The idea behind Burn Your Thoughts
How exposure therapy works
Why writing down the thought you least want to look at, and then watching it burn, can make it lose its grip.
01 Everyone has intrusive thoughts
An intrusive thought is an unwanted thought, image or urge that pops into your head out of nowhere. It might be violent, sexual, blasphemous, embarrassing, or just a nagging "what if?". It can feel shocking, as if it says something terrible about you.
of people in a study spanning six continents reported at least one unwanted intrusive thought in the previous three months (Radomsky et al., 2014).
Back in the 1970s, researchers found that the intrusive thoughts of people without OCD had much the same content as those of people with OCD (Rachman & de Silva, 1978). The difference isn't having the thought. It's how much weight we give it, and how hard we fight it.
02 Fighting a thought makes it stronger
The natural reaction to a horrible thought is to push it away. Unfortunately, that tends to backfire.
People told not to think about a white bear kept thinking about it. And once they were allowed to think about it again, it came back more often than for people who had never tried to suppress it.
Wegner, Schneider, Carter & White, 1987The same thing happens with intrusive thoughts. Avoiding them, pushing them away, seeking reassurance or doing a ritual to "cancel" them gives quick relief. But it also teaches your brain that the thought was dangerous, so it comes back louder.
03 Exposure: turning toward it instead
Exposure therapy works the other way round. You deliberately, gradually face the thing you fear, here the thought itself, without doing anything to escape or neutralise it. For OCD, the version known as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is one of the best-supported treatments available (e.g. Foa et al., 2005).
When you stay with an uncomfortable thought, two things tend to happen:
- The alarm quiets down. With repetition, the anxiety the thought triggers usually fades.
- Your brain learns something new. Modern research suggests exposure works mainly through new learning: "I had that thought, nothing bad happened, and I coped." That new memory starts competing with the old fear (Craske et al., 2014).
Put simply, a thought is just a thought. Exposure helps you feel that, not just know it.
04 Why writing it down helps
Writing a thought down is a small act of exposure in itself. You have to look at it, find the words, and see it on the page rather than letting it swirl around half-formed.
Writing about difficult thoughts and feelings has been linked to benefits for wellbeing and even physical health, in a long line of studies that started with James Pennebaker's work in the 1980s.
Pennebaker & Beall, 1986Seeing a thought written out also creates a little distance. It's no longer you; it's some words on a piece of paper. Therapists call this defusion: noticing a thought as a thought, rather than a truth you have to obey.
05 Why burning it
This is where the fire comes in. Our minds treat thoughts a bit like physical objects, so what we do with the written-down version can change how much it weighs on us.
In a set of experiments, people wrote their thoughts on paper. Those who then threw the paper away relied on those thoughts less afterwards, while those who kept the paper safe in a pocket relied on them more. Simply imagining throwing them away also had an effect.
Briñol, Gascó, Petty & Horcajo, 2013, Psychological ScienceBurn Your Thoughts turns that into a ritual you can do in under a minute: write it, crumple it, feed it to Cinder, watch it burn.
06 How to use this site well
- Write the thought exactly as it showed up. Don't soften it or tidy it up. The scarier, more specific version is the one worth practising with.
- Read it back once, slowly. Notice the discomfort. Maybe rate it from 0 to 10 in your head. Let it be there for a few breaths without arguing with it.
- Then let it burn. Crumple it and give it to Cinder. Watch it go.
- Come back when it comes back. It probably will, and that's fine. Each time you face it rather than run from it, it tends to lose a little more power.
Burning the thought is meant to show you that it's just a thought, not to get rid of it as fast as possible. If you notice you're using the site to make the anxiety stop immediately, or you feel you have to burn a thought "properly" or the right number of times, it may be turning into a compulsion. If that happens, slow down. Spend longer with the thought before burning it, or leave it on the page for a while.
A note of care
This site is a self-help tool, not a replacement for therapy. If intrusive thoughts are taking up a lot of your day, causing you real distress, or leading you to avoid things, a therapist trained in CBT or ERP can help a great deal. That's especially true for OCD, where structured treatment works far better than going it alone.
If you're having thoughts of harming yourself and feel you might act on them, please reach out to someone now. In the US you can call or text 988; elsewhere, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line in your country.
References
- Briñol, P., Gascó, M., Petty, R. E., & Horcajo, J. (2013). Treating thoughts as material objects can increase or decrease their impact on evaluation. Psychological Science, 24(1), 41–47.
- Craske, M. G., Treanor, M., Conway, C. C., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10–23.
- Foa, E. B., Liebowitz, M. R., Kozak, M. J., et al. (2005). Randomized, placebo-controlled trial of exposure and ritual prevention, clomipramine, and their combination in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162(1), 151–161.
- Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
- Rachman, S., & de Silva, P. (1978). Abnormal and normal obsessions. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 16(4), 233–248.
- Radomsky, A. S., Alcolado, G. M., Abramowitz, J. S., et al. (2014). Part 1—You can run but you can't hide: Intrusive thoughts on six continents. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, 3(3), 269–279.
- Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13.