Transcription
One answer to the question of how to abstain from intrusive thoughts, you know, thoughts that we're addicted to, is if those thoughts are merely on loop all the time and we can't stop them, but the thoughts themselves aren't particularly disturbing. So, think about a song you can't get out of your head, or you keep recounting some event, but the event itself isn't very disturbing. It's just intrusive because it's there.
Well, in that case, the data really point to trying to anchor your thoughts to some external stimulus, so getting into action, getting into activities that really draw your attention away from that thought. Now, you may still hear it scrolling in the background. So, you might be sitting in class still hearing that loop of thoughts in the background. That's something that over time ought to wane. It ought to disappear if we try and bring more and more attention to whatever it is that's in our environment, whatever it is that we happen to be learning or doing physically, etc.
Things like mindful meditation, doing a 10 or even just five-minute today practice of sitting with eyes closed or lying down with eyes closed and really focusing on one's breath, focusing one's attention on the, sometimes it's called the third eye center, but in science, we'd say the just the region right behind the forehead. You're directing your attention there. Has been shown to increase focus for singular topics and can improve memory and do a bunch of other things as well. Those are data from Dr. Wendy Suzuki's lab at New York University. She was a guest on the podcast as well. My laboratory has run studies on mindful meditation as well. So, what you're really trying to do is learn how to focus better on one thing, and by focusing on that one thing, you focus off these repetitive thoughts.
Now, I have a feeling that this question was asked and that many people upvoted this question because the issue isn't just thoughts that are intrusive because they're there and on repeat, but because the thoughts themselves are actually troubling. This could be recounting a trauma, someone harmed you, you observed something that was disturbing, um, you felt wronged, you felt someone else was wronged, um, you can't seem to get your mind off of something, and your emotions tend to follow, and so it's uncomfortable. I have a feeling this is the the root of the question.
In that case, the approach is very different. What we know from essentially all of the quality scientific and clinical studies is that those sorts of intrusive thoughts are very much like a trauma. Now, we have to be clear in defining what trauma is. I'll use the definition that Dr. Paul Conte, another incredible guest that was on our podcast, a psychiatrist, Stanford Harvard trained psychiatrist, I think one of the world's foremost leaders on the issue of trauma and psychiatry and psychology generally. He defines trauma as an event or something that fundamentally changes the way that your nervous system works, such that you function less adaptively going forward from that event. Okay? So, not every bad occurrence in your life is a trauma. That's good news. The bad news is many people have traumas, and traumas change the way that our nervous system works so that we don't function as well as we could. So, in that sense, intrusive thoughts that are disturbing are in many ways traumas and are reinforcing that trauma.
Now, we know that almost counter-intuitively, in order to deal with trauma, you have to get very close to that trauma. You don't have to re-expose, and I would hope you would not re-expose yourself to the very same trauma. But we know that one of the best ways to deal with traumas is to get very clear about the narrative around those traumas. Now, this can be done with a therapist, ideally. But not everyone has access to therapy or can afford therapy. There's a range of quality of therapists, for that matter. So, we're always referring to the desire for people to do great therapy with really great, meaning excellently trained people. But it turns out that if you want to extinguish an intrusive thought, one of the best ways to do that is to journal about that particular thought extensively.
So, rather than the earlier strategy for intrusive thoughts where they're just on loop and intrusive because they're on loop and present, but their content isn't disturbing, when a thought is disturbing and intrusive, we know that it's very useful to script out as much detail about that particular thought and the things around it as possible. Obviously, you want to do this in a way that is fairly structured. So, you ideally would use complete sentences. So, the reason for doing that is that thoughts, as I mentioned earlier, can often be fragmentary. So, they they pop up in our mind almost we seemingly spontaneously. They're they're inhibiting our ability to focus or be present to work or family or other things or sleep. Writing things down in a lot of detail does seem to have this quality of both reducing the emotional load of whatever it is that that thought is about, as well as diminishing the frequency of those intrusive thoughts over time.
So, this is far and away different than the strategy I mentioned for the other types of intrusive thoughts, and really, it's far and away different from the 30-day abstinence approach that Dr. Anna Lemke was talking about for substance or behavioral addictions. Now, of course, this process of abstaining from thoughts or removing the addictive nature of certain thoughts can definitely take some time. So, a good example there would be superstitions. You know, I'll come clean here, and I've talked about this before on a few podcasts, that when I was in college, I developed a sort of knock on wood superstition. Anytime I'd say something that I didn't want to happen or did want to happen, I'd say knock on wood, and I'd knock on wood. And then I started suppressing the behavior, mostly because it was a little embarrassing. And then I started just telling myself in my head, knock on wood, knock on wood. And it was clearly a little bit of an OCD type thing. But again, OCD in air quotes here, um, I think it qualified as OCD in the sense that the more I did it, the more I wanted to do it. So, I needed to go cold turkey on the thinking. But how can you go cold turkey on a thought? You couldn't. What I was told to do, and what worked very well for me, was to just write down the worst possible outcome that I was concerned about. So, to really get close to the nature or the underlying basis of that intrusive thought.
And I raise this because a lot of times the intrusive thought is not, okay, I'm thinking about a car accident, or I'm thinking about a breakup, or I'm thinking about an exam that I have. That can be intrusive. But a lot of times, it's some kind of, um, nebulous, abstract set of words or ideas or images around something that happened that we saw or heard or experienced. And by putting a lot of clear structure to what the thought is exactly, and to putting some thought and structure onto paper about what that pattern of not healthy thinking relates to, people often achieve tremendous relief in a fairly short amount of time. Sometimes just in one session of writing it down. Sometimes they need to write it down multiple times.
What you're essentially trying to do with an intrusive thought or a trauma of any kind is you're trying to turn a disturbing story that is a story that evokes a lot of emotion and captures it, kind of hijacks your nervous system, into what is essentially a known but repetitive and kind of old, boring story where the emotional load has been depleted. And there, of course, I have to highlight the fact that getting sufficient rapid eye movement sleep, we also know is very important for removing the emotional load of traumatic experiences and intrusive thoughts. So, you really want to strive to get the best possible sleep you can. That includes sufficient rapid eye movement sleep. And we have multiple zero-cost resources for that at hubermanlab.com. We have the episode on Master Your Sleep, we have the episode on Perfect Your Sleep, we have the Toolkit for Sleep, all of which are time-stamped and all of which can be accessed to completely zero cost to try and get your sleep as good as possible, including lots of rapid eye movement sleep.
So, in order to remove intrusive and addictive thoughts, ask yourself, is this OCD of the classic sense? If it is, you should see a psychiatrist. They won't necessarily prescribe medication, but there are tools for true OCD that that are very effective in many cases. The episode on OCD, which I invite you to listen to as well. You want to ask yourself, are the thoughts disturbing or merely intrusive and repetitive? If they're merely intrusive and repetitive, well, then learning to focus your attention on other things and getting better at focusing on single things through an exercise like mindfulness meditation can really help. And indeed, the perhaps the best use of mindfulness meditation is to improve your level of focus. It does have other benefits as well, but that's going to be the major one that one will experience even with these very short five or ten-minute day meditations. Great data on that from the scientific literature.
And then, if those intrusive thoughts are not only intrusive but they're also disturbing, in that case, you really want to put as much structure and thought, believe it or not, into what those thoughts are really about. Write them out on paper in complete sentences, and maybe do that multiple times until the underlying emotions related to those thoughts really start to diminish. And by doing that, you're essentially doing your own form of trauma therapy, for lack of a better way to put it. And again, the data really point to the fact that getting close to the specific details around those intrusive thoughts is going to be the best way to extinguish them.