Distinguishing between unwanted intrusive thoughts and negative automatic thoughts

Both Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts (UITs) and Negative Automatic Thoughts (NATs) tend to be initially unpleasant. How we respond to them can have a significant impact on our lives. However, UITs are sometimes disguised as NATs and helpful approaches in responding to UITs and NATs often differ. Therefore, distinguishing between UITs and NATs is an important first step in better addressing UITs and NATs.

What are Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts?

UITs come in many different forms, such as ideas, visual images, memories, doubts, and impulses. However: they all have one key thing in common: they bother you. For some, these UITs are very bothersome and create intense anxiety, distress, or disgust. With such distress, people sometimes try to avoid situations that tend to elicit the thoughts, suppress the thoughts, or develop active ways of trying to prevent and cope with them (such as in the form of rituals) to reduce anxiety or discomfort. These responses can start to take on a life of their own and the urges to engage in them can become very strong. Thus, they are often called “compulsions,” because you can feel very strongly compelled to engage in them (in effort to cope with intense emotions). However, these efforts tend to lead to more and more UITs, which are commonly called obsessions for this reason. These patterns show up in a variety of issues, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Illness Anxiety Disorder (formerly called “hypochondriasis.”)

Some examples of UITs:

• doubt about whether you hit a car accompanied by an urge to drive back and check

• mage of house catching on fire with urge to unplug all appliances

• thought of child in plane crash with compulsion to repetitively check their flight status

• thought you might die from cancer with urge to research for hours to obtain certainty

What are Negative Automatic Thoughts?

NATs tend to lead to a variety of unpleasant emotions, such as sadness, frustration, jealousy, or anxiety. They tend to be unhelpful and can often be untrue. They often get in the way of reaching goals or contribute to unproductively intense emotions. However, they tend to respond to reason or evidence that they are untrue overtime.

Some examples of NATs:

• “I’m a failure”

• “They don’t like me”

• “It’s going to be a bad day”

• “But it won’t work for me though”

Distinguishing Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts from Negative Automatic Thoughts

Unfortunately, UITs can often be disguised as general worries. Well-intentioned people might try to help you to navigate UITs by reasoning through the thoughts and analyzing them. Although this can be productive for negative automatic thoughts (NATs) and general worries, it can backfire with UITs and actually lead to more anxiety in the long-term. There are important differences in the best treatments for UITs associated with OCD and NATs associated with general worry, depression, and stress. If you’ve tried reasoning through your thoughts, suppressing them, or other forms of therapy and it hasn’t been successful, then you might be dealing with UITs and could benefit from working with a specialist in OCD who has the expertise to teach you how to better navigate UITs.

UITs might…

• Lead to anxiety, distress, or disgust

• Tend to be repetitive/recurrent

• Reoccur more often in the long-term when over-analyzed

• Be unusual, odd, magical, or not fit your character/history or the situation

• Be challenging to share with others for the first time

• Lead to a sense of urgency and/or strong urge to avoid/prevent them

NATs might…

• Be unhelpful or unrealistic

• Lead to a variety of emotions (e.g. sadness, anger, hopelessness, fear)

• Respond to reason/contrary evidence

• Be relatively more common

• Be a little more challenging to identify than UITs

Learn more about how OCD therapy with TherLively can help you!

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