 This is episode 207 of the anxious truth and today we are talking about how you cannot Forcibly stop control or change your thoughts. This is important. So let's go Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is podcast episode number two zero seven today We're gonna talk about the fact that you cannot Forcibly control stop or change your thoughts no matter how hard you try So if you are new to this podcast, I am Drulence a lot of creator and host of the anxious truth We've been at this since 2014. This is the podcast. That's all about anxiety and anxiety recovery So if you're dealing with things like panic disorder or agoraphobia or social anxiety or health anxiety or OCD This is the podcast for you. I'm really glad you're here And of course if you are a returning viewer on YouTube or listener of the podcast, well, welcome back I'm certainly glad you're here every week. Thank you very much. So today we're gonna talk about a really important topic It's a thing we do talk about a lot But I feel like it's come up a little bit more in the community lately And I wanted to dedicate a full podcast episode on this Which is the idea that you cannot no matter how much you want to decide to simply stop thoughts Control them or change them into positive thoughts. It just doesn't work that way So we're gonna talk about that today before we do I just want to remind you that the anxious truth is way more than just this podcast episode There's 206 other podcast episodes. There's three really good books and anxiety and anxiety recovery And there's even a bunch of social media stuff That's all free and there is my morning email newsletter and mini podcast called the anxious morning Which is also free. There's a ton of stuff on my website at the anxious truth comm So go avail yourself of all of those resources, please And if you are enjoying this work this podcast and I'm helping you in some way And you would like to find a way to support it and help keep it ad and sponsorship free as it always has been You can find ways to do that at the anxious truth comm slash support Of course, that's never required but always appreciated and I appreciate all of you guys no matter how you participate in the community Thank you very much. So let's get to this episode. This is another one that I recorded on the beach So it's the middle of March today as I record and it was just a great day So I took the camera and went up to the beach this morning to hang out for a while And I recorded two podcast episodes You saw one a couple of weeks ago and then I did this one also you'll see I was wearing the same gray Switcher what are you gonna do? So let's get to that Hopefully you enjoy my little second episode from the beach and then I'll come back at the end and wrap it up as I always do So let's get rolling All right, welcome back to Cedar Beach on the north shore of Long Island I recorded here a few episodes back But really that was only about 12 minutes ago as you could tell because I'm wearing the same thing Taking off the blue hoodie doesn't fool anybody. I'm aware. So today I wanted to take a few minutes from this kind of beautiful place and talk about Why you cannot control or change your thoughts This is something that we talk about all the time But it's been more a little more prevalent in the discussion in the community, especially my Facebook group So I just wanted to take a few minutes and dedicate a podcast episode to this because it's it's really important Most people don't seem to understand this premise especially in the beginning of the recovery process if you're plagued particularly by thoughts Especially if you're dealing with OCD and thought-based OCD puro But really anybody with an anxiety disorder really gets plagued by these thoughts and we ruminate and get stuck on them And they become intrusive and they replay That's a matter of degree, of course So but in the beginning everybody seems to want to come into the community at which everybody's welcome to of course at all Times and it's really natural for sort of a beginner or somebody that's new in this on the recovery journey to ask Any tips for how I can stop them? How can I make those thoughts stop or how can I control them? You know any tips and tricks for controlling my thoughts And that's a really common question to ask because clearly when the thoughts are disturbing to us We don't want to have them. We don't like them. They scare us They they threaten us in some way because many times those thoughts indicate Activities that we don't want to do and we would never do but they suggest them to us anyway and we see them then as possible threats or dangers or or They they describe us as evil people or bad people or whatever it happens to be. They're scary. They're disturbing. They're unwanted It's why we call them intrusive. They were wanted thoughts I wouldn't be talking about them and we wouldn't call them intrusive But they're just thoughts nonetheless, but the important thing about this is to understand that Trying to control those thoughts and stop them from happening is super frustrating and in the end It's a dead end. So we never approach these things by trying to stop the thoughts So there's two things here number one is trying to stop the thoughts Which you can't do and number two which I'll get to in a minute is the idea that you can change the thoughts And I'll get to that in a second. So let's start with the idea that you want to be able to stop the thoughts I'm gonna control the scary and disturbing and anxious thoughts That I have and I want to try to find the way to stop them from happening I don't want them to happen. So any tips for stopping? Well, let's talk for a second about what that would mean So let's take a ridiculous example and say in my head is a thought about a green umbrella because there's a green umbrella over there So Let's assume that I'm I keep thinking of this green umbrella and I decide I don't want to think of that green umbrella And you can apply this to any thought no matter how out there or disturbing or uncomfortable It may be it is exactly the same as my green umbrella that's over there So if I want to not think about that green umbrella What I have to do is try to think of other things But then that process of metacognition is gonna kick in right and we've got that thing that says well Now I have to check to see if I did it because that green umbrella thought is scary and disturbing I don't want it. I want it gone. So if I want it gone, I have to check to make sure that it's gone So if I'm gonna force myself to think of squirrels and an ice cream and Sunsets and happy things. I don't want to talk. I don't want to think about the green umbrella Then my brain is gonna have to circle back in and a checking mechanism to say, okay Is it working? Are you thinking about it? And the minute my brain circles back to check to see if I am in fact Thinking of a green umbrella. I'm thinking of a green umbrella. So that experiment has happened a zillion times I've heard it with the pink elephants flamingos like purple dinosaurs like it's again and again and again and again I dare you for the next 10 seconds to not think of a purple dinosaur and and you will think of a purple dinosaur I'm thinking of it now We can't help it because we will monitor that. So, you know, we don't even control that like okay I need to make sure I don't think of that green umbrella So I have to check to see if I'm successfully stopping the thought and as soon as I check to see if I'm stopping the thought I have the thought and there it is. So I see people try to do this all the time like and believe me I've seen all kinds of crazy techniques thrown at people by You know people that really have no business giving this kind of advice I've heard people think of a stop sign, you know, imagine there's a stop sign in your head Tell the thoughts to stop. I've heard advice like count to ten and tell it to go away Count backwards from ten to make it go away I've had somebody who was literally told by a therapist believe it or not that they were disperse person was was kind of crippled with OCD Puro thought-based OCD and this therapist literally told that person to picture a stop sign and to yell out loud stop stop stop Like I can't even believe that that was actual advice Which clearly didn't work for that person and put them into even a little bit more of a torture chamber because I see no matter What I do this thought is so powerful and special and scary that it's overriding my special stop techniques But but there is no special stop techniques. We cannot decide what we think Thoughts pop on our heads all day long randomly in some cases depending on the state that we are in in an anxious state a frightened state Clearly in the case of the OCD community those thoughts become louder and stickier and more persistent But there's still just thoughts and they're going to have it So if you think that you are have to try to stop your thoughts And I sure hope that this windsock is working because the wind has kicked up a little bit If you think you're going to try to stop your thoughts think again because we cannot successfully Stop a thought from happening and that's just been proven again and again and again The second thing that we cannot do is to change that thought now This is advice that you hear often in the personal development self-help space, especially online Where it's the toxic positivity the choose happiness choose positivity So when I am having these scary thoughts Oh, what if I have a heart attack on this beach where there's nobody here to help me? Then I should immediately try to replace that thought with a positive thought Oh, let me think about my daughter's sixth birthday party and what a great day that was But that doesn't really work either. That's that's just a variant on thought stopping and we know that thought stopping doesn't work So you're not going to have a lot of success with that and a lot of people hear that sort of advice just change your Negative thought or your scary thought into a positive thought and then it'll go away and that's not true And it leads you down Especially if your thoughts are maybe more of a moral and ethical like I'm an evil person because I'm thinking of hurting people Or maybe I believe I don't really love my family or my partner if you're stuck on those kind of thoughts and you cannot choose positivity by replacing them with positive happy thoughts Then it makes things almost even worse It's almost more proof that the thought is true. I'm a bad person But you're not your brains just don't work that way if you're going to try to replace a thought With another thought that's just another form of thought stopping and thought control and that process that Metacognitive process going to kick in to check on what you're thinking about to see if you have successfully replaced the five So that is an almost impossible ask to just instantly decide well instead of having this thought I will choose to have this thought because and that plays into the whole tremendously misleading thing and sort of popular self-help culture change your thoughts change your life which is not true in our case in this Community where we're talking about anxiety disorders and recovery. It's not change your thought change your life You can't stop the thoughts and you can't you can't change them and wrestle into something different because you don't like them So we can't just decide to change our thoughts what we do change is our behavior now That's a whole other episode and I talked about this all the time. So we lead with different behavior And I'm not gonna get into it now because otherwise this will become a 45 minute episode But in the end you can't change them and you can't stop them. So what do we do? We just kind of go with them We have to learn to allow those thoughts to be there without Engaging in that frantic response that tries to squash them or sweep them out of the way with a positive thought Or perform some sort of safety ritual that that proves that the thought is not gonna come true It's a hard ask don't get me wrong to allow thoughts like that to just come And part of what we do when we lead with different behavior is we do engage with the outside world So I can walk down this beach while my brain says well, what if you have a heart attack on the beach? I can do both of those things at the same time and over time you just learned a new relationship with that thought that says Oh, yeah, I'm thinking that again. It's never true. It's not gonna be true now and whatever happens. I'm gonna handle it So that's in the it's gross oversimplification just to keep this from becoming too long an episode But it was really important for me to throw that out there because I think a lot of people are under the misconception that when you're Stucked on thoughts That you can just decide to stop having them through some mental trick Or that you can decide to replace a negative thought with a positive thought and you can't that's just not terribly effective It might work for a minute or two at a time But then it comes back and you wonder why it doesn't work like well How come this is how come I can't just choose to think positive things doesn't work that way Unfortunately, we're just not designed that way. Maybe it's bad design. I'm not saying it's good design But that is the way we are designed and becomes really really difficult if you're gonna try and go down that road So that the crappy conclusion to this is that we have to learn not to live with the thoughts like okay Let's I'll just be tortured forever, but we can learn to coexist with those thoughts so that they no longer become torturous Maybe from time to time they will still be scary and disturbing. That's possible You can't say that it isn't but they don't have to torture you forever for the rest of your life So just know that when we say you can't control or change your thoughts We're also not saying that you are resigned to a lifetime in the barrel just being beaten with a bat by these thoughts That's also not true. There's other outcomes here. Alright, so The only other thing that I kind of wanted to add before I wrap this up and I'll do to wrap up at the end back at my desk I usually do is What did I? Well, it's out of my it's out of my head now it had to do with that whole toxic positivity Mindset this is not also a mindset thing So while we're talking about changing thoughts and controlling thoughts and stopping thoughts We're talking about mindset for just a second also because so many people will think oh well And a lot of people self-development personal development self-help gurus will somehow bring mindset into the anxiety recovery process You don't get to just decide to change your mindset. This isn't a mindset problem like oh I think negatively so if I could just get into a positive mindset then somehow or other I will solve this problem It's not a mindset problem either. I mean, I'm not saying that mindset is completely irrelevant How you approach this and sort of your framework and and whether or not you believe you can make a difference or not does matter There's true, but you can't just fix this problem or address this problem by somehow magically changing your mindset That's not a thing either right so the bottom line in this episode and I'll wrap it up now Is if you have been kind of tortured and you're feeling like nothing is working I can't get this to work. Why can't I control my thoughts? Why can't I change my thoughts? Why can't I choose positive thoughts and why can't I change my mindset? There's a reason for that and that doesn't mean that you're failing or broken It was never gonna work because that's not how we are wired. All right, so Bring it back to the desk to wrap it up in this episode. Thanks for hanging out at the beach with me for episode number two in this Little Beach series and I'll see you in the next one Alrighty then we are back for the wrap-up. That is it for episode 207 a little discussion about the impossibility on an unrealism of trying to forcibly control your thoughts we just can't do it So I hope that you have found it helpful. I hope you enjoyed my little second podcast episode from the beach I intend to do more of those over the spring and summer coming up I got my fancy new camera here So I could just kind of throw it on a tripod and go somewhere into the beach or the wood somewhere and just kind of Off the cuff them because that's sort of my favorite way to do these anyway. Hopefully you are finding them helpful That is it for 207. You know it's over because music This is Afterglow by Ben Drake It's the song you hear every week on this podcast You can find Ben and his music at ben drake music comm go check him out and tell him I said hello If you are watching on YouTube feel free to leave a comment like or subscribe to the channel for sure Digging interacting with you guys on YouTube after neglecting you for way too long. I'm sorry about that And if you are listening on Apple or Spotify or any platform that lets you rate and review the podcast Leave a five-star rating if you dig in it and maybe write a little review to help other people find the podcast I really appreciate that we get to help more people that way. That's it I will be back next week with another episode again I don't know what I'm gonna talk about but I will be here talking about something and remember this is the way Yeah, you're doing fine. It's all around you can breathe it