If you’ve ever found yourself in bed with a partner only to have your mind clogged with strange, scary, or disgusting thoughts—you’re really not on your own there. This can be extremely distressing, distracting, and libido-deadening, but it’s not unusual.
The good news is that this issue is one of the easiest to resolve. It’s called performance anxiety and it happens to almost everyone from time to time.
Getting to the Bottom of Why We Have Intrusive Thoughts
Fear makes the mind turn on itself. Intrusive thoughts “essentially [hijack] our mind and take us down a rabbit hole of negative, fear-based, troublesome ideas which are usually rooted in some sort of past trauma or negative experience,” says Moushumi Ghose, MFT, a licensed sex therapist. “Most of the time, these intrusive or negative thoughts are unrealistic and magnified perceptions of a terrible outcome.”
Intrusive thoughts are different from generalized negative thoughts because they genuinely disrupt your life and well-being. They creep in, overtake you, and are hard to repel.
The body needs to respond to these disruptive thought patterns. It doesn’t know that these thoughts are just thoughts. And so, it responds as if they are IRL threats. “The body senses a similar feeling from a past memory and it automatically responds. [Your] heartbeat gets faster, [you get] butterflies in the stomach, etc.,” Ghose explains. “The mind then begins creating a mountain out of a molehill, based on these past emotions.”
Why? Because fear is like a virus—it makes our minds turn on themselves and create worries about what might go wrong instead of focusing on what we can do right now to make things better. And the more we focus on these fears, the stronger they get—making them more likely to pop into our heads again and again until we learn how to deal with them differently.
Read the article below to learn more.
Caitlin Oates
Author
Doubling as LAST’s practice manager and intake coordinator, Caitlin is a writer and creative with a passion for sex-positivity, LGBTQIA advocacy, and mental health care.
Caitlin earned her bachelor’s degree in communications from Northwestern University, and now flexes those communication muscles by teaching medical students humanism skills, coaching athletes in functional fitness, and learning from and working with LAST to promote, amplify, and normalize the importance of sexual and mental health.