, a three minute video by
Dr. Russ Harris from an Acceptance Commitment Therapy perspective.