Intrusive Thoughts - Out of the Blue?

[O Neg]

Hello All,

Having looked at a few Youtube  videos on Intrusive Thoughts. As far as I can make out from an American lady called Kati Morton, intrusive thoughts enter into ones mind totally out of the blue! One may be doing something totally unconnected with the intrusive thought, but this thought just pops in uninvited, out of the blue so to speak.

What I was wondering was what if the thought does have a connection with what one id doing at the time. For example if one is carving meat, one might have the intrusive thought of self harm with the knife. It would still be an intrusive unwelcome thought but on the current activity.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, or perhaps its the way these things are explained.

[PolarBear]

An intrusivr thought is one you don't want thst pops into your head. Now you can be triggered by an object, place, person or event, but it's still an unwanted thought thst pops into your head.

[dksea]

To expand on PolarBears comments, ANY thought can be an intrusive thought, the only requirements are that it causes you distress and you have difficulty managing it.
Whether or not you can identify the trigger for the thought is irrelevant to whether or not its intrusive.  Most, if not all, of your thoughts are triggered by something. You just aren't consciously aware of what that trigger is some of the time.  

People like to believe that they are in complete control of their brains, that they ARE their thoughts.  But the reality is a lot of what the brain does is automatic, "we" don't control it, which is good, because if we had to our lives would be a nightmare.

Consider for example what happens when your brain sees something.  In an instant it identifies the shapes and colors of a myriad of items in front of your eyes.  It classifies these objects and tells you what they are without you even having to think about it.  You know what a door is, a window, a person, a car, etc. without taking even a split second to think about it.   And your brain is doing this CONSTANTLY while your eyes are open, interpreting not just what you see, but what its doing to predict future outcomes (say you see a car moving in subsequent images, you realize its moving in a certain direction and you figure out what that means for you, such as stopping your car, or waiting to cross the street.  Tons of information just being automatically dealt with.  No expand that to your ears, your nose, your skin, etc. All that data is being processed by your brain and creating thoughts.  "Is that car important, do I have to pay attention to it?  Is that dog important, do I have to pay attention to it? Is that person over there speaking to me or someone else? Did someone call my name just now? Did I just feel a drop of rain?"  Imagine that except multiply it by a billion and you've got what your brain is doing all the time.  Its constantly evaluating this information and, ideally, only alerting your conscious brain, the "you" part that makes real decisions of the important stuff.  Sometimes "thoughts" leak through that are less important.  Most people can easily ignore them.  OCD people struggle with this, we get stuck on these stray thoughts.  But they were always there, and they are there for non-OCD people too.

The difference between a person with OCD and a person without OCD is not that they never have thoughts like OCD sufferers do, its that they don't CARE about those thoughts.  Their brain basically automatically recognizes them as not important, or when it goofs. and thinks they MIGHT be important, a quick analysis answers the question and they can move on with their lives.  

Having the thought isn't the problem, its how we respond to the thoughts that is.  Learn how not to respond, teach your brain how not to respond and you can recover and get back to living your life.