Everything You Need to Know About Intrusive Thoughts

Occasionally, you're minding your own business when a weird - and sometimes disturbing or upsetting - thought pops into your head. Why does your brain do this, and does it mean that you're a bad person?

- By Hayley Bennett

Have you ever been driving along a motorway, listening to the radio, when your brain suddenly piped up with, "Hey, what if I just turn into the central barrier?" Or perhaps you picked up a knife to slice some bread and wondered, "What if I was to hurt someone with this?" These are examples of intrusive thoughts - just thoughts that pop into your head, either of their own accord or maybe because of the situation you're in, such as driving a car or slicing bread. Ideally, we acknowledge these thoughts before simply setting them aside and moving on with our days. But for some people, at certain points in their lives, dismissing intrusive thoughts can become more difficult. Here, with some help from the experts, we explain what intrusive thoughts are, what happens when they get out of hand and how to deal with them.

What are intrusive thoughts?

From the broadest perspective, an intrusive thought is anything random that 'pops into mind', says clinical psychologist Prof Mark Freeston, who specialises in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders at Newcastle University in the UK.

Technically, an intrusive thought could be positive, but it's more often than not the negative ones that we notice.

An example might be a sudden panic that you've left the oven on and your home is going to burn down. The sort of thing that we all think about from time to time. We might not think of it as 'unwanted', because it's just a thought that we quickly forget about.