Your Intrusive Thoughts Are Telling You Something

I’m not good enough. If I were, I’d be further along by now.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been sitting with that thought more than I’d like to admit. Not in a crisis, just in that quiet, persistent way intrusive thoughts have of showing up uninvited. Usually, when something isn’t landing the way I hoped, or when the people I need alongside me are too caught up in their own stuff to show up for mine. In those moments, it’s easy to read the situation as a personal failing. Maybe I haven’t communicated it well enough. Maybe I’m not the right person for this.

The instinct is to push it down and get on with things. And for a while, that works. Until it doesn’t.

I was listening to a podcast recently, and something stopped me. Dr Caroline Leaf, cognitive neuroscientist, talking to Craig Groeschel on the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. She said something I wasn’t expecting: intrusive thoughts aren’t the enemy. They’re data. Real, physical structures in the brain, built from memories and experience, pointing at a pattern that needs attention.

And here’s the part that really landed: suppressing intrusive thoughts doesn’t make them go away. It makes them stronger.

Suppressing intrusive thoughts doesn’t make them go away. It makes them stronger.

This isn’t just one person’s observation. Researchers ran a well-known experiment where they told participants not to think about a white bear. They couldn’t do it. And when the researchers told them they could think about it freely, they thought about it significantly more than people who’d never been asked to suppress it in the first place. Researchers call this the rebound effect.

The harder you push, the harder it comes back.

This pattern shows up across decades of research into thought suppression, and it helps explain something I suspect many of us recognise: the thoughts we work hardest to dismiss are often the ones that won’t leave us alone. If you’ve ever lain awake at 2am being visited by the exact thought you spent all day trying to avoid, you’ll know what I mean.

I’ve written before about why that feeling of being behind is so common among people who actually care about their work. This is the same territory, just a level deeper.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT for short, makes this argument clinically. The goal isn’t to eliminate the thought. It’s to change your relationship with it. Stop treating it as a threat to neutralise.

The imposter experience, that persistent feeling that you’re not really qualified for the room you’re in, affects up to 70% of people. And the approaches that try to argue you out of it, challenging the thought, replacing it with a more positive one, rarely work long-term. Because you can’t think your way out of something that isn’t really a thinking problem. It’s a pattern. And patterns need to be faced, not argued with.

you can’t think your way out of something that isn’t really a thinking problem

What Dr. Leaf describes, and what the research supports, is that the moment you turn toward the thought rather than away from it, you begin to weaken its hold. Not by agreeing with it, but by examining it. There’s something in that worth sitting with, and it connects to what I wrote about giving your brain space to actually think rather than constantly drowning it out.

Here’s where I’ve landed… at least for now.

With a bit of distance and honesty, I can see that the project that isn’t gaining traction has more going on than simply my ability to land it. The ally who isn’t engaged is fighting their own battle, or if they’re honest, just isn’t as excited about it as I am. That’s not a me problem.

So why do I carry it as if it were? I think it’s because I care.

And if that’s true, what would happen if I actually faced the thought? Instead of burying it or feeding it with false modesty, how does it fare against that simple question: does this thought exist because something matters to me?

When I do that honestly, the evidence doesn’t stack up the way the thought says it does.

I’m fully aware I’m one step away from motivational speaker mode here, so I’ll spare you. But are you actually giving yourself the space to cheer yourself on? I know, I know. We don’t want to sound like narcissists, and the world has enough of them right now. But backing yourself is not the same thing. You care, it matters to you, and that means something.

But backing yourself is not the same thing. You care, it matters to you, and that means something.

And if I weren’t good enough for this, I wouldn’t be here, doing it.

What are your intrusive thoughts actually telling you?