How to get rid of intrusive thoughts?

Every person regularly processes thoughts, emotions, images and sounds that constantly occupy their subconscious awareness. That activity is commonly known as “thinking” and to some degree that’s incorrect statement. Because in reality thinking means “analysing what is in front of you” and in almost all cases, we don’t analyse anything that’s happening to us right here and now and instead we process “historic hooks” fed to us directly from our subconscious mind. Those “hooks” could be anything and are usually linked to what we deem important for our personal survival or has direct links with our unmet egocentric views, such as love related issues, conflicts with “unreasonable people” or can be anything that doesn’t conform to rigid observations of our own map of the world. In one word, we constantly chew some bits of information that comes to our conscious awareness in forms of images, sounds, thoughts and emotions.

Psychologists claim that average person processes in between 16000 – 60000 thoughts every day. Most of these thoughts are recycled on a daily basis and great majority of them were already thought about the day before and the day before that one and so on… Strangely, despite boring repetitiveness of these thoughts, they almost all the time go unnoticed, hiding deep within our subconscious mind. As such, they can harbour some serious trouble, because if you allow them to continue to roam free on a daily basis, they will draw equivalent emotions and with persistent dwelling in these thoughts/emotions, they will imprint themselves into your sub cellular memory, hence become your predominant emotional experiences or moods. 

Now, there is nothing wrong if you consciously cultivate certain way of thinking that’s empowering, positive and makes you feel energised, whilst at the same time being confident to get on with things you want to experience. This is great way of being and should be highly encouraged at all levels. However the problem occurs when you don’t have conscious awareness of your thoughts/emotions, hence their influence on your perceptive understanding/interaction with people/situations in your external reality. In order to understand this notion a little better, let’s delve deeper into this subject. All your subliminal programming starts with your thoughts. The thoughts on their own have no power to influence anything and so they are totally harmless. However, they exert direct control over your emotions and this is the tricky part, because your body’s endocrine system (hormonal system) 100% responds to your emotions and with mirror like precision produces chemicals that are released into your bloodstream. So whatever you feel emotionally, through released like hormones your entire body will “feel” instantly and this is where the danger comes. Because with prolonged dwelling in thoughts of certain nature, they will draw exact emotions, which will then be hormonally fed into every cell in your body. In time, your body will get chemically hooked on these predominant emotions, which will become your regular mental states or conditions.

If these thoughts are still not controlled and at the same time they are negative, disruptive or unpleasant – they will become what is known as “intrusive thoughts”. If you suffer from any form of intrusive thoughts, you will know that they have the “power” to control every aspect of your conscious awareness and as such interfere with everything you do on a daily basis. These thoughts are directly linked to your emotional processing of every moment of your day and in such cases they may cause you extremes of unpleasant emotions. If you allow this to continue unchallenged, you will start to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, usually expressed in various forms of fears that have become an integral part of your perceptive reality. In such cases you become extremely cautious or even fearful for no particular reason.

This is how we subconsciously programme our mental states. Now, you can condition yourself mentally in two ways – consciously (being aware of what you are doing) and unconsciously (you are not aware of what you are doing) and the difference between the two is the level of awareness of external triggers, thoughts, emotions and actions. Those that are aware can detect successfully the following, depending on the levels of their mental observation skills:

• People with advanced levels of self awareness have mastered their self observation skills to such a degree that they can recognise triggers very early and can deal with them, as quickly and safely as possible. This means that they have developed their sensory skills (listening to their intuitive nudges, feelings, observation of thoughts and emotions) to such a degree that they can sense that something is not right very early. In this way they are able to “intercept” build up of negative energy early enough, hence least amount of mental exertion, because there is very little to mentally “clean” from the perspective of non desired thoughts and emotions, because none of them were given enough time to cause non desired issues.
• People that have developed “medium” levels of self awareness are able to detect negative thought patterns when things became more emotionally burdensome. In here, those specific thoughts were allowed to permeate within their subconscious mind long enough to evoke non desired emotions. At this point, these people became alerted that something is not right, because they finally became aware of their negative thought patterns. The corrective action at this stage is to identify thoughts that are directly linked with their identified “heavy emotions”. More specifically they must get familiar with what these “negative thoughts and emotions” are drawing to them in terms of situations and people. You will do that by being able to focus on your inner state, whilst at the same time keenly observing “external” triggers that are causing you to feel the way that you do. So when you consciously detect “negative thoughts and/or emotions”, at that moment you must make connection with whatever you have noticed in your external reality. In theory, that could be the trigger and the only way to be sure is to test it, until that assumption gets validated. When you know the exact triggers for these specific “negative situations/people”, you can then start the process of reframing by mentally changing the context these “external triggers” started to create. This action can be challenging depending on the level of emotional energy that was allowed to be accumulated at that point.
• In the last group falls great majority of people who tend to notice their negative thoughts late or when those thoughts have become so burdensome, due to their “heavy energy” exerted by negative emotions. At this stage, the corrective action is always more challenging, because it starts either with the awareness of negative emotions or even worse – negative moods. The key challenge at this stage is to confront your own fears and that’s very hard, because you must go directly against your belief system and that can be very uncomfortable for some people. After that you need to work on accepting and positively reframing those emotions by mentally changing their context, before mentally scanning for relevant thoughts that have preceded these emotions. Once you identify and positively reframe both thoughts and emotions – you can then search for their initial triggers.

So why is this important – you may ask? It is massively important if you want to become the master of your own mental states, hence direction of your own life. You cannot do anything meaningful in your life, before you master the basic cognitive tools of your thoughts and emotions. Intrusive thoughts occur due to persistent lack of mental discipline and awareness of what is going on behind your conscious awareness and as such, they represent the biggest obstacle for you to live the life you desire. They are causing you negative and/or disempowering emotions, which if left unchallenged will lead you to become obsessed or distressed with non relevant things in life, thus creating myriad of unpleasant mental states from anxiety to irrational fears, neurosis, depression and other ailments to name the few. This is the main reason as to why intrusive thoughts occur and why they have such power over you, unless you decide to take action.

As seen from above, the first thing you must do is to become aware of your negative thought patterns and in particular if some of them keep stubbornly repeating themselves at all times. These are the very thoughts and later emotions you will need to contend first. How do you do it?

You must first learn to relax your body and mind at will. This means you must master a number of breathing and energy release/recharge exercises that will help you reduce the brainwave activity, hence start the process of self regulation (homeostasis). This is quite challenging part, because your body will stubbornly resist to force you to stop doing it, because if you persist you will eventually change its established inner chemistry and just like any “drug” addict – it will do everything in its power to prevent it from happening. In the process, you will experience lots of inner doubts and various other forms of mental/physical distractions to force you to give up, so that your body can continue to indulge in the stress chemicals that its been accustomed to. If you are strong willed and ready for all eventualities – you will prevail and you will initiate the process of inner change, which will come with induction of inner calmness and peace. This is the first part and the next one is all about squaring up to your intrusive thoughts and emotions.

The best way to deal with emotions is to face them directly. Naturally, this is the scariest part (particularly for those people who didn’t master the art of body relaxation). In such instances, if you’re experiencing higher than acceptable levels of bodily tensions – you must not proceed to this stage. Instead you must continue to work on your complete mind/body relaxation, until you master this part first. When you finally start to get your body and mind in a state of complete relaxation, you can then bring forward specific unpleasant situation/s charged with undesired emotions to the very front of your cognitive screen. When so, you will then need to observe that situation/s using a 360 degree perspective. In so doing, you will start to acknowledge things that you haven’t seen before and which will help you better understand why that emotion or emotions came to the fore in the first place.

The next step that follows is to look for thoughts that are closely associated with this emotion or emotions. You will do that by being able in your mind to elicit the type of events that are used as triggers for those intrusive thoughts. In this analytical part, you will be able to skilfully determine the root cause of your intrusive thoughts by being able to go to the very beginning. It always starts with the trigger, followed by a certain type of situation that you encounter in your daily life and then you will notice thoughts that are closely linked with these situations. When you reach this point you will need to do a number of highly technical steps that require specific guidance. The objective of this part is for you to fully understand reasons behind your negative thoughts/emotion and why they make you fearful of given situations and or people. The closing point is when you successfully determine all angles related to why intrusive thoughts and emotion were active for all that time and what they were trying to teach you.

When you apply all above, you will realise that your intrusive thoughts are your teachers, because they keep nagging you to go back to the very beginning of some long forgotten unresolved issue that is still plaguing your subconscious mind. In order to set you free from the grip of intrusive thoughts – you must learn and implement on a regular basis a number of highly specific steps that were outlined above. In time you will resolve one issue after the other and you will free yourself from them forever.

If you wish to learn more on how to heal yourself from devastating effects of intrusive thoughts on your body and mental states, please visit our visit our website: www.energy-savvy.com and in particular we would recommend you try our 20 weeks energy and mental healing programme, in where we will teach you in some depth various energy generation exercises, mind reframing techniques and routines. Alternatively, you may contact us via email on: info@energy-savvy.com and we’ll be more that happy to assist you in any way we can.