The Purple Elephant

“Try to pose for yourself this task, not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

Dostoevsky wrote that in 1863, and whether it be polar bears or purple elephants, often when we don’t want to think of something the reverse happens and instead we think of it all the more. The psychologist Daniel Wegner studied this effect and named it Ironic Process Theory, and it can become a real problem in your life when you’re feeling stressed, worried, anxious or afraid.

The harder you try not to think about something, the more you think about it. Tell yourself right now not to think about that embarrassing thing you said at work last week. Don’t think about it. Seriously, stop thinking about it.

How’s that working out for you?

It’s not working because your brain doesn’t work that way. The moment you tell yourself not to think about something you’ve already thought about it, you’ve activated the exact neural pathway you’re trying to avoid. This is the problem with thought suppression: it just doesn’t work.

Ironic Process Theory

Not all of our thoughts are as innocuous as thinking about polar bears or purple elephants. Some of our memories, fears and anxieties bring with them painful emotions that we desperately want to avoid.

Here’s what happens when you try to suppress a thought. Your brain splits its attention between two tasks: one part actively searches for distractions, whilst another part monitors whether you’re still thinking about the forbidden thought. The problem is that the monitoring process has to keep checking the thought to know if you’re still thinking about it, so that’s why it doesn’t work.

So whilst one part of your brain is busy looking for distractions, the other part keeps bringing the thought back into your awareness every few seconds just to check you’re not thinking about it. You’ve created a thought loop, and this is where Ironic Process Theory really becomes a problem in people’s lives: they get stuck on the bad stuff.

Someone comes in telling me they can’t stop worrying, they’ve tried everything to make it stop. They’ve tried distraction, meditation, positive thinking, telling themselves to just stop being ridiculous. Nothing works, and of course nothing works, because they’re trying too hard to suppress the thought, which means they’re thinking about it more. In regards to worry, worry then becomes the default: second order worry takes over and people end up worrying about worrying, forgetting what they were worrying about in the first place.

Ironic Process Theory can create mental loops that your brain sees like a broken record and keeps playing. That neuroplasticity thing we talked about earlier takes effect, and before you know it a particular thought pattern becomes what’s going on by default in your brain. Your worry becomes automatic, your anxiety becomes your baseline, your fear becomes your constant companion.

Sufferers of anxiety might initially be anxious about something real and tangible, but then they develop second order anxiety. The anxiety thought loop sticks, perpetuated by Ironic Process Theory, and you have a person whose default setting is being anxious about being anxious. This also works with other emotions too, so ask yourself when you’re stressed or worried whether you’re stressed about something specific or whether you’re just being stressed about being stressed.

For many people the worry or other disturbing emotions they feel at any particular time is not always about the problem that caused that anxiety in the first place; instead it’s become a process. Even if you fix the problem they initially worried about, the worry process still remains. Their brain will continue to worry, and to make sense of the whole thing it will even look for things to worry about.

I had a patient, let’s call her Sarah, who came to me convinced she was going to die young from heart disease. She was in her thirties, healthy, a regular marathon runner, with no family history of heart problems and no particular risk factors. Statistically she was absolutely fine, but she’d read an article about sudden cardiac death in young athletes and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Every chest pain was a heart attack in her mind. Every heartbeat she felt was the beginning of the end. She’d lie awake at night checking her pulse, googling symptoms, convincing herself that this was it. The irony was that the stress she was creating through this constant worry was probably doing more damage to her cardiovascular system than anything else in her life.

When I saw her she’d already tried to stop worrying about it. She’d tried not thinking about her heart, tried distracting herself with work and exercise, tried positive affirmations about being healthy. Every single strategy had made it worse, because every strategy involved monitoring whether she was still thinking about her heart, which meant thinking about her heart.

This is the trap of Ironic Process Theory. The more you fight it, the stronger it gets.

Now add in the physical feelings that your body gives you when you’re stressed, worried or anxious, and you can see how one small anxious or worrying thought can perpetuate into a full blown panic attack. Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets shallow, your muscles tense up. Your brain notices these physical symptoms and interprets them as danger, so it worries more, which creates more physical symptoms, which creates more worry.

You’re caught in a vicious cycle where the worry feeds the physical response and the physical response feeds the worry, and the harder you try to stop either one, the worse both become.

Sometimes the elephant in the room isn’t the obvious problem you’re facing. Sometimes the elephant in the room is the purple elephant, and it’s the problem thinking that’s the problem, rather than the problem itself.

Sarah wasn’t actually worried about her heart. Her heart was fine, and I know this because she’s continued running marathons without any problems since. She was worried about worrying, trapped in a thought loop that had nothing to do with cardiovascular disease and everything to do with Ironic Process Theory. The original trigger, that article about cardiac death, was long forgotten. What remained was the pattern: the automatic loop of checking, monitoring and worrying.

For some people their relationship with this kind of thinking is so unbalanced that it’s only a step away from a diagnosable anxiety disorder, however for the majority of us it’s just that we don’t understand what’s happening. It’s not therapy we need but a better understanding of how thought suppression works, if we’re to progress in life and prevent these patterns from holding us back.

There are a few things you need to know about Ironic Process Theory and thought suppression.

Firstly, suppression doesn’t work. Full stop. Telling yourself not to think about something makes you think about it more. This isn’t a character flaw, it’s not a sign of weakness, it’s just how your brain works. Fighting your thoughts is like fighting gravity: you’re going to lose every single time.

Secondly, distraction doesn’t work long term. You can distract yourself temporarily and give yourself a break from the thought, but it always comes back. Usually stronger than before, because whilst you were distracted your brain was still monitoring whether the thought had returned, which means it was still activated in the background.

Thirdly, positive thinking doesn’t work for this. Telling yourself to “think positive thoughts” is just another form of suppression, because you’re trying not to think negative thoughts, which means your brain is scanning for negative thoughts just to try and stop you from thinking about them. Your brain doesn’t respond well to commands about what not to think about.

What does work is counterintuitive, and most people hate hearing it.

You have to stop trying not to think about it.

I know that sounds ridiculous when you’re lying awake at 3am with your mind racing, but it’s the only way out of the loop. You can’t suppress the thought, so don’t try. Let it be there. Acknowledge it. Look at it. Don’t fight it, don’t push it away, just notice it.

“There’s that thought again. Interesting.”

Not “Oh God I’m thinking about it again, I’m such a failure, why can’t I control my mind, this is terrible.” Just “There it is.”

When you remove the monitoring process, when you stop checking whether you’re thinking about something, Ironic Process Theory loses its power. The thought can be there, it’s just a thought, and it can’t hurt you. You don’t have to do anything about it.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call cognitive defusion. You’re not trying to change the thought or get rid of the thought, you’re changing your relationship with it. The thought can exist without controlling you, without demanding your attention, without sending you into a spiral.

Most of my patients hate this advice initially, because they want me to give them a technique to stop thinking about the thing, some kind of mental trick or strategy to make the thoughts go away. I can’t do that, because that technique doesn’t exist. Any technique to stop thinking about something requires you to think about it, which means you’re back in the loop.

The only way out is through. Just let the thought be there, it’ll get bored and leave eventually, thoughts always do, unless you keep fighting them. Then they’ll stay forever.

You can break thought loops, but not by fighting them. You break them by refusing to engage, by letting thoughts pass through without grabbing onto them, by noticing you’re worrying without worrying about worrying.

It takes practice. Your brain won’t like it at first, because it’s used to hanging onto the bad stuff, and it may have already built those neural superhighways for worry, anxiety and fear. Those pathways don’t disappear overnight, but every time you notice a thought without fighting it you’re building new pathways: healthier ones, and ones that don’t lead to panic attacks at 3am.

Sarah learned this eventually. It took time and it wasn’t easy, but she learned to notice her heart-related anxiety without fighting it. “There’s that worry about my heart again.” No drama, no panic, no desperate attempts to think about something else. Just acknowledgment.

The worry didn’t disappear immediately, but it lost its power. The thought loop broke because she stopped feeding it with her attention and her resistance. Her brain stopped treating the normal sensations of her heart as dangerous, because she stopped reacting to them as if they were.

Some months later she came back to see me and told me she barely thought about her heart anymore. When the worry did pop up occasionally, she just noticed it and moved on. Ironic Process Theory had nothing to feed on, so it withered away.

Remember that Ironic Process Theory is what causes us to think about what we don’t want to think about. Sometimes the elephant in the room could be the purple elephant, and it’s your thinking about the problem that’s the problem, rather than the problem itself.

Problem thinking doesn’t have to run your life.

The real irony of Ironic Process Theory is that the moment you stop trying to control your thoughts is the moment you actually gain control. Not control in the sense of suppressing every unwanted thought, you’ll never have that, and your brain generates thousands of thoughts per day, most of them complete rubbish. That’s normal.

But control in the sense of choosing which thoughts deserve your attention and which ones don’t. Control in the sense of noticing a thought without being controlled by it. That’s the kind of control that actually matters.

So next time you find yourself lying awake trying desperately not to think about something, remember Dostoevsky’s polar bear. Remember that the harder you try not to think about it, the more you will think about it, and then stop trying.

Let the purple elephant be in the room, let the polar bear be in the room, and you might be surprised how quickly it leaves when you stop chasing it.

This isn’t therapy. If you’re dealing with clinical depression, severe anxiety, or trauma, please see a professional. I say this as a doctor, not as a disclaimer.

Ironic Process Theory

Further reading

The 50–75% Stage: When the Obstacles Get Real

The Wokeness Trap

Conditions of Worth

Decision Fatigue

The Law of Diminishing Returns

The Positivity Trap

Ironic Process Theory

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