Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts _ a CBT-Based Guide to Getting Over Frightening, Obsessive, or Disturbing Thoughts. ( PDFDrive )

Recovering from Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts 13
Exercise: Observing Your Own Ironic Process
This demonstration will take less than ten minutes, and it consists of
two parts.
Part 1
Set a timer for two minutes. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and pay
attention to what you think, feel, hear, and smell. You may think about
anything you want— anything at all— except for one thing. Under no
circumstances should you think about carrots. Not the word carrot, not
the smell of carrots, not the taste. Nothing with carrots in it— no carrot
cake, no carrot salad, and certainly no Bugs Bunny! It might help to
stay away from the color orange as well. Now start the timer, and do
your best to keep your thoughts away from carrots.
After the timer goes off, ask yourself how well you did. Now, most
people will report that they failed to be completely free of carrots.
The effort to not think about carrots backfires. In fact, the effort itself
is doomed to failure. The more you try to rid your mind of carrots,
the more insistent the thought becomes. So trying not to think about
carrots is a form of thinking about them.
Part 2
In this portion of the exercise, you will set your timer for five minutes.
Your task is to try to keep your mind completely free of carrots for five
minutes. As in the first part of the exercise, sit comfortably and give
yourself permission to think about anything at all except carrots. Start
the timer, and each time you think of carrots, you must reset the timer
back to five minutes. Your task is simply to go five minutes without
thinking of carrots. Be honest! Ready, get set, go!
Now look at what happened. Most people report that they think
of carrots after just a few seconds, so they reset the timer. But then
it happens again, and the timer is once again reset. After a while,
the task starts to seem impossible. You become frustrated, annoyed,