It seems like enough people share this experience that it’s pretty normal, but why? It seems completely contrary to survival as a species.
In: Biology
I asked my psychiatrist this as I get it to the point where I cannot be on any ledge or anything high. I even struggle driving sometimes. He had no coherent response.
I’ve been curious about this as I experienced it throughout my life and noticed it got a little more frequent after having kids. I did some.googling about this in the past and it’s a common phenomenon referred to as [call of the void](https://www.healthline.com/health/call-of-the-void#causes). There hasn’t been much research into it with only one study done to date. I have an anxiety and depression diagnosis and had PPA/PPD and PTSD after my first. It would seem this experience is in line.qith the researchers hypothesis about anxiety sensitivity and my belief is my “call of the void” got slightly worse after kids as my anxiety levels also increased and I was constantly in fight or flight mode.
Intrusive thoughts like that are your brains way of saying “Hey, I just thought of this, it might be dangerous, what happens if we do it?”. Most of the time you realize that would be dangerous and don’t do it, but it can also scare you away from hanging out on cliffs or places where you’d fall because you get that sudden fear that you are going to do it, which prevents you from accidentally falling.
The brains job is to present options. Then it votes, more or less to use a bad metaphor, on which option is most viable.
Intrusive thoughts are just those options.
An intrusive thought is just a random thought. As soon as you have it, you evaluate, decide it’s absurd, and discard it. There’s no intent or desire behind having the thought. It doesn’t reveal any dark secrets about yourself. It’s just a thought. Since there’s no desire behind it, it doesn’t actually lead to action, and therefore survival isn’t brought into the equation.
Interestingly, depression/anxiety have a lot to do with whether we pay attention to these thoughts, which can make them distressing. For example, a normal, sleep-deprived, stressed out parent might have a brief thought of smothering their baby to get them to stop crying. Normal process is that it’s a flash of a thought, then gets evaluated as absurd and unhelpful, and you barely register that you had it. A mother suffering from post-partum depression might have the same thought but then overreact to it, thinking it must mean she’s a bad mother, or that she has some impulse to kill her child and she’s dangerous. By giving too much weight to the thought, she can cause herself distress, even though tons of people have those thoughts and are great parents.
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