OCD Tips: How to Control Intrusive and Obsessive Thoughts

Have you dealt with intrusive thoughts, repetitive thoughts, obsessive thoughts, those annoying thoughts that are kind of just churning around in your mind and can completely overwhelm you? I totally have that sometimes. And I was going to do a live today about anticipatory anxiety, but I kept having this intrusive thought that, well, you haven't done your hair and you haven't done your makeup, and you look so weird with your hair pulled back. Like, this is my messy hair, don't care kind of look. And I was like, I'm having intrusive thoughts that are making it difficult to prepare for a live about anticipatory anxiety. And then I was like, I need to do the work that I'm teaching my community to do. And so instead of doing a live about anticipatory anxiety, I'm actually going to do the work with you right now on how to deal with intrusive thoughts. And so when we think about thoughts, we have two main types of thoughts, right? There's active thoughts and there's passive thoughts. Active thoughts are those thoughts that you're having when you're actively thinking. Like, I'm choosing to think of the words that I'm saying to you right now. And then we have passive thoughts. Those are the thoughts that are kind of humming around in the background that you may or may not be aware of or paying attention to. Like, I'm noticing the temperature in the car. I noticed that somebody just drove by in the background as I'm sitting here parked, and I'm speaking to you, and I'm having active thoughts, and I'm having passive thoughts. And so when it comes to intrusive thoughts, they can come in the form of either active or passive. And the strategy to deal with intrusive thoughts is to turn them into passive and then thought relocate. So there's two things there. So if you have intrusive thoughts, if you have obsessive thoughts, if you have thoughts that are just spinning around in your brain and they're preventing you from going to sleep. Sleep or concentrating or focusing or creating, then this is the video for you. And I'm going to be doing this with you. And so the first thing is that we want to take those passive thoughts and we want to acknowledge them. And then once those passive thoughts are acknowledged, we're going to do thought relocation. And I'll teach you that in a minute. But the question is, is what if they're not actually passive? What if they're these intrusive, active thoughts and they're just right here in our face and I just can't stop think about it like, oh my gosh, you're talking to somebody. Oh my gosh, they must think I'm a failure. Oh, they must think I look so weird. Or am I saying the right words? Right. Those active thoughts that we may have. And so if you're having active thoughts, we want to shift them into passive first. So let me explain in more detail. Remember, we have two types of thoughts, the active and the passive. If they're passive, we want to acknowledge them and then thought relocate. If they're active, we want to acknowledge them and then thought relocate. So here's how we thought relocate. So regardless of the thoughts are passive, regardless of if you're not thinking them and they're just spinning around back there, or if you're actively thinking them right now, we want to thought relocate them. And so I'm going to do this with you while I teach you how to do this. And I find it's easier to concentrate when I close my eyes. And so if you're doing this video with me, if you're watching this video, whether live, or if you're going to be watching this video later or you want to just listen to this recording later, if you find that your thoughts are getting in your way, you may find that you feel better doing it with your eyes closed or keep them open, whatever is better for you. But I'm going to close my eyes. And so as you're watching, just do whatever feels right. But I want you to imagine noticing where the thoughts are in your mind. When I have active thoughts, oftentimes my active thoughts live in my forehead. They're spinning around. I can imagine the placement of them is right here in front of me. They're annoying, they're intrusive. And so thought relocation is all about you taking the power back. And so what I want you to do is if your thoughts are in your forehead or maybe they're in the back of your mind, is we're just simply going to imagine pushing them farther away from your head. So, so imagine noticing the thoughts. Acknowledge the thoughts and then see if you can kind of physically picture or imagine what they may look like. And then start to push them farther away from your head. And then the next step, once you've been able to do that, is imagine visually, maybe the thoughts are written in a font. You take them, you acknowledge them, you push them farther away from your head, and then we're gonna start to push them to the right side. So imagine the thoughts. So you push them away from you, push them to the right side and imagine thinking the thoughts on the right side. Imagine the thoughts outside of your head on the right side of your body and see how far you can push them away, see how close you can bring them. Thought relocation is all about changing what is changeable and making what hasn't previously been changeable, changeable. So you start with the thought, you acknowledge it, whether it's passive or active, and then you push it away, you push it forward, and then you push it to the side, and then you push it to the other side. So you start to begin to relocate your thoughts at will. The next step is you're going to actually mindfully push them back. Because what we're going to be doing is we're going to allow our thoughts to, to do their thing. Your brain likes to think whether you are just anxious or feeling insecure or planning or excited, or if you deal with intrusive OCD type thoughts, the more that we try to suppress or resist, the louder they're going to get, right? So thought relocation allows you to get them out of your way and just let them chill out and do their thing in the background. So, so the last phase is to mindfully imagine the thoughts. Remember, we imagine where they are and then imagine pushing them behind you so that they're just back here somewhere. And so the more that you practice that, the more that you practice acknowledging and thought relocation, the less intense, the less bothersome and the less prevalent those intrusive thoughts are going to be. You can spend just 10 seconds on this if you notice it, or you can do a meditation where you spend a little bit more time leaning into this. But the really cool thing about it is that the more that we acknowledge and mindfully dwell in the space of our signs, our symptoms from our bodies, the less that you're going to end up having those symptoms. So today we talked about thought relocation and I'm Dr. Nicole and I love helping you with anxiety. And so if there's topics that are useful for you and you want to talk about them, then let me know. Send me a dm. Leave a comment on any of our posts that are valuable. Share this with a friend. And if you have a hanker and it's so fun for me, if you just leave a little message that says I love this or I'd like to learn more, that makes my heart so happy. So thank you for watching this video. If you want to know more, you can check out our other free content today. We've been talking about how to deal with obsessive, intrusive, annoying thoughts, whether passive or active, negative. And we used a technique called thought relocation. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Dr. Nicole, and I will see you guys later.