What we're actually talking about

I want to start with something I tell almost every person who comes to me describing this problem for the first time: you are not the first, and the thought you are so ashamed of is far more common than you think.

Intrusive thoughts are unwanted mental events — images, impulses, or fragments of words — that arrive without invitation and feel completely at odds with who you are. A devoted parent suddenly pictures dropping their baby. A gentle, non-violent person imagines pushing a stranger off a platform. Someone deeply in love with their partner has a sexual thought about a family member. A person with no intention of self-harm has a vivid image of doing exactly that.

Research consistently shows that more than 90 percent of the general population experiences intrusive thoughts at some point. The content can be violent, sexual, blasphemous, or morally repugnant. The thoughts are not a secret window into your true desires. They are a feature of how human cognition works — not a reflection of character.

Why the mind produces them at all

Closely related: childhood Emotional Neglect and you Took the ACE Test. Now What?.

The brain is, among other things, a threat-detection system. It runs simulations. It models danger before danger arrives so that you can respond quickly if it does. Most of the time this is useful. Sometimes it misfires and generates a scenario that has no relationship to anything you want or plan to do.

Think of it this way: the thought "what if I swerve into oncoming traffic" arises precisely because your brain knows you should not do that. The alarm is evidence of your values, not a violation of them. If the thought genuinely did not matter to you, it would not stick. The reason it feels so loud is that you care deeply about the opposite.

There is also a well-documented cognitive phenomenon called thought-action fusion — the tendency to feel that thinking something is morally equivalent to doing it, or that thinking it makes it more likely to happen. Neither is true. A thought is a mental event. An action requires a decision, a body, a plan, and execution. The thought about the platform and the act of pushing are not on the same spectrum.

The paradox of fighting your own thoughts

Here is where most people make the first mistake, and it is a completely understandable one: they try to suppress the thought.

If I ask you right now not to think about a white bear for the next thirty seconds, you will think about almost nothing else. This is the ironic process theory described by psychologist Daniel Wegner — suppression increases the very thing you are trying to eliminate. The mental energy spent checking whether the thought has returned guarantees that you keep returning to it.

The same applies to reassurance-seeking. You tell a friend, or your partner, or you search online for evidence that people with these thoughts are not dangerous. You feel relief — for perhaps twenty minutes. Then the doubt returns, slightly louder. Reassurance gives short-term comfort at the cost of long-term amplification. Every time you seek it, you confirm to your nervous system that the thought was genuinely threatening and that reassurance was necessary. The cycle tightens.

The connection to anxiety and OCD

For most people, intrusive thoughts are a low-level nuisance that passes quickly. For people with anxiety disorders, and particularly for people with OCD, the thought gets caught in a loop.

In OCD, the thought produces intense distress, which triggers a compulsion — a mental or behavioural ritual intended to neutralise it. The compulsion brings brief relief, which reinforces the loop, which makes the next intrusion more distressing, which produces a stronger compulsion. The content varies enormously: harm OCD, contamination, relationship OCD, scrupulosity, and many others. What they share is the same structural pattern — obsession, anxiety, compulsion, temporary relief, return.

I am not saying that everyone who has an intrusive thought has OCD. Most people do not. But if you notice that:

  • the thoughts are consuming significant time or focus each day
  • you are carrying out mental or behavioural rituals to neutralise them
  • your avoidance of certain situations is expanding
  • the distress feels unmanageable

...then working with a clinician trained in evidence-based approaches would be genuinely useful, and there is no shame in that.

What actually helps: defusion

The evidence-based approach I find most useful to explain in plain language comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It introduces a practice called cognitive defusion — creating a small, observable distance between you and the thought.

Instead of "I am going to hurt someone," the practice invites you to notice: "I am having the thought that I might hurt someone." It sounds like a small grammatical shift. In practice, it changes your relationship to the thought substantially. You are no longer inside it; you are looking at it from one step back.

You can also try naming the thought as what it is: "There's my brain doing threat-simulation again." Or, if you want to reduce its power further, imagine the thought as text scrolling across the bottom of a television screen — present, visible, not demanding that you act on it.

The goal is not to make the thought disappear. The goal is to stop treating it as a command that requires a response.

Tolerating uncertainty

Underneath almost every intrusive thought loop is a demand for certainty: *Am I a good person? Am I safe to be around? Can I be sure I would never act on this?*

The honest answer is that certainty about future behaviour is not available to anyone. People who do not have these thoughts cannot guarantee their own future actions either. Seeking that guarantee is the engine that keeps the loop running.

The practical step here is learning to sit with "I don't know, and I can tolerate not knowing." This is genuinely uncomfortable at first. It gets easier with practice. The discomfort is not danger — it is just discomfort.

Some concrete starting points:

  • Notice the urge to seek reassurance and delay acting on it by ten minutes. Then twenty. The urge diminishes on its own when it is not fed.
  • Write the thought down plainly, without catastrophising language, and then set the paper aside. Externalising it reduces its felt intensity.
  • Return your attention to what you were doing — not as avoidance, but as a deliberate choice to re-engage with your actual life.

If you want a clearer read on where your anxiety sits right now, our Free Anxiety Test takes a couple of minutes and needs no sign-up.

A word on character

I want to return to where I started. The people I see who are most distressed by intrusive thoughts are, almost without exception, people with a well-developed moral sense. The content of the thought represents the precise opposite of what they value. A person without empathy does not lie awake terrified that they might harm someone they love. The terror is itself evidence of care.

Having a thought tells you nothing about your character. What you do with your attention — and whether you build a life aligned with what matters to you — is where character lives.