When intrusive thoughts become obsessions
- Kaila Morris
- Aug 13
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 5
Don’t think of a pink elephant.
You just did, didn’t you?
Our brain doesn’t perform well with these kinds of commands. That’s because they are, in essence, a psychological paradox. When we’re asked to not think about something, the very act of processing the question means such a thing is already being thought about. The harder we try to not think, the harder avoidance becomes.
In other words, when I say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant,” what we hear is: Pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant.
This is the mind’s paradox: the more we resist a thought, the louder it becomes. For most people, the noise fades with time. But for others, it lingers, loops, and compounds—until it becomes obsession. That’s what this story is about: not fleeting discomfort, but persistent thought traps we can’t escape. Traps that steal our peace and rewrite our sense of self.
I’ve always been fascinated by intrusive thoughts.
There’s a term coined by the French. ’Lappel du vide—the Call of the Void. We’ve all heard it: the Devil’s whisper, a fleeting vision of Hell as you stare down the face of a mountain or catch the glare of the subway lights as it races towards you on the tracks. As I write this, I’m on a bus through the fjords of Norway, and here it is again—that sudden urge, as we stop at a lookout platform and gaze upon the valley hundreds of meters below us, to throw my phone to the bottom. The thought simply appears, as if commenting on the blueness of the sky or the attractiveness of a passing stranger.
We like to believe we have control over our thoughts, and to some extent, we do. We can choose to internalize a poor exam grade as an opportunity for improvement or a cancelled flight as an extra day to adventure. But nobody is immune to intrusive thoughts. An unthinkable urge, a humble brag, a shameful desire. They arrive like an overbearing mother-in-law—without warning, without filter, without boundaries—and are colored by varying shades of taboo, uniquely horrifying brands of mortification. When we indulge them, it isn’t long before they overstay their welcome.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that we largely ignore intrusive thoughts. As human beings, we experience tens of thousands of them every day. It would be unhealthy to feed each with time and energy. But when we ignore something, we risk stigmatizing it. And stigma is an invasive species that takes more than pesticide to weed away.
Throughout my teenage years, my mind conjured deeply disturbing images on the regular, the ghosts of which haunt me to this day. I never found out if my thoughts were normal, or a more extreme version of an otherwise common occurrence, nor did I seek out help for my condition. What I do know, is that I was troubled to an unnatural degree. I was convinced that because I had bad thoughts, I must have been a bad person, and I obsessed over every intrusion. It never occurred to me that my thoughts were normal. I wonder, would I have been happier if it had? Or was I born into anxiety, fated for it by the overactive neurons in my brain?
Most people will indulge their existentialism from time to time. On a stormy night, we give into dread, doubt, or panic, and the lines of our spiral descend into a dark blur—compacted negativity that weighs upon us like the world onto Atlas. But by morning, the thoughts disappear, as most thoughts do, until we forget they ever existed. We become whole again.
This isn’t a story about indulgence.
It’s about overwhelm. Anxiety, shame, and silence, and the systems that built them.
It’s about obsession.
The brain’s job is to present us with options so that we may vote on the most viable one.
In the process of making decisions, we experience hundreds of thoughts each day that aren’t representative of our true desires. Most of the time, those manifest in millisecond-long flashes. What if I wear that red blouse to work today? What if I eat eggs instead of a bagel? What if I take the bus to work? This is true for our more disturbing thoughts, too—the calls of the void. They blip into and out of existence, light-speed ships shooting through space.
For some people, the thoughts are harder to forget. Perhaps they occur in higher quantities, or with such vivid detail that they seem impossible to ignore. Helpless against them, we take action into our own hands. This can be obvious. A devout germophobe might insist upon wearing latex gloves during each meal; a superstitious accountant might write financial statements with the same ballpoint pen. But our battles are just as often internal. A woman tormented by graphic images, for example, might spend hours turning over their meaning in an attempt to dispel them from her mind. She loses her appetite. She stops sleeping. She seems distant in conversations. She becomes a victim of the pink elephant paradox—attempting to not think about something only further emphasizes it in her mind—but she sees no other way out.
Consider a young girl who has an intrusive thought, in the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation, of punching her counterpart in the face. This is not something she would do under any circumstance, so the juxtaposition between the thought and her true character is unsettling. Irritating. Even, perhaps, appalling. She pushes the thought away to avoid discomfort and tells herself that it does not reflect anything about her. But her worry lingers, and soon enough, anxiety has immortalized something which was meant to have the significance of a mayfly. Now, whenever she’s pulled into a conversation, she wonders if the thought will reappear, what it means if it does, and how she can stop it.
You can see how this cycle becomes debilitating, especially as the thoughts grow more severe or the stakes raise. Say the girl develops a fear that she will eventually punch someone important in the face and that this action will destroy her life. Now, her thoughts aren’t only irritating—they are defining.
My intrusive thoughts were several levels more graphic than the above example. I have excluded them from this narrative, because a surviving fragment of my elementary self still cringes at the mention of unmentionable things. Being embarrassed about intrusive thoughts is like feeling bad for using the restroom, or sneezing, or brushing against a stranger in a crowded room. These things are inevitable, but societal norms indicate we should feel some sense of shame. So I’ve chosen to preclude myself from judgement, because I think you can understand my point without traversing inside my mind.
Shame keeps us silent. Silence reaffirms our shame. The girl with the intrusive thoughts of punching her colleagues believes that admitting to such thoughts will make them more real, more representative of her character. She tries to ignore them, but ignorance heightens her awareness. Every time the thought repeats, she internalizes her embarrassment more and more, until she is terrified to participate in the simplest of conversations. This vicious cycle traps her in a game of obsession for which she is constantly raising the stakes.
There’s a larger system at play here.
We’re living in a world that is more anxious than ever before. Mental health diagnoses are skyrocketing across the country, especially among youth, which signals that intrusive thoughts may be on the rise too. This is my theory: The 21st century has been flooded by instant communication technologies, and that abundance of information is overwhelming us.
Growing up as a young woman in the late 2010s felt like swimming through the ocean as an oil droplet. I was part of the first generation raised by smartphones, my childhood defined less by memory than by media. I drank from the firehose of information before I even learned to sip. It’s no wonder I had so many intrusive thoughts when information was coming at me in floods—curated reels, eye-catching headlines, group chats buzzing with drama and doom.
I wanted to be informed; instead, I was inflamed.
It’s hard enough to resist bias as an adult, so you may imagine my difficulties as a child, when my brain functioned more as a sponge than a brick wall. I tried to absorb content from all sides—left, right, center. But a sponge cannot tell what it’s soaking up. It just fills. And what filled me most, amidst the viral videos and flashy for-you pages, was fear. I consumed content in echo chambers that amplified the most extreme takes on current events. Every article was breaking news; every text was an urgent alert.
Eighth grade was a fever dream of headlines with shadows far too dark for my insulated little life. The news was a haunted house I wandered through daily, and every creak of the floorboards was a jump-scare to my mind. When someone reached into their coat, I imagined a gun. When a man smiled at me, I wondered if he was a predator. It’s not that I believed those things were true. I just couldn’t not imagine them, and the more I feared my thoughts, the more powerful they grew.
My brain was doing its job—trying to protect me. But the world I was trying to survive was one I barely understood.
Looking back now, I see that my anxiety didn’t grow in a vacuum. It was fertilized by algorithms. It is not paranoia to fear what you’ve been shown a thousand times. It is not irrational to panic in a world that markets fear for profit. So perhaps the real question is not, What’s wrong with me? but rather, What’s wrong with a world that made me this afraid to begin with?
Not all intrusive thoughts are symptoms of a deeper societal issue. But we live in a world that is as beautiful as it is polarized, and I have to wonder what that divide is doing to our minds. It feels like I can’t have an open-minded political discussion nowadays without it turning into an attack. There is no nuance, no diplomacy, no attempt to understand the other side. We live in fear without bothering to understand the things we’re afraid of.
I once told my therapist that I was terrified of my thoughts and doubting whether I was a good person.
“I had a dream that I drove my car into the ocean,” I said. “All my friends were onboard. I don’t want to drive anymore.”
He looked at me for a moment. “If you got into a car with your best friend right now, what would happen?”
“I don't know.” I shrugged. “We would drive. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I do everything I can to help people. These thoughts just come into my head.”
“So you’re afraid of driving, because you think—based on a dream—that you might do something that you have no desire or intention to do?”
There it was, the logical fallacies of the mind in a nutshell. I’ve always considered myself a logical person, but in that moment, I was utterly convinced of something which felt ridiculous when spoken out loud. I had repeated my fear to myself so many times that a dream became my reality.
That’s not to say we should be embarrassed by our irrational fears. Fear is fear, and everyone has their fair share of it. But sometimes we jump to conclusions before we can realize we never needed to take the leap. The accessibility of confirmation bias, and the echo chambers of social media, only expedite this process. Often we need another set of eyes to help us slow down, take a deep breath, and redelegate our attention to more worthwhile matters.
I often wonder if technology has made us lazy communicators.
Why talk problems out when we can ghost? Why challenge our assumptions when we can just as easily find an article to confirm them? It’s more comfortable to internalize one-sided beliefs, even if those beliefs are extreme or alarmist, long-term sources of anxiety. But what kind of life is this—one where fear lives free?
We must learn to challenge the assumption that a thought has merit simply because it exists. Our judgments should be treated as hypotheses, not confessions, and placed on a mental trial. Some will pass the test, yes, but most will not. Because intrusive thoughts are just that: intrusive. And extremist beliefs are just that: extreme. These things are mental spam, a flicker of bad signal on an otherwise clear screen. If we don’t learn to filter through the noise, then we’re destined to turn every mental mosquito into a murder hornet.
I used to think that talking about my thoughts would give them more power. I was wrong. Lies live in the quiet. They grow teeth in isolation. It’s not that therapy or a heart-to-heart with a friend are cure-alls. But there’s something therapeutic about acknowledgement. When we give the monster under the bed a shape and name, we give it boundaries, too. It is no longer an abyss, but a finite thing, with borders, edges, and ends.
As for what to do about the shame that sometimes drives our ignorance? Shame is the ultimate pink elephant: the more we try to ignore it, the louder it trumpets. It’s also a cunning architect. It shapes our identity from the scaffolding of our worst moments, then dares us to imagine who we might be without them. But like any structure built from broken pieces, it falls apart under scrutiny.
Challenge assumptions. Meet thoughts with facts. And above all, think critically.
Intrusive thoughts don’t have to become obsessions. They can pass like ships in the night; quiet, fleeting, undisturbed. But that requires calm waters. And calm, these days, is a rarity.
We were not taught how to sail these seas. Just how to stay afloat—how to scroll, suppress, distract. So when the storm hits, and the pink elephants stampede, we panic. We believe the mind’s noise must be telling us something urgent, something dark, something true.
But a thought is just a thought.
A shadow on the wall is not a monster. A pink elephant is not a prophecy.
We live in a world that feeds on our fear. A world that makes obsession easy and silence comfortable, that monetizes our spirals and calls it content. We don’t have to play along. We can think a thought, name it, hold it up to the light… and let it go.
When we stop treating our minds like enemies and start seeing them as messy, beautiful, overprotective companions—well-meaning, if occasionally unhinged—we begin to reclaim power. The goal is no longer Don’t think of a pink elephant, but rather: When the pink elephant shows up, can I let it pass through without building it a home?
Let it pass. Let it go. Let yourself be free.
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