A short YouTube talk by Danielle Thornton (certified coach and anxiety/OCD specialist) explaining why attending to intrusive thoughts and fears reinforces them. She frames intrusive thoughts as a learned brain pattern of hyper-focusing that seeks protection, and argues that engagement with these thoughts increases their frequency.
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm a certified coach and anxiety and OCD specialist. And I help people recover more long term from any subset of anxiety and ocd. So today let's talk about why focusing on your intrusive thoughts actually makes them worse. So this is actually true for just about anything. The more we focus on something positive, the more positive we feel. The more we focus on something negative, the more negative we feel. Now, that doesn't mean we want to completely ignore and run away from things in life, because it does not work that way. But essentially, with OCD and anxiety, we're talking about a brain pattern. A pattern of your brain hyper focusing.
On something because it's trying to protect you from getting hurt physically, mentally, from discomfort. Right? And the more we engage with intrusive thoughts and fear and these negative thoughts and emotions, the more this brain pattern is getting attention and the more our brain goes, great, he or she is listening to me. I'm going to do this more often because it's getting what it wants.
The key to reducing your intrusive thoughts, we don't get rid of them because everybody gets intrusive thoughts, some more than others. But the key to reducing it is no longer giving it attention. And this is also true for what I call depressive thoughts, the thoughts that make us sad and hopeless. The more we just naturally believe these thoughts that we're not good enough, that life is going to suck in the future. Whatever that thought is, the more we believe it and engage with it, the more real it feels and the less we believe it and the less we engage with it, the less it bothers us and eventually goes away. And this is true for OCD as well. Now, it's not quite that simple. It can be depending on how deep you are into the OCD cycle. But essentially when we give it attention, it gets what it wants and it keeps going and it actually gets stronger because your brain is learning what it does to get your attention and what it does. And if it's not getting your attention, it's going to fade away. So you actually have a lot more control than you realize. And that's why exposure and response prevention works so well for ocd. So hopefully this made sense. Like this video, if this was helpful for you, make sure you subscribe to my channel so you get notifications of new videos coming up. And if you want help to recover long term for your OCD and anxiety, just like I have, I have several different options for all different price points, I am able to help you get to the recovery stage, just like I have. It works every time when you do the work. We'll talk to you next time.
