Quick Tip For Stopping Intrusive Thoughts

Hey, do you deal with obsessive, intrusive and persistent thoughts? And are you looking for a way to help stop those thoughts in their tracks? This is Dr. Nicole, and today we're going to spend just a few minutes talking about how you can send intrusive and impulsive thoughts backstage so that you can live your life and focus on what you want to focus on and not just those pesky intrusive thoughts. I want to start by telling you a story about a client that I used to work with. And his symptoms were focused around obsessive intrusive thoughts. It all started when he was in college and he had a lot of anxiety. His anxiety was focused on performance and perfectionism and, and he wanted to do a really good job. And so it started where he was thinking quite a lot about, okay, how can I write this paper? How can I make sure I clearly articulate myself? How can I make sure that I do a good enough job to get an A? And then it started to spiral into a lot of what ifs and a lot of self defeating thoughts. And the thoughts got worse and worse to the point where they were loud and they were intrusive. And he went to the doctor. So he goes to the doctor and the doctor's like, oh, well, you just sound like you're anxious and it's causing test anxiety and paper anxiety and school anxiety. And this medication will stop the intrusive thoughts so you don't have to deal with it. So I gave my client benzodiazepine called Xanax and sent him on his way. And he kept refilling that prescription for the next five years. And so he started having perfectionism and wanting to do a really good job. It spiraled into what ifs and intrusive thoughts and anxiety. And then after five years of taking this medication, he tried to hurt himself. He was really depressed and he didn't know why. He had graduated from college, he was working as a mental health provider actually, and he was so depressed he wanted to take his own life. And so he went back to the doctors and asked if there's anything that he could do. And they said, continue your Xanax. I still think it's anxiety, but we're going to add an antidepressant medication. So now he's taking an antidepressant and he's still taking the benzos and he feels worse. One of the things that antidepressants can do is by pushing up serotonin, that can push down dopamine. And so serotonin and dopamine live on a teeter totter. So the theory is, is that as his serotonin went up, he was already incredibly depressed, his dopamine flatlined, and all any remnant of feel good neurotransmitter was crushed. And he got much worse. What ended up happening is he started to taper down on the benzodiazepines under a new physician, and his depression started to get quite a lot better. But as he came down of the Xanax, he started to notice the anxiety getting worse. And, and as the anxiety got worse, his thoughts became incredibly intrusive. And they were much worse than the intrusiveness of when he was in college. These thoughts were violent, they were scary, they felt like they were assaulting him. They were involuntary and intrusive. And so this thought would come into his head and it would be recurring again and again and again. And it filled him with so much stress that he would engage in a behavior to try to make the thought go away. He went back to his doctor, who then diagnosed him with obsessive compulsive disorder. And so he continued to taper off of the benzodiazepine and his anxiety and the intrusive thoughts got worse. And so I'm going to talk with you today about the number one thing that he used in order to make those intrusive thoughts better, to loosen the grip on intrusive thoughts. And it's something that you can do starting right now and after the research shows that after 60 to 90 days, you'll start to see a shift. And then after 90 to 120 days, the brain will start to wire a new habit. And what I asked him to do in the beginning was incredibly scary and upsetting to him because the thoughts that he was having, he wanted to get as far away from as possible. But what he was doing wasn't working. And so he's like, all right, I will try it. The strategy is exposure therapy. And what you do in exposure therapy is the thought will come, and then you embrace and allow the thought to be present. And so the body is producing a symptom from some sort of a root cause, which he and I are working on now. And so the body is producing the symptom in the form of an anxious feeling. And as the symptoms got more severe, they were more intensive thoughts. And what his normal standard response was to try to suppress that and push that down because he didn't want to associate or affiliate himself with those thoughts. He wanted them to go away. But what he resisted, persisted, and it got worse. And so exposure therapy is all about facing those thoughts head on and acknowledging them. And so what you do is so a thought will enter your mind. You notice it, you acknowledge it, you hold the space for it, and then you drop it. Then the thought is going to come back and you acknowledge it, you notice it, you hold the space for it, and then you drop it. And what's going to end up happening is that the brain is going to start to re associate the relationship with the thought. When we acknowledge something, the data has been passed on, you've received and acknowledged that data, and then you have the power to start transforming it. The first thing that he noticed was that the grief and suffering that came with the thoughts and got better. He started to notice, it's just a thought. It's okay. This is just my anxious body producing thoughts. I'm going to acknowledge them, and then I'm going to practice releasing them. So his relationship with the thoughts changed. And when his relationship with the thoughts changed, the emotions that were triggering the thoughts started to change. He started to accept himself, accept these parts, and the thoughts got quieter and quieter. And so when I spoke with him fairly recently, he reported that the obsessive intrusive thoughts were 90% better. And he's been using the exposure therapy for the past three weeks. And again, the brain will start to shift in 30 days, and then it'll start to become more noticeable in 60 days, and then the brain starts to rewire in 90 to 120 days. And so he's practicing exposure therapy for those intrusive impulses, impulsive, interfering thoughts. And so when you're practicing this, if you have a thought that comes up, and oftentimes these thoughts are going to be the opposite of your true self. And so they could feel unethical, they could feel scary, they could feel like total lies. And the impulse may be to try to fight that thought, but just allow the thought to come up, label it. My brain is thinking, thinking, thinking. I am not my thoughts. I notice you thoughts, I accept you thoughts, and I'm going to release you. And so that is the quick tip that I wanted to share with you today. If you're dealing with intrusive thoughts, repetitive thoughts, obsessive thoughts, then practicing exposure therapy, in addition to using the other techniques that we talk about here, is going to help you. It can help you get your life back. It can, and it's been shown in the research to be an effective strategy. At the same time, while you're using exposure Therapy make sure that you're getting to the root cause of what's starting your symptoms to begin with. My client, the failing by his doctors is that they didn't start to talk to him how he could deal with his anxiety in school. They didn't talk with him about his perfectionism. They didn't look at what was happening with his biochemistry. They just gave him a pill for an ill and then they refilled it for five years. And then his brain became dependent. It changed his biochemistry, his relationship to the anxiety. And then as symptoms got much worse, they added on another medication and so on and so forth. Does that sound familiar to you? Have you ever been in a situation where you felt really scared, you didn't know what to do and you were given a prescription and then that prescription caused another issue and another issue. It's so you're not alone. And there are strategies that you can use, things that actually work to heal the brain and to heal the body. And so my passion is to share with you every Wednesday and every Friday something from my private practice or my consulting practice and to give you all of the information I can to empower you to get your life back. And it's all free. And so come and visit with me every Wednesday, every Friday, 1 o' clock Eastern and let me know what kinds of questions I can answer for you today. We've been talking all about intrusive thoughts. And a 10 that I can give you in addition to the exposure therapy is to get to the root cause of what's producing those thoughts to begin with. One way to do that is to do our free one week Anxiety Freedom Challenge. You can check that out by clicking on the link. I'll have Haley post that there. It's totally free. And when you register for that, you just click on the link. It'll take you to a few questions and one of which is we'll ask for your email address and then we're going to send you videos and handouts and you're going to get 14 tips, two for each day. And it's going to be great. And it's just my way of thanking you for showing up for yourself and sharing the message that you can get your life back from anxiety, depression and trauma. And so My name is Dr. Nicole. If there's anything that would be helpful for you that we could touch on in our next live, then let me know and I will see you guys on Friday, same time, same place. And I send you lots of love and I'll talk to you later. Bye.