<ul><li>These thoughts and images are unwanted and often unpleasant. The content can sometimes be aggressive or sexual, or you could suddenly think about a mistake or a worry.</li><li>You might feel distressed when this happens, but having an intrusive thought once in a while is a typical part of life.</li><li>In most cases, intrusive thoughts do not have any particular meaning. As long as you recognize that these are only thoughts, and you have no desire to act on them, intrusive thoughts are not harmful.</li><li>However, if they’re happening often, causing significant concern, or interfering with your daily activities, it’s a<warningtag> good idea to talk with a doctor.</warningtag></li></ul>

Intrusive thoughts seem to come out of nowhere

Some people may have intrusive thoughts about:<ul><li>germs, infections, or other kinds of contamination</li><li>violent acts, aggression, or causing harm to other people</li><li>doubts about doing tasks wrong or leaving tasks unfinished</li><li>religion, blasphemy, or being an immoral person</li><li>sexual acts or situations</li><li>acting out or saying the wrong thing in public</li></ul>It’s also possible to have other types of intrusive thoughts that do not fit into these categories.Sometimes, people who experience intrusive thoughts become worried about what they mean. This can lead to someone trying to control or stop the thoughts. People may also fe<warningtag>el ashamed and want to keep them secret from others. Keep in mind that the image or thought might be disturbing, but it does not usually have a particular meaning.</warningtag>

Types of intrusive thoughts

It’s common to have an intrusive thought every once in a while. In fact, it happens to almost everyone.Although intrusive thoughts are usually nothing to worry about, sometimes they can start to interfere with your daily life.People who feel fear or guilt about their intrusive thoughts, or feel like they need to take action to control the thoughts, may be experiencing something more serious. If that’s the case, it’s a good idea to talk with a doctor.

Are intrusive thoughts normal?

Intrusive thoughts may not have a cause. They can just happen randomly. Some thoughts wander into your brain. Then just as quickly, they exit, leaving no lasting impression.Less commonly, intrusive thoughts are related to an underlying mental health condition, like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These thoughts could also be a symptom of another health issue, such as:<ul><li>brain injury</li><li>dementia</li><li>Parkinson’s disease</li></ul>Signs that there might be an underlying cause include intrusive thoughts that:<ul><li>last longer than a brief moment</li><li>continue to pop back into your head</li><li><warningtag>cause distress over time</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>make you feel like you need to control your thoughts.</warningtag></li></ul>

What causes intrusive thoughts?

<ul><li>Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): you’ll work with a therapist to learn ways of thinking that can help you become less sensitive to intrusive thoughts. In a controlled setting, your therapist may also expose you to triggers for your intrusive thoughts so you can learn to react to them differently.</li><li>Medication. Sometimes, medications are used to treat conditions like OCD and PTSD. </li><li>Self-care. A good step toward treating intrusive thoughts is recognizing what they are: just thoughts. You can learn to label them when they happen and recognize that thoughts are not the same as intent or behavior. </li></ul>

How to manage intrusive thoughts

A collection of ideas for changing your attitude and overcoming unwanted intrusive thoughts

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Problem Solving

health

Health

mentalhealth

Mental Health

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

How to Cope With Intrusive Thoughts

Intrusive thoughts are unexpected images or thoughts that seem to pop into your head.

Intrusive thoughts can be unexpected and upsetting. Learn why we have intrusive thoughts, when they may become a problem, and how to manage them.

Why Do We Have Intrusive Thoughts?

<ul><li>Americans are emerging from the pandemic more stressed out and reactive than ever.</li><li>Emotional flooding is an automatic physical and mental response to an unexpected negative reaction by another, usually a close person, an encounter we can perceive as a threat.</li><li>Beyond hurting personal relationships at home and creating all kinds of difficulties out in the world, emotional flooding significantly impairs decision making.	 </li></ul>

Emotional Flooding

Imposing a 30-second response delay on everyone reduced aggression significantly, but only when there were negative consequences (having to perform a task) to being aggressive.Counting to 30 only works when you have the self-awareness to understand your reality, and it can be challenging during emotional flooding.

The Challenge Of Staying Aware: Counting To 30

Sit quietly and think about the feelings you are experiencing.Then, say to yourself, "I am not this anger. It will not manage me or make my decisions for me." This metacognition will leave you calm and empowered.

Observe Your Feelings

Managing your emotions is like home improvement: You can teach yourself to do a lot of it well, but it's best to get some professional assistance when the job is particularly tricky.Journaling is one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, which in turn creates emotional knowledge and regulation, which provide a sense of control.

Write It Down

If you can prevent your emotions from taking over in the face of stress, you can avoid a lot of regret and set a good example for others.

How to Stop Freaking Out

<ul><li>Stress is harmful only to those who feel it is.</li><li>People with a positive view of stress are happier and healthier</li><li>Most of the harm associated with stress may be a result of trying to avoid it.</li><li>You can learn to activate particular responses to stress.</li><li>Some stress responses foster energy, confidence and connection to others.</li><li>You always associate stress with something that’s important to you.</li><li>Dealing with stress is a necessary step in finding meaning in life.</li><li>Connecting with and helping others is one of the best strategies for managing stress.</li></ul>

The Upside Of Stress: Key Takeaways

Most health experts preach that stress is dangerous. Learn to manage your stress, they say, or invite such consequences as heart disease, depression and addiction. These experts say that managing stress means reducing it, either through relaxation techniques or by reorganizing your life to lessen the pressures affecting you.The latest science reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger and more successful.

Stress Can Be Good

Three decades of research suggest that stress offers rarely recognized benefits. These findings show stress can make you smarter, more confident and more empathetic. Stress can even improve your health. The best way to manage stress is not to fight it, but to embrace it.Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake. It earned a bad reputation from research on rats in the 1930s. New research paints an entirely different picture, and most people’s daily stresses are not as severe or capricious.

Embracing Stress

Humanity’s primitive ancestors evolved the stress response in an environment far more dangerous than today’s civilized workplaces. Humans’ evolutionary responses no longer match their daily reality. The ancient fight-or-flight response – wherein stress provokes an accelerated heartbeat, tightened muscles and the release of adrenaline – impelled early humans to either flee a predator or charge into battle. The mismatch theory recognizes only this kind of stress response, but evolution has not stood still.

Evolutionary Stress Responses: The Mismatch Theory

Your body is smart enough to distinguish between a lunging lioness and a looming deadline. When you face a nonlethal threat, the body can initiate the challenge response, a mix of hormones that boosts confidence, focus and motivation. You come out of these stress experiences feeling more assured and self-reliant.

The Challenge Response

This response stimulates the release of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes emotional connections to others. It suppresses the flight instinct, giving you the courage to face the source of your stress. You become more likely to seek others’ support and to offer your support to them. Oxytocin is heart-friendly, helping the organ regenerate cells and repair “micro-damage.”

The Tend-and-Befriend Response

The latest science indicates that, far from being a toxic goad, stress can become a valuable resource in difficult moments. The stress response enhances performance. Under stress, businesspeople hold more successful negotiations, students do better on tests, athletes become more competitive, surgeons improve their dexterity and pilots handle simulated emergencies more effectively.

Stress As A Resource

Imagine you are about to give a speech. If you’re like most people, you experience the physical symptoms of nervousness: dry mouth, sweaty palms and an accelerated heartbeat. Conventional wisdom says you won’t perform well unless you find a way to calm down and tame that anxiety. But if you dampen that stress, you’re cutting yourself off from a powerful ally. The symptoms you interpret as anxiety are actually the result of a challenge response. You feel more focused. Your brain processes information faster. The world even looks brighter – because your pupils have dilated.

The Focusing Mechanism Of Stress

Stress arises only in situations that involve something that is important to you. By pursuing your values, you inevitably encounter stress. Don’t interpret stress as a sign that something is wrong. You wouldn’t expect to reach a big goal, like climbing Mt. Everest, without encountering stress. You accept that hardships are part of the challenge, and you face them because you value the goal. You won’t feel like a failure because you’re exhausted from the cold or anxious about scaling yet another ice mass. You’ll see stress as a sign of failure only when you avoid it, not when you use it.

Defining A Stressful Situation

Research suggests that trying to avoid stress may be more harmful to your health and emotional well-being than stress itself. In a Japanese study, students who tried to dodge stress experienced a diminished sense of community. In Zurich, those students who tried hardest to avoid pressure reported a loss of focus, vitality and discipline. A US Department of Veterans Affairs study tracked more than 1,000 adults for a decade. Those who said they tried to avoid stress reported more incidents of depression, increased discord at home or on the job, and more negative outcomes, such as divorce.

Don't Dodge Stress

Those who try to avoid stress concentrate on dulling the discomfort rather than dealing with its source. They might use unhealthy means of escape, like alcohol. They also may isolate themselves from relationships or withdraw from their careers to avoid the pressure. Such avoidant behavior increases stress and robs people of resources they could use to handle the stress instead.

Let There Be Discomfort

The best way to deal with stress is to embrace it and deploy it to support your effort to reach your goals. To do so, you must change your mind-set about stress. A mind-set is a “core belief,” a part of your fundamental understanding of how the world works. As in the placebo effect – in which a sugar pill produces whatever results the patient expects from actual medication – a mind-set can spark physiological or neurological responses.

Accepting Stress

Present the new mind-set in a short lecture, video or reading. For instance, psychologist Greg Walton conducted an intervention to help Ivy League freshmen feel that they belonged in the student community. Walton had the students read comments from juniors and seniors about how they struggled with feeling like outsiders at first and how that feeling changed over time. The next steps:<ul><li>Do an exercise that encourages you to adopt the mind-set.</li><li>Share the idea with others.</li></ul>

Mindset Intervention: Learn The New Point of View

The stress of daily hassles – such as long lines at the supermarket – can have the most negative impact because these stressors feel random and meaningless. Instead of appearing as challenges, they feel more like “intrusions” – stumbling blocks that prevent life from running smoothly.When you write about your values, you see problems as more manageable and are more likely to face challenges than avoid them. Select a personal value and write a short essay about it. Explain why you find this value meaningful and describe its role in your daily life.

Remember Your Values

To manage stress, learn to trigger an appropriate or beneficial stress response. For instance, if you have to give a speech, you may feel so nervous that you trigger the fight-or-flight response. But fleeing or throwing punches isn’t the most practical way to handle this stress. People tend to trigger fight-or-flight when they believe they lack the resources – the skills or fortitude – to handle a situation

Manage Your Stress Response

Even small acts of kindness stimulate the release of chemicals that support confidence, focus and empathy. Purposefully do a good deed to trigger the tend-and-befriend response, and then transfer the benefits to another challenge. By learning to manage and leverage your stress response, you will find that stress is more than just a handy resource: It is the key to a meaningful life. After all, we only experience stress about the things we feel matter most.

The Bottom Line

Don't let workplace stress get you! Tips for a healthier work-life without burnout.

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Communication

Managing Work Stress

According to conventional wisdom, stress is a killer – a Pandora’s box of threats to the mind and body. Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal offers a rare contrarian look at stress based on new research that changed her mind about its impact.

Drawing from groundbreaking research, psychologist and award-winning teacher Kelly McGonigal, PhD, offers a surprising new view of stress—one that reveals the upside of stress, and shows us exactly how to capitalize on its benefits. You hear it all the time: stress causes heart disease; stress causes insomnia; stress is bad for you! But what if changing how you think about stress could make you happier, healthier, and better able to reach your goals? Combining exciting new research on resilience and mindset, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, proves that undergoing stress is not bad for you; it is undergoing stress while believing that stress is bad for you that makes it harmful. In fact, stress has many benefits, from giving us greater focus and energy, to strengthening our personal relationships. McGonigal shows readers how to cultivate a mindset that embraces stress, and activate the brain's natural ability to learn from challenging experiences. Both practical and life-changing, The Upside of Stress is not a guide to getting rid of stress, but a toolkit for getting better at it—by understanding, accepting, and leveraging it to your advantage.

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Mindfulness

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Books

Drawing from groundbreaking research, psychologist and award-winning teacher Kelly McGonigal, PhD, offers a surprising new view of stress—one that reveals the upside of stress, and shows us exactly how to capitalize on its benefits. You hear it all the time: stress causes heart disease; stress causes insomnia; stress is bad for you! But what if changing how you think about stress could make you happier, healthier, and better able to reach your goals? Combining exciting new research on resilience and mindset, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, proves that undergoing stress is not bad for you; it is undergoing stress while believing that stress is bad for you that makes it harmful. In fact, stress has many benefits, from giving us greater focus and energy, to strengthening our personal relationships.   McGonigal shows readers how to cultivate a mindset that embraces stress, and activate the brain's natural ability to learn from challenging experiences. Both practical and life-changing, The Upside of Stress is not a guide to getting rid of stress, but a toolkit for getting better at it—by understanding, accepting, and leveraging it to your advantage.

Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, an award-winning science journalist, and a leading expert on the mind-body relationship. Her teaching and writing focus on the applications of psychological science to personal health and happiness, as well as public policy and social change. She is the author of The Upside of Stress (Penguin Random House/Avery 2015), The Willpower Instinct(Penguin/Avery 2012), Yoga for Pain Relief (New Harbinger 2009), and The Neuroscience of Change: A Compassion-Based Guide to Personal Transformation (Sounds True Audio, 2012).

Kelly McGonigal

The Upside of Stress

Ryan Kirkbride, Online Marketing Manager, has been selected as one of Phocuswright’s thirty-five young leaders under the age of 35. Ryan will be attending the <a href="https://www.phocuswrightconference.com/Young-Leaders-Summit" target="_self">Young Leaders Summit</a>, which showcases the important role young leadership plays in the growth of the travel industry.

Phocuswright’s 35 Young Leaders as part of its 2019 Cohort.

With over 10 years experience working in digital marketing, Ryan is passionate about building systems for sustainable growth. Heading up Online Marketing for Left Travel, Ryan oversees the teams in both the Canada and Bangladesh offices. As a key contributor to the global strategy, Ryan is experienced in managing a multi-million-dollar annual PPC budget. Prior to joining Left Travel, Ryan worked at HomeAway/Stayz and the Australian Stock Report.

About Ryan

Left travel is an industry leading Metasearch travel company. Presently has 16 brands, most recently Meilleures locations. Left travel is a subsidiary of left, an Award-Winning BC Tech company.

About Left Travel

<ul><li>Website: http://www.lefttravel.com&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeftTravel&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lefttravel/&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lefttravel/&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>

Stay in Touch

Left Travel is proud to announce that Ryan Kirkbride, Online Marketing Manager, has been selected as one of Phocuswright’s thirty-five young leaders under the age of 35. Ryan will be attending the…

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

Ryan Kirkbride, Selected as One of Phocuswright’s 35 Under 35 in Travel

Focus on a well-defined target market will reap better rewards than trying to be too broad. By focusing on a well-defined target market you can set yourself apart and create a competitive advantage. By focusing on a well-defined target market you can set yourself apart and create a competitive advantage.&nbsp;

Should you diversify with this new ad platform called Quora?

Quora has been around since 2010 and has gained a solid reputation as a good community driven Q& A engine. At the end of April, they announced they had nearly doubled their monthly user base from 100 million to 195 million over the past year. They don’t require you to be registered to use it and have over 200 million monthly unique visitors. The platform is still relatively Unproven, however.

Quora: a Q&A Engine

There are riches in niches. Focusing on a well-defined target market will reap better rewards than trying to be too broad. You can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t try.

Riches In Niches

Self Service Interface: B-Campaign Types: CAudience Targeting: C+Device Targeting: BReporting: CAd Types: C-Conversion Tracking: B-Support: BBudgets and Ad Cost: DScalability: DPerformance: N/APolicy: N/AOverall rating: C+

Quora Ads: Report Card

Quora has been around since 2010 and has gained a solid reputation as a good community driven Q&amp;A engine. They have built a network of “experts”, essentially crowd sourcing the best answers to questions like <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-online-advertising-market-changing-in-2017" target="_self">How is the online advertising market changing in 2017?</a>

Quora: A Brief Primer

We’re taught to diversify most things in life. Our investments. Our lifestyle. Vary your exercise. Have a balanced diet from the food pyramid and in what you drink. I tend to take that advice to…

Why Do We Have Intrusive Thoughts?

How to Stop Freaking Out

The Upside of Stress

Ryan Kirkbride, Selected as One of Phocuswright’s 35 Under 35 in Travel

Quora Ads Review: 12 Things You Need to Know About Quora Ads

Devin Lee