How do you manage intrusive thoughts?

I have been facing this occasionally after the withdrawal of OCD medications 4 years before.

Please exclude alcohol and drug related solutions, I dont prefer those options at all as they dont help anymore.

I hope this thread will be helpful to people facing similar issues.

Thank you, guys.

Mental illness is a b1tch.

Crap can get easily triggered.

Once it's triggered, you can forget that it's mental illness and voila, a month of planning how to build a nuclear plant for a variety of reasons.

The only thing you can do is to be aware of the mechanism involved in your mental illness / problem.

For me it's exaggeration of things. Once I accidentally exaggerate one thing, it can become a month of exaggerating different things.

Forgetting to call it "mental illness" and recognizing the mechanism creates major problems.

It usually slips in when I'm just living life. It's as if your mind became as sharp as 1000 knives and you couldn't do sh1t about it other than start recognizing it and surrendering to what other people say about it. The problem is, it exaggerates "evil parts" and "dark side" of people. It makes you think everyone is your enemy and that the only way to escape it to either kill yourself or kill yourself.

So I broke all my id cards, found a way to hide myself in the forests and realized it's a mental illness after 2 months.
Now I have 5+ other problems I created during this "episode".

Some people will reject it's mental illness. Don't listen to those.

I just force fed my brain self development material like brian tracy and jim rohn, zig ziglar, (and i been in some tight holes thanks to mental illness) now i only really listen to funky tracks, and good hip hop (which sometimes has a very positive uplifting message) I have intrusive thoughts, but I think that's natural, and everyone has them, its just a case of your brains randomness when it comes to thinking about things. Don't get hung up on this ability too much, and instead realise its the key to your creativity for work related stuff.

Defiantly helps when you listen to positive uplifting music, as its like a tonic for your brain, while you work, and master the success voice you already have. Best of luck.

I can tell you that without a help of a professional I'd be still coding $20m / year SaaS while having no food to eat and no money to pay the rent.

If you can take it from being bad 90% of the time to being bad 20% of the time, it's a lot. Maybe you can get as little as 5% if you're careful.

Meditation and a to-do list

Dude, relax, learn to enjoy life, get lazy, and then let the OCD become a casual behavior. I'm more or less OCD, but I'm a bit lazy, so my room is in a state of disarray most of the time, and then I'll focus on organizing it at some point

Having a good psychologist is fundamental when it comes to managing intrusive thoughts. Sometimes, these thoughts can gradually take up space in our minds, and when they do, they can distort our perception of reality, leading us to darker places. I’ve been there, and it’s hard to navigate alone.

For me, what really made a difference was the combination of therapy, meditation, strength exercises, and medication. My psychologist helped me understand that these thoughts are not who I am, and over time, I learned to manage them better. It wasn’t easy, but with the right support and tools, I was able to reclaim control and start feeling like myself again.
I am here if you need something.

seoways said:

I have been facing this occasionally after the withdrawal of OCD medications 4 years before.

Please exclude alcohol and drug related solutions, I dont prefer those options at all as they dont help anymore.

I hope this thread will be helpful to people facing similar issues.

Thank you, guys.

Click to expand...

My OCD has been extreme since I was around six years old. I would do a lot of rituals and have tons of intrusive thoughts for years. Finally, when I was 19, the doctor put me on a medication called Remeron, and I started doing Cognitive Behavioral therapy. The combination of the two made it so I don't even think about it.

Now, just cause it worked for me and my body chemistry doesn't mean it works for others, but I am saying that you are not alone and will find a solution. Hang in there and never give up!

1. Ask yourself if this thought is true.
2. Ask if it is absolutely true.
3. If it's not just forget/delete it and make space for better thoughts.
4. If it comes back, focus on something else and repeat the process.

seoways said:

I have been facing this occasionally after the withdrawal of OCD medications 4 years before.

Please exclude alcohol and drug related solutions, I dont prefer those options at all as they dont help anymore.

I hope this thread will be helpful to people facing similar issues.

Thank you, guys.

Click to expand...

Educate yourself on Psychology.

I have a friend who is suicidal. She loves to get together with our friend group and make suicide related jokes. When she does this, my friend group typically admonishes her and demands that she 'Block out those bad thoughts!' These people are my friends, so I am not going to start an argument with them.

However,

This is not how the human brain works. The subconscious mind owns 99.9% of your brain and has 100% control over the rest of your body. The idea that you can simply use will power to override these "Mental Intrusions" is completely delusional. In order to correct the situation, you need to do the one thing you have been resisting. You need to confront these thoughts head on. Drag them out into the daylight and beat them with a stick. Know what they are, where they come from, why they exist. This is not advice from a coked up motivational speaker: Your subconscious is demanding that you deal with these thoughts and if you refuse then it will simply keep pestering you.

If you have difficulty with this process, then I recommend you educate yourself on Psychology. And don't cheat because you will only be cheating yourself. Keep your research chronological...

Read...

1) Arthur Schopenhauer

2) Friedrich Nietzsche (Plot twist, he hated Schopenhauer)

3) Sigmund Freud (The man had such control over his own mind that he literally gave up cocaine)

4) Carl Jung (Plot twist, he hated Freud)

5) Allan Watts (Be warned, the man loved LSD. But he was also brilliant)

Best of luck stranger!

Practicing mindfulness and cognitive behavioral techniques can help manage intrusive thoughts. Regular exercise and speaking with a therapist might also provide relief.

Nobody is immune from intrusive thoughts.

What's important is that you develop a certain level of mental awareness and self-awareness to realize that you're having an intrusive thought.

You really have to understand that, just because you think something is true doesn't mean it's true.

It doesn't mean that it's your identity.

Just because you think of something doesn't mean that it represents your hopes, wishes, dreams, or your character.

You have to understand that we're sponges.

If you like watching serial killer documentaries, don't be all that shocked when certain intrusive thoughts appear or certain thought patterns that don't fit the way you imagine yourself to normally think appear.

That's just how it goes: garbage in, garbage out.

If you want to manage your intrusive thoughts and you think that your intrusive thoughts appear so frequently that it's some sort of problem, the first step is to watch your social media diet.

The great thing about places like TikTok is that you can easily program it to give you content that fits who you think you are.

If you're an aspirational person and you're dirt poor right now, things are not going well, and you're broke as a joke, look for rich content.

Look for content about making tons of money and interviews with billionaires.

That way, you feed yourself information and more importantly, you give yourself attitudinal cues that can work on a subconscious basis to push you out of the situation you're in.

Similarly, if you have an addiction such as objectifying women and you watch a lot of porn, there is content on TikTok that enables you to push yourself out of that.

Again, you are not your prison.

You are not your habits.

You are not your past.

You can change.

The first way to change is to change your input.

What I love about TikTok and to a lesser degree YouTube shorts is the fact that by proactively going out there and selecting aspirational content (I'm talking about content that doesn't necessarily reflect your present reality today but reflects who you want to be in the future), by looking at that aspirational content for a little bit of time, eventually, all your feed will be about the aspirational content.

It constantly reminds you of who you could be.

If you want to get out from under all these intrusive thoughts and let me add, negative personality programming that you stepped into at some point in the past, you have a lot more control over your situation than you give yourself credit for.

Change your media diet.

Change the music that you listen to.

Change the people that you talk to.

Eventually, you start reflecting on these influences.

If you achieve some kind of momentum and you feel more and more positive, you can scale it up by being more aggressive and finding more stimuli that help you chip away at your old identity as well as your thought patterns.

Eventually, those intrusive thoughts will disappear and be replaced by more positive thoughts — thoughts that lead you to where you can be and enable you to live up to your fullest potential.

But this is not feel-good talk.

This is not a pep rally.

This is a call to action because the only person who can break you out of that personal prison with no walls is you.

The key has been in your hands all along.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Hey bro, I hope things get better for you.

I go to the gym and do crossfit exercises, that seem to be effective for me, it makes me so tired that I cannot think about anything, except sleeping.

Maybe your new home is rehab with kidnappers entering your room in number of 4 to 5 with various medical injections as you're mentally ill.
And medicine pills is your new diet for life till you die leaving your ancestral property to your cousins.

Stay extremely BUSY. Schedule tasks with others. Fill up your calendar to the brim. If you make a ton of money or have success bring on interns with high energy and positive demeanor and find meaning in mentoring them. If you stay busy you won't have time to think and wallow.

I'm chiming in a little late on this as i just stumbled across it. Something that has helped me big time with ocd and intrusive thoughts is listening to subliminal audios. There's a lot of different ones on youtube but this audio worked out for me...

not sure if i am able to post links or not so i will post the title (hopefully thats ok to do)... put that in the search and it should be the first video... its like 30 minutes long. i have a whole playlist of different people that i leave playing in the background while working at the computer.


The title is "INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS SUBLIMINAL | Overcome Obsessive Thoughts, Rumination & Overthinking"

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