Welcome back, everybody. Today we are talking about a topic that I commonly get asked as a clinician, I commonly get asked as an advocate for anxiety online and so forth, which is how to let go of intrusive thoughts. I think that this is such an interesting question because words matter. For those of you who know me, you’re going to know that words really do matter when it comes to managing anxiety and we have to get it “right.” When I say “right,” what I’m really saying is our mindset about anxiety and intrusive thoughts and any emotion really that is uncomfortable, we have to approach it with a degree of skill, effectiveness, and wisdom. My hope is to help you move in that direction. I know you’re already in that direction, but hopefully, this episode will be really powerful. I’m going to give you a metaphor that I hope really, really helps you. It really helps me. I’ve talked about it on the podcast before, but I feel like it’s important so I have to talk about it again.  When we talk about this idea of how to let go of intrusive thoughts, we have to ask, what do we mean by that? Often when people first start seeing me as a clinician or they start seeing my therapist—we have a private practice in Calabasas, California—we commonly will get, “Okay, just I’m here. I’m ready to do the work. Teach me how to let go of intrusive thoughts.” A lot of the beginning stages of treatment is educating on how letting go, meaning not having them anymore or quickly avoiding them or distracting against that, could actually be what’s making your anxiety worse. For those of you who’ve taken ERP School, which is our online course for OCD. If you’re interested, you can go to CBTSchool.com to learn more about that course. That’s where you can learn how to manage your own OCD. It’s an on-demand course. But we talk a lot about understanding that trying to push thoughts away or suppress thoughts, not having them actually reinforces the problem. I also want to mention, it makes total sense that your goal is to be able to have the thoughts and have no discomfort related. Like I just want to have the thoughts and I don’t want them to bother me, and I just want them to create no suffering at all. I get that. That is a very normal desire to have. But what we want to do here is, when we’re talking about how to “let go” of intrusive thoughts, what we are really talking about is how we can be skillful in how we respond to them, because we know, based on science, that we can’t control our intrusive thoughts. Often there are mechanisms in the brain that’s making it very difficult for you to pump the brakes on thoughts, which is why you’re struggling with so many of them, and they’re happening so repetitively. We know this.  When I first learned about mindfulness, one of the most important metaphors that just shook me to the core—it really changed the way that I learned to deal with thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, urges, and all the things—was to think of my thoughts like water in a stream, and that my mind is this stream of water. As you’re thinking like these beautiful green banks, and there’s the river in the stream, and it’s flowing in one direction. What happens for us when we’re experiencing our mind is we hit a rock in the stream. When we hit that rock, we want to imagine that that rock is a metaphor for an intrusive thought. Here you are, you’re the water. You’re just rolling over all of the banks and commandeering back and forth, and then all of a sudden you hit this very sharp, jagged rock. Of course, your reaction is to get jolted and go, “Oh my goodness, what is this? Why is this here? I’m just trying to get from A to B.” Often what we do is when we hit the rock, we make a huge splash. The splash goes everywhere. We’re like, “Wait, what happened?” When we do this, we actually create a lot of pandemonium for ourselves.  Now, that’s what we do. But if we were to think about a stream, what does the stream water normally do w