Letting Go of Unwanted Thoughts

The ability to let thoughts go is crucial.  Failure to do that can ruin your focus, your mental health, and possibly your life. 

Here’s an example: horrible thoughts.  Research shows that over 90% of us have horrible thoughts: murder, sexual perversion, hitting our kids, you name it.   We imagine horrible things happening to us and our loved ones—even more disturbing, we imagine that we CAUSE the horrible things.  There’s a phenomenon called thought-action fusion in which we basically assume, “Thinking it is just as bad as doing it,” and we convict ourselves of thought crimes.  Outside of science fiction, though, that’s bullshit.

When a horrible thought comes into your head, what do you do?  Most of us instinctively try to force it away, order ourselves not to think about it.  That strategy doesn’t work.  I think there are two good reasons why it bombs.  The first is something called paradoxical intent: every time you tell yourself, “Don’t think about that,” you are…wait for it…THINKING ABOUT THAT.  The second reason is more unique to first responders and other lines of work that dance with the darkness.  The thoughts we try to banish are inevitably the dark and disturbing ones (who wants to banish that fantasy about Charlize Theron?)—but you’ve been trained to focus your attention on the dark and disturbing.  You’re familiar with it, and paying attention to the darkness can be a life-or-death issue.  So the logical part of your brain is trying to banish the thought—while another part of your brain is automatically focusing on it.

There are at least three winning strategies for how to cope with these thoughts: 

1. Deliberately focus your attention on something else.  Choose something positive or neutral that really gets your attention—a memory or image, an activity—and shine your mental spotlight on it.  Be prepared to do this over and over, because your brain will want to go back to that “bad” thought

2. Practice observing your thoughts without getting caught up in them.  This is tricky and takes a lot of practice.  But it’s worth the practice time, because the payoff is that you get better at taking control of where your thoughts and your attention go

3. Cut yourself some slack.  If over 90% of people, AKA pretty much everyone, have dark thoughts, then…honestly, what makes yours so special that you should dwell on them?  More to the point, maybe it’s not a good use of your time to condemn yourself for the mental equivalent of putting your elbows on the table at dinner.

To make it easier to remember these, let’s call them the 3 F’s: Focus, Forget, Forgive.

If you want to get better at focusing and forgetting, I have one word for you: meditate.  Meditation helps you gain more control over your attention “spotlight”, and regular practitioners also level up their ability to let a thought drift away.  Meditation helps you  sit beside your stream of consciousness, instead of swimming (or drowning) in it.  You get some separation from your thoughts, which helps you choose whether to look more closely at a thought or let it drift away.

Forgiving yourself—for dark thoughts or anything else—is more complicated, because it’s tied in to childhood, religion, your moral code…  Try asking yourself a couple of questions.  First: would you judge other people in your life this harshly if this thought passed through their head?  Your spouse, your best friend, your child?  If you’re using a double standard, you might want to take a closer look at that.  (Also see my other blog about judgement and the “mental courtroom”. Second: is there anything to forgive?  If a thought came into your head automatically, AKA not of your choosing, then do you truly believe you did anything wrong?

Bottom line: For a lot of reasons, most of us aren’t naturally good at coping with dark or disturbing thoughts when they float into our heads.  The good news is that there are a few effective strategies for being able to let them go and turn our attention to where we want it to be.  The winning approach starts with accepting that “bad” thoughts aren’t bad: they’re part of the human condition.  Mastering the focus—forget—forgive strategy feels like an uphill battle at first…but practice makes progress.