Why pushing a thought away makes it louder

The thought comes, and you push it away. Of course you do. It is horrible, it is not you, and the obvious thing to do with a horrible thought is to get rid of it. So you push. You think of something else. You tell yourself to stop. And it comes back, and you push again, and it comes back louder, and by the end of the day you have spent hours fighting a thought that a different person would have forgotten in a second.

I want to explain why this happens, because understanding it is the beginning of doing something different.

The white bear

There is an old demonstration that most people have heard some version of: try, for one minute, not to think of a white bear. What happens is that you think of almost nothing else. The instruction to not think about something requires you to hold that thing in mind, so you can check whether you are thinking about it. The checking is itself the thinking.

This is how attention works. You cannot aim attention away from something without first aiming it at that thing, and every time you check whether the thought has gone, you bring it back.

What the pushing teaches your brain

There is a second problem. Every time you push a thought away with urgency, you send a message to the part of your brain that decides what is dangerous. The message is: this thought is a threat. It needs to be dealt with. Do not let it pass.

The brain is good at learning what to watch for. Tell it, a few hundred times, that a particular thought is an emergency, and it will start scanning for that thought, flagging it the moment it appears, and delivering it with a jolt of alarm. The thought becomes sticky not because of what it is but because of how it has been handled. Your brain is now doing exactly what you trained it to do.

Not just suppression

Pushing away is one form of the fight. There are others, and they all do the same thing. Analysing the thought to work out what it means. Arguing with it, marshalling the evidence that you would never do that. Neutralising it with a good thought, a prayer, a mental correction. Checking how you feel about it, to establish that you feel the right way. Asking someone to tell you it means nothing.

Each of these feels like dealing with the thought. Each gives it attention, urgency and importance, which is precisely what keeps it in place. This is why, in CBT with exposure and response prevention, we stop fighting rather than look for a better way to fight.

What works instead

The alternative is to let the thought be there. It sounds too simple and at first feels impossible. Do not push it, analyse it, argue with it, cancel it or check on it. Notice it, the way you would notice a car passing, and go back to what you were doing. The thought will still be there for a while. Then, given nothing to feed on, it will lose its charge.

This is not the same as agreeing with the thought or liking it; it is declining to treat an ordinary product of a busy mind as an emergency. In practice, it is learned gradually, with support, in steps you agree to. The urge to fight rises and then, if it is not obeyed, it falls. That falling is the thing you have never experienced, because you have always fought before it could happen.

What I will not do

I will not tell you the thought means nothing about you, and I will not debate whether it is true. Not because the answer is in doubt, but because reassurance is the fight in a different form, and I am not going to be one more way of pushing the thought away. The content of an intrusive thought says nothing about who you are, and that does not need proving, again, every time the thought returns.

I know these are hard things to talk about. Many people start with the theme in general terms and share more as trust builds. You will not shock me.

If you have spent years pushing and it has only got louder, there is more on how I treat intrusive thoughts and Pure O.