Content Warning for discussion of Intrusive Thoughts and the ways I cope with them, along with their relation to my OCD, anxiety, and depression.

I was talking to a friend the other day and they said something about how they had just had a thought they were going to share but stopped themselves from saying anything because they realized it was an intrusive thought and a little messed up to share without any context. I laughed and replied that I was very familiar with the feeling, given that it is an every-day, nigh-constant occurrence for me. We talked about it back and forth a bit, them sharing their experiences with intrusive thoughts and their present-day therapy journey and me sharing my overall experience with intrusive thoughts as a whole and the place they held in my therapy journey. At one point, as I talked about how constant intrusive thoughts are for me, they remarked that it must be exhausting and I struggled to respond in a way that felt true to my experience. Yeah, objectively, it is exhausting to be constantly filtering intrusive thoughts and to need to filter every thought I act on or thing I say for stuff that slipped through my initial filter, but I’ve also been doing it for over two decades at this point. It is objectively hard, for sure, but I’ve spent so much time doing it that it often doesn’t feel very difficult.

It’s a lot like any kind of exercise. The more you do it, the easier it gets. It generally takes the same amount of energy, but you’re more efficient with it. Less goes to waste. If you run a mile every day for a month, you will not only run it more quickly at the end of the month than the beginning, but you will also feel like you did less work. Most mental health practices are similar. Once you get skilled and adept with them, once you’ve had a lot of practice employing them, they fell easier to do. If I ever sit down and explain the process that occurs in my mind any time one of my obsessions interjects a thought, or when my anxiety or depression join my OCD in peppering my mind with intrusive thoughts, it sounds exhausting. So much happens that even typing it out took two paragraphs worth of text (and didn’t really add anything, which is why they got deleted). The thing is, I don’t think about most of it anymore. I still actively filter a lot of what comes out of my mouth, but some part of that is just living in polite society and trying to be a considerate person. Most of the work gets done without my attention.

The only time I really remember how much work I’m doing to ignore the intrusive thoughts parading through my mind at any given time is when I talk about it with someone else. This hasn’t come up as often as you might think, given the amount of investment in my mental processes and well-being required to even start the conversation, much less continue past my warning that it will be a bit of a long explanation. The times I’ve had occasion to actually follow through, when I’ve explained the number of mental processes occuring at any given moment in my mind, I’ve been met with some version of “that sounds exhausting” every single time. In addition to the intrusive thought filter, I’ve got a few observational processes going, an interpretation process to make sure I’m picking up the subtext and body language of people around me, and any number of other thought processes just chugging away in the background of my mind. All of this stuff is what I refer to as my “backburner” in my mind. Everything that’s going on that stays out of my main attention until I call it to mind or check in on whatever it has flagged for me. It’s how I notice changes in my environment, how I usually realize someone and I haven’t been communicating clearly, how I work through stuff without thinking about it directly, and how I keep the mental pathways of my mind clear of the less helpful stuff that my OCD, anxiety, and depression want to endlessly spiral around. It is a lot of effort, but I’m used to doing it all the time.

Any time I talk to someone about it, though, I always wind up appreciating the amount of work I’ve done in the past (and am still doing in the present). None of this stuff got to the point it is today, where I can juggle it all in the background and still have the energy to do other things, without a lot of hard work. I’ve spent more than thirteen years of my life working on improving my mental health and it can be incredibly easy to lose sight of all the progress I’ve made until I talk about it with someone who isn’t familiar. This is one of the reasons I’m so open about my various mental health struggles, issues, and successes. Sure, it helps other people to know that they’re not alone, but it also helps me to appreciate my growth and the changes I’ve made even over the course of just the last year. Everyone benefits.

All that said, I still occasionally struggle with intrusive thoughts. I’m still figuring out that some things are intrusive thoughts and trauma responses rather than sensible considerations or responses stemming from my own emotions, so I’m far from finished. It’s not like I can afford to just ignore all of them, either, since some of them are legitimately useful thoughts and ideas that can appear much like intrusive thoughts do, especially since I tend to have so much sitting on my metaphorical backburner all the time. If I just rejected anything that wasn’t tied to what I was immediately focused on, all of the useful thought processes and conclusions would get thrown out as well as the ones telling me to do stuff like tackle people or stick my finger into a bunch of powered wires at work. It’s not automatic with those kinds of intrusive thoughts, like it is with those related to my OCD (which tend to be very specific and easy to group together in a way that makes ignoring them easier now that I’ve mastered the process of actually dealing with them in a healthy manner). It’s a lot of work that is made easier by the decades of experience I’ve got. I’ve been managing intrusive thoughts longer than I’ve been writing stories down (though nowhere near as long as I’ve been telling them), so I’ve built up quite a bit of practical skill these days.

Any time I get this deep into a discussion about this stuff with people, I usually remind them that I just make it look easy because I spent my entire childhood being forced to do it if I wanted to survive my upbringing. I am skilled because I had no other choice in the matter. I learned via trial by fire, which is not a process I’d recommend, especially because it created some unhealthy habits as well that took many years to unlearn and replace. A good therapist is probably your best resource for this stuff, as is self-reflection and introspection. If you learn more about yourself, you can learn to better identify which thoughts are your own and which are intruding from wherever that shit comes from. Regardless, you will need to put the work in. Just like any physical activity, it will not get easier to do until you can do it consistently and keep it up even when it tires you out. Just think of it as an extended training montage and you’ll start to feel the difference in no time at all.