How Do You Combat And Prevent Obsessive Thinking?
One in fifty people suffer from obsessive thinking. It is one of the psychological problems that people who suffer from it often try to hide. Obsessive thinking means you keep thinking about something and can’t get it out of your head. In general, obsessive thoughts are accompanied by excessive or irrational worry. All this causes unnecessary suffering.
We all have bad days, fights, or a situation that ruins our whole day. We keep thinking about it all day, and how we could have reacted differently. We can’t help it, we keep thinking about it obsessively. While we can’t change what happened, our minds are dominated by the situation, and we can’t stop it, even if we want to. This is obsessive thinking.
Obsessive thinking as a psychological problem
We all have obsessive thoughts from time to time. That doesn’t mean it’s an immediate problem, let alone a condition. But for some people it is a psychological problem because these thoughts significantly affect their lives. In addition, they try to hide these thoughts. They are too ashamed to admit that they suffer from something so strange.
For these people, the obsessive thoughts keep coming back. The obsessive thoughts are about absurd concerns, and although they themselves know that they are absurd, they cannot avoid these thoughts. For example, a classic example of obsessive thinking is: am I capable of doing something that is dishonest, illegal or criminal?
Cause of Obsessive Thoughts
Obsessive thoughts can have a number of causes, or rather, they can arise from a number of different factors. One of the most common is the future, especially the desire to be able to predict the future. We want to know what will happen in the future to make sure there will be no disaster tomorrow. We want to control the uncontrollable, but we cannot. Unexpected things happen every day.
Another cause of obsessive thinking is a low tolerance for anxiety. We live in a world where we are always running around and inundated with stimuli and information. We are forced to be always busy. All this causes a lot of stress and anxiety. They are normal things that our bodies can deal with, but our minds cannot. When we are confronted with a certain idea that makes us nervous, we want to get rid of it. We don’t think about it any further.
The last cause is that we are afraid of challenges, because all challenges are terrible in our eyes. We think we are the center of the world, so any setback means the end of the world. This tendency to exaggerate problems causes obsessive thoughts.
While these are the main causes of obsessive thinking, there are more. These include superstitions, shame, fear of reactions from others, and more.
What can you do about obsessive thoughts?
Obsessive thinking has a number of striking features that can help us eliminate its negative influence. Anyone can be freed from these thoughts, or diminish their power to such an extent that we can ignore them. We can all get rid of obsessive thoughts without drugs. But you do need treatment for it.
This treatment is based on learning to tolerate fear. The more fear we can handle, the better we can deal with intense anxiety. For this, you have to get used to feelings of anxiety, or at least a certain level of anxiety. You can also learn to deal with uncertainty. We must learn to live without thinking about the things we cannot predict.
On another level, we shouldn’t make our “bubble” too important either. A lot of the problems we have are not that important, so one of the best things we can do with a problem is put it into context with the rest of your life. For this we have to accept ourselves. We have to let go of this perfect image of how we should be. It’s also so unrealistic. We have to accept our imperfections.
All this will help us to distance ourselves from meaningless thoughts in general, and obsessive thoughts in particular. In short, we must come to believe that nothing is “too terrible” to handle.
