Why Do Some Thoughts Stick in Your Mind More Than Others?

Have you ever had a thought pop into your mind that you just can’t seem to let go of? It may start a spiral of anxiety and overthinking.

Most of the thoughts you have every day come and go in an ongoing stream without you paying very much attention to them. You think about what you’re having for dinner. Something reminds you of a conversation you had yesterday. You wonder whether you remembered to send an email. You notice something happening around you. Then another thought comes along and the previous one disappears. Your attention wanders, sometimes deliberately and sometimes all by itself.

But every so often, a thought feels different.

It might seem:

• important
• frightening
• uncomfortable
• unusual
• uncertain
• completely out of character

And instead of allowing it to disappear like all the other thoughts you’ve had that day, you start paying attention to it. You keep thinking about it, you worry about it and you search for what it may mean. You wonder:

• “Why did I think that?”
• “What if that happens?”
• “What does that thought mean?”
• “Why can’t I stop thinking about this?”
• “What if I’m right?”

Now you’re not simply having a thought – you’re thinking about the thought.

You analyse it, question it, try to understand it, argue with it or desperately try to get rid of it. And the more time, attention and emotional energy you give it, the more significant it can begin to feel. It can make you feel anxious and so you worry all the more. The thought just seems to ‘stick’ in your mind.

After helping hundreds of people with overthinking and anxiety in Ely, Newmarket and online, this is something I’ve seen many times.

People often assume that a thought keeps coming back because the thought itself must be particularly important. But very often, what keeps a thought going is how you respond when it appears.

That’s an important difference, because you can’t always control which thoughts pop into your mind. But you can start changing what happens next.

 

Quick Summary

Some thoughts seem to get stuck in your mind because they trigger anxiety, uncertainty or another strong emotional response.

Once a thought feels important, you may start:

• analysing it
• checking whether it’s true
• trying to understand why you had it
• looking for reassurance
• trying to push it away
• repeatedly returning to it

All of this gives the thought even more attention and creates more anxiety.

The thought feels important because you’re anxious about it, and because it feels important, you think about it even more.

In this article, we’ll look at why this happens and how you can start responding differently.

 

Related Anxiety Resources

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Anxiety and Overthinking
• Intrusive Thoughts and Anxiety
• Why Anxiety Isn’t Going Away on its Own?
• How to Calm Anxiety in the Moment

 

Why Do Thoughts Get Stuck in Your Head?

Imagine having two completely different thoughts.

The first is: “I need to buy some milk.”

You may remember it. You may forget it. You probably aren’t particularly concerned about why you had the thought. You act upon it or you don’t and it may not unduly bother you.

Now imagine another thought suddenly appears: “What if something terrible happens to someone I love?”

That creates a very different response.

You feel anxious and because you feel anxious, the thought suddenly seems important.

So you start thinking about it.

• “Why did that come into my head?”
• “Is there some reason I’m thinking this?”
• “What if it’s a warning?”
• “What if something really does happen?”

You might start imagining the terrible thing happening. You may check whether the person is okay. You might look for reassurance. Now the original thought has been given much more attention than the thought about buying milk.

It makes you feel anxious and so your brain starts treating it differently. It gets treated as important and may feel stuck at your forefront of your awareness. That anxiety may then start to direct your mind to think of other things that could go wrong.

The more significant you treat a thought, the more likely you are to notice it again.

 

The Thought Isn’t Always the Problem

One of the biggest misunderstandings about thoughts is that because something appeared inside your mind, it must mean something. You think it and then treat it as something important.

But your mind can think about almost anything:

• You can remember things that happened years ago.
• You can imagine things that have never happened.
• You can predict things that probably won’t happen.
• You can think things you don’t agree with.
• You can picture things you don’t want to happen.
• You can have completely random thoughts that make absolutely no sense.

The vast majority of these disappear because you don’t do anything with them and they don’t make you anxious.

But when a thought does make you anxious, you can start treating it as though it deserves time and attention. You treat it as a thing because you thought it.

And that’s where the pattern can begin.

 

Why Anxiety Makes Thoughts Feel More Important

When you’re anxious, your mind becomes more interested in potential problems and threats. That’s understandable because if your brain thinks something might be dangerous, it wants you to pay attention to it. Your brain searches for the cause of the anxiety and the threat, and it can often find something to latch on to. That’s why anxious people often say that it seems like there is always something for them to worry about.

But your mind doesn’t only respond to things happening around you. It responds to what you’re imagining too. Again, people with anxiety also talk about how they think the worst even when they know it is irrational and that things are unlikely to turn out that way. However, when anxiety is strong, the emotional response can easily overpower what you know logically.

You can be sitting safely at home while thinking:

• “What if I lose my job?”
• “What if this physical sensation means something serious?”
• “What if I said something wrong yesterday?”
• “What if I lose control?”

Your body can then respond to those thoughts as though something threatening is happening right now. And because you’re feeling anxious, the thought seems even more credible.

You think: “I wouldn’t feel this anxious about it if there wasn’t something to worry about.”

But the anxiety isn’t evidence that the thought is true.

It’s only evidence that your mind and body are responding anxiously to what you’re thinking.

 

How a Thought Becomes a Thinking Loop

The pattern can look something like this:

• A thought appears.
• You feel anxious or uncomfortable.
• The feeling makes the thought seem important.
• You analyse the thought.
• You become more anxious.
• You pay even more attention to the thought.
• The thought comes back again.

Now you may start worrying about the fact that the thought keeps returning.

• “Why am I still thinking about this?”
• “Why can’t I get this out of my head?”
• “There must be a reason it keeps coming back.”

And that gives you another reason to keep thinking about it.

The thought hasn’t necessarily become more important.

You’ve become more focused upon it.

 

Why Trying to Work a Thought Out Can Keep It Going

When something worries you, trying to understand it seems perfectly logical.

Sometimes that works. Let’s say, if you’re wondering what time your train leaves, you can check the timetable and get an answer. Problem solved.

Anxious thinking doesn’t always work like that.

Imagine you’re wondering: “What if everybody thought I was boring at that party?”

How can you ever know with absolute certainty what everybody thought?

Or: “What if this physical sensation means something terrible?”

You might reassure yourself that it doesn’t. But then your anxious mind responds: “Yes, but what if…?”

Or perhaps you’re wondering why an unwanted thought entered your mind. You analyse it for half an hour and eventually feel reassured. Then tomorrow the thought appears again.

So you analyse it again.

Instead of resolving the uncertainty, you can inadvertently train yourself to respond to the thought every time it appears.

 

What I Notice With Anxiety Clients

Something I regularly notice in my anxiety work is that people can become incredibly skilled at analysing their own thoughts.

They’ve often spent months or years doing it.

They can explain exactly why a thought worries them, all the possible things it might mean and every argument they’ve used to reassure themselves.

Yet despite all that thinking, they don’t feel any more certain.

Often they feel worse. It can feel exhausting trying to deal with your own anxious thoughts over and over.

That’s because the problem isn’t necessarily that they haven’t found the right answer yet.

The analysing itself has become part of the anxiety pattern.

They notice a thought. They feel anxious. And almost automatically, they start engaging with it. The overthinking creates anxiety and the anxiety leads to more thinking.

One of the changes we work towards is recognising that having a thought doesn’t automatically mean you need to do anything about it.

You can also read about the experiences of people I’ve helped with anxiety and other issues here: Hypnotherapy reviews and client experiences in Ely.

 

Why Trying NOT to Think About Something Can Backfire

Of course, once a thought starts bothering you, there’s another obvious solution: “I’ll just stop thinking about it.”

Unfortunately, that can create another problem.

To check whether you’re successfully not thinking about something, part of your attention needs to keep checking for the thought.

You may have heard this one before. Imagine I told you: Don’t think about a bright pink elephant for the next thirty seconds.

What are you now trying not to picture?

The harder you work at making sure the thought isn’t there, the more aware you can become of it.

Then when it inevitably pops back into your mind, you think:

“It’s back again!”

That creates frustration or anxiety. And once again the thought gets treated as important.

 

Intrusive Thoughts, Overthinking and Sticky Thoughts

There can be overlap between thoughts that seem to stick, intrusive thoughts and overthinking, but they aren’t necessarily exactly the same thing.

An intrusive thought is usually an unwanted thought, image or impulse that appears involuntarily and can feel disturbing or inconsistent with who you are.

You can read more about intrusive thoughts and anxiety here.

Overthinking is the broader habit of repeatedly analysing, predicting, reviewing or worrying about something.

You can read more about anxiety and overthinking here.

A thought becoming ‘sticky’ describes what can happen when you repeatedly give a particular thought attention and significance.

The content can be completely different from person to person.

The pattern can be remarkably similar.

 

How to Stop Getting Stuck on a Thought

The aim isn’t to somehow prevent unwanted thoughts from ever entering your mind. That’s probably an impossible standard (although as you break the cycle you may have less thoughts that get stuck).

Instead, start changing what happens after the thought appears so that it has less impact upon you.

 

1. Notice That You’re Thinking

This sounds obvious, but there’s an important difference between:

“This terrible thing might happen.”

and:

“I’ve noticed my mind is giving me the thought that this terrible thing might happen.”

The first puts you straight inside the content of the thought.

The second gives you a little distance from it.

You can recognise: “There’s that thought again.”

You don’t have to immediately decide whether it’s true, important or something you need to solve.

 

2. Don’t Automatically Start the Investigation

Notice the urge to analyse and engage.

You may desperately want to answer:

• “Why did I think that?”
• “What does it mean?”
• “What if it’s true?”

But ask yourself whether analysing similar thoughts in the past has actually resolved the anxiety.

Or has it simply led to more thinking? Remind yourself it’s just the same old pattern happening again.

Not every question your mind produces needs an answer.

 

3. Allow Some Uncertainty

Anxiety often wants certainty.

• You want to know for definite that the thing you’re worried about won’t happen.
• You want to know exactly what somebody else thinks.
• You want to be absolutely certain that a thought means nothing.

The problem is that life doesn’t offer complete certainty about everything. That gap of uncertainty is where anxiety creeps in.

Trying to achieve 100% certainty can keep you analysing indefinitely.

Sometimes you need to become more comfortable saying: “I don’t know, and I don’t need to work this out right now.”

 

4. Stop Fighting With Your Own Mind

You don’t have to like the thought.

You don’t have to agree with it.

And you don’t have to make it disappear.

Allow it to be there without continually feeding it with more analysis.

Your mind produces thoughts all day long. You already know how to let thoughts just move on inside your mind.

This can simply be another one.

 

5. Put Your Attention Somewhere More Useful

This isn’t about desperately distracting yourself so you don’t think the thought. This isn’t about desperately trying to distract yourself so that you don’t think the thought. Keeping yourself constantly busy to escape your thoughts may work for a while, but the anxious thought can simply reappear in a quieter moment.

It’s about deliberately choosing where you want your attention to go rather than continually giving it back to the anxious thought.

• If you’re talking to somebody, return your attention to the conversation.
• If you’re working, return to what you’re doing.
• If you’re walking, notice what’s happening around you.

The thought may still be there for a while and that’s okay.

You don’t need to wait until your mind is completely quiet before getting on with your life.

 

6. Calm the Anxiety Around the Thought

Sometimes people spend all their effort arguing with the thought while ignoring the anxiety attached to it.

If you’re highly anxious, your mind is much more likely to continue searching for threats and problems.

Learning how to reduce the anxious response can make it much easier to step away from the thinking loop.

You can find practical ideas here: How to Calm Anxiety in the Moment

 

One Thing I Learned From My Own Anxiety

When I struggled with anxiety, I used to place far too much importance on what was happening inside my own head.

I would worry about saying the wrong thing, what someone else might think or making an idiot of myself. I would be on hyper alert for any sign of something going wrong and my mind would imagine one possible worst case after another.

If something made me anxious, I assumed I needed to think about it. It could feel like I was preparing myself so that, if the worst happened, it would somehow be easier to deal with. After all, if I’d already imagined it so vividly and thought through everything that could go wrong, perhaps it would be less of a shock if it actually happened. Of course, what actually happened was that I spent a lot of time experiencing anxiety about things that usually never happened.

And because I was thinking about it repeatedly, it seemed even more important.

What I eventually learned was that I didn’t have to automatically follow every thought my mind produced. No one had ever taught me that it was up to me whether I treated a thought as important or not. If it was imagined inside my own head then I could do something about it.

A thought could appear without becoming something I needed to analyse for the next hour.  I could notice a thought without automatically analysing it, believing it or feeling that I had to do something about it. Sometimes I could challenge what I was thinking; other times I could simply let the thought be there and get on with what I was doing. I started to realise that a thought wasn’t automatically important simply because I’d thought it. If there was nothing else to back it up, I didn’t have to keep treating it as though it meant something.

That doesn’t mean controlling every thought. It means becoming much more selective about which ones you choose to engage with, and those you choose not to.

 

What NOT to Do When a Thought Feels Stuck

If you’re caught in one of these thinking loops, be careful about:

• repeatedly checking whether the thought has gone
• continually searching online for reassurance
• asking other people the same reassuring question
• repeatedly reviewing what happened
• trying to achieve absolute certainty
• treating the anxious feeling as proof the thought is important
• constantly testing whether you still have the thought
• fighting with yourself because the thought came back
• assuming that thinking something means you want it to happen

All of these can give the thought more significance and keep your attention focused upon it.

 

The Good News

If a thought has been going around your mind for days, weeks or even longer, it can start feeling as though you’re never going to be able to stop thinking about it.

But remember what happens with all the other thoughts you have.

They appear.

You don’t give them much attention.

And eventually something else comes along.

The goal isn’t to create a perfectly empty mind where uncomfortable thoughts never appear.

It’s to stop automatically treating every anxious thought as something that requires your attention.

As you change your response, the thought can gradually lose the importance you’ve been giving it.

And when something no longer seems important, your mind has much less reason to keep bringing your attention back to it.

 

Frequently Asked Questions About Thoughts That Get Stuck

Why does my brain get stuck on certain thoughts?

Thoughts are more likely to hold your attention when they create anxiety, uncertainty or another strong emotional response. Once you start repeatedly analysing or checking the thought, you can inadvertently reinforce its importance and become increasingly aware of it.

Why does the same thought keep coming back?

Sometimes the thought returns because you’ve taught your mind that it’s something important that needs attention. Each time it appears, you analyse it again, which makes you feel anxious and keeps the pattern going.

Does having a bad thought mean I secretly want it to happen?

No. Your mind is capable of imagining and producing all sorts of unwanted, strange or upsetting thoughts and images. Having a thought isn’t the same as wanting something to happen or intending to act upon it.

Why can’t I stop thinking about something even though I know it’s irrational?

Logical understanding and anxiety don’t always operate together. You may know intellectually that a thought is unlikely or irrational while still experiencing an anxious response to it. Continually trying to prove the thought wrong can sometimes keep you focused upon it.

Should I try to suppress unwanted thoughts?

Trying hard not to think about something can make you more aware of whether you’re thinking about it. A more useful approach can be noticing the thought without automatically analysing, fighting or responding to it.

Are thoughts getting stuck linked to anxiety?

They can be. Anxiety can make you more alert to potential threats and uncertainty, which can increase the importance you attach to particular thoughts. Persistent or distressing thoughts can also occur in conditions such as OCD, so seek appropriate professional support if thoughts or related behaviours are causing significant distress or disruption.

 

Why Do Some Thoughts Stick? My Ely Standard Article

I recently wrote about this subject for my regular Ely Standard column because it’s something that comes up so often in my anxiety work.

Read my Ely Standard article: Why Do Some Thoughts Stick in Your Mind?

The article was also published across other regional titles including the  Hunts Post, Cambs Times, Wisbech Standard and Peterborough Matters.

 

Anxiety and Overthinking Support in Ely and Newmarket

In my work as an anxiety therapist in Ely, Newmarket and online, I regularly help people who feel trapped inside their own thinking.

• Sometimes it’s worrying about the future.
• Sometimes it’s continually replaying something from the past.
• Sometimes it’s a particular unwanted thought that seems impossible to let go of.

Whatever the content, one of the most useful changes can be learning that you don’t have to automatically give every thought your time, attention and belief.

Your mind will continue producing thoughts.

And you can become much better at deciding what you do with them.

You can learn more here:

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Anxiety Hypnotherapy in Ely
• Intrusive Thoughts and Anxiety
• Hypnotherapy Reviews in Ely

Or arrange a free initial consultation to talk through what’s been happening and what might help.

To your health and happiness,

Dan Regan

Anxiety Therapy and Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket