One of the most common questions I receive is some version of this: “Mark, how do I move on from a thought?” Whether it’s a disturbing intrusive thought, an obsessive loop that won’t quit, or a troubling idea that seems to follow you everywhere — you want to know how to get unstuck and move forward. Today I want to share with you a skill you can actually develop that will change how you relate to your own thought life.
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What Your Sense of Smell Teaches You About Your Mind
Allow me to start off by talking about your nose and smell. Here’s something fascinating about how your sense of smell works: you don’t actually smell everything around you. Your nose is designed to detect new smells. You encounter a new scent, your senses register it, and then — within moments — that awareness drifts into the background. That’s why someone else sometimes has to tell you your breath isn’t fresh, or that there’s a strange odor in the room you’ve been sitting in for hours. You’ve become habituated to it.
Think about walking into a room where someone is burning a candle or cooking a meal. That aroma hits you immediately. But within a few minutes, it fades from your awareness — not because the smell is gone, but because your brain filed it away as non-threatening background information and moved on.
Here’s the key insight: your mind works the same way with thoughts. You were actually designed and built to move through thoughts, not to get stuck in them. Thoughts are meant to arrive, pass through your awareness, and drift into the background — especially when they pose no real threat.
The problem is that many of us have never learned how to let that happen.
Why Some Thoughts Get Stuck
Your mind’s natural process of filtering thoughts gets hijacked when a thought triggers an intense emotional charge. The thought presents itself as a threat — like an alarm going off — and suddenly your nervous system responds as if there’s a real emergency. Your attention locks onto it. And the more you engage with it, try to fix it, argue with it, or escape it, the more power you give it.
Here’s how the cycle typically unfolds:
A thought shows up. Your emotions spike. You attach meaning to it — this means something about me, this must be important, I have to deal with this right now. That meaning triggers catastrophic thinking. And because the thought feels so urgent and threatening, you feel a deep personal responsibility to do something about it. To solve it. To make it go away.
But here’s what’s actually happening beneath the surface: the more you react to the thought, the more your brain marks it as legitimate danger. And danger demands your attention. So the thought grows louder, more persistent, more charged.
The Path Forward: Habituation
There’s a technical term for the brain’s natural ability to move through thoughts: habituation. Simply put, it’s the brain’s built-in process of losing interest in a stimulus it no longer perceives as a threat.
The key phrase there is no longer perceives as a threat. Your brain doesn’t stop noticing a thought because you argued it out of existence or successfully pushed it away. It stops treating a thought as a threat through repeated non-reactive exposure — meaning you encounter the thought, and you don’t do anything about it. Over time, the brain files it away as harmless, the emotional charge decreases, and the volume turns down.
This is not a one-time event. It’s a process. And it goes against everything our anxious minds instinctively want to do.
What Habituation Is Not
Before going further, let me be clear about what this process is not, because many people unknowingly do things that keep them stuck:
It is not convincing yourself the thought isn’t real. Repeating “this isn’t a threat, this isn’t a threat” to yourself is still a reaction — it’s a mental compulsion. It might bring momentary relief, but it signals to your brain that the thought is worth engaging with.
It is not trying to force the thought to leave. Saying “get out of my head” only amplifies the distress.
It is not suppressing the thought. White-knuckling your way through, trying to push the thought into a mental lockbox, actually increases the fear attached to it.
It is not white-knuckling at all. This process requires compassion, not brute force.
The Real Culprit: Compulsivity
If you’ve been asking yourself “why can’t I just move on from this thought?” — compulsivity is usually the answer.
Every compulsive response to a thought, whether mental or behavioral, teaches your brain to treat that thought as a real threat. The compulsion might bring temporary relief, but the relief doesn’t last. Worse, it actually raises the stakes. Your brain gets the message: that thought was worth responding to. Stay on high alert.
Over time, rituals become more elaborate. Avoidance expands. The effort required to feel “safe” keeps increasing. And exhaustion sets in.
Compulsions can look like many things:
- The internal loops — arguing, debating, analyzing, ruminating, trying to resolve the thought in your mind
- External actions — confessing repeatedly, seeking reassurance from others, researching the topic, praying in a compulsive way to make the thought stop
Both interrupt the habituation process. Both communicate to your nervous system that the thought has power. Both steal your freedom.
Think about it this way: imagine you keep walking back into a room to check whether that strange smell is still there. Every time you go in to check, you’re refreshing your awareness of it. Your brain never gets the chance to file it away as background noise. The obsessive mind does exactly this — it keeps checking for the thought, which ensures the thought stays front and center.
A Special Word for Believers
If you’re a Christian, you may be especially vulnerable to getting trapped in this cycle, and I want to speak directly to that.
Christians have a high value for healthy thinking and moral integrity. Those are good things. But when they get tangled up with performance-driven faith, condemnation-based thinking, or perfectionism, those same good values can become weapons that work against you.
Here are some ways that can show up:
You may see the intrusive thought as sin. Because the thought feels so visceral and real, you feel fused with it. And you go down a rabbit trail — this came from me, maybe this is what I really want, this must mean something is wrong with me.
Your spiritual disciplines may become compulsions. Prayer, Bible reading, confession, and repentance are meant to connect you to God’s love. But when they become tools for managing anxiety or silencing intrusive thoughts, they get strangled by compulsivity — and what was meant to fuel your soul becomes another area of torment.
You may fear desensitization. Some Christians are afraid that if they stop reacting anxiously to these thoughts, they’ll become spiritually numb, hardened, or careless about sin. But here’s what I want you to understand: the horror you feel about an intrusive thought is evidence of your values — not a violation of them. Intrusive thoughts are notorious for targeting the things you care about most and flipping them inside out. Your anxiety about the thought reveals that you don’t want it — not that you secretly do.
You may be treating your intrusive thoughts as spiritual failure. This may be the one that aches my heart most. When the presence of a thought makes you feel like you’re not right with God, like your salvation is questionable, like you’re a reprobate — that is not God speaking to you. God does not use shame, condemnation, and fear to communicate with his children. That’s not His voice.
I want to say this clearly: there is no condemnation for your intrusive thoughts.
The renewing of your mind is not about making thoughts disappear. It’s about developing renewed reactions to your thoughts. And peace is not the absence of difficult thoughts — it’s the absence of compulsive, anxious responses to them.
Developing a New Relationship with Your Thoughts
So what does this actually look like in practice? Here are the principles I want you to work with:
1. Become a compassionate witness to yourself. The first line of renewal is trading hostility toward yourself for grace. Instead of “What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep thinking this? Something must be broken in me” — you practice “There’s that thought again. I don’t have to respond to it. I’m loved, and I’m okay.” Compassion reminds you of God’s love for you. Grace empowers you to take the next step. This is where the journey begins.
2. Practice non-reactive response. When the intrusive thought shows up, you notice it — and you don’t engage your compulsions. This is not the same as suppression. You’re not pushing the thought away. You’re simply not feeding it. You’re letting it exist without giving it an audience. Think of it like watching clouds pass across the sky. Some clouds move slowly. Some feel like they’ll never leave your field of view. But they pass. You don’t have to do anything to make them pass. You just let them go.
3. Sit with the discomfort. Anxiety will often spike when you first stop your compulsions — sometimes significantly. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s actually a sign that the habituation process has been activated. The wave is peaking. If you don’t add fuel to it, it will fall. This is where mental and emotional strength is built — not in avoiding the discomfort, but in remaining present with it long enough for your brain to reach its own conclusion that the threat isn’t real.
4. Use the gentle redirect. When the thought shows up and you’re not feeding it, you may wonder: “Okay, now what?” The answer is simply to gently redirect your attention to what’s actually in front of you — your work, your kids, the conversation you’re in, the present moment. This isn’t white-knuckling. It’s a practiced, compassionate shift back to life. Over time, those small redirects build into real confidence.
5. Celebrate small wins. Progress in this area doesn’t look like the thought never showing up. It looks like the thought showing up and you caring less about it. That is not numbness. That is not spiritual apathy. That is what healing looks like. You’re not exchanging your values — you’re exchanging your cares, in the biblical sense. Peter wrote, “Cast your cares upon Him, because He cares for you.” You’re releasing your grip on the control mechanisms, the mental fixes, the compulsive rituals — and learning to trust in the care God already has for you.
The Trust Muscle
I want to close with something I believe with everything in me.
For those of you who battle obsessive and intrusive thoughts — especially in the world of OCD, scrupulosity, and anxiety — you are developing something that many people never have to develop: a profound, moment-by-moment trust in God.
Many people talk about trusting God in a general, broad sense. But for those who struggle with anxiety ridden intrusive thoughts, they have to practice trust hour by hour. Sometimes minute by minute. Every time you feel the pull toward a compulsion and choose to walk away from it, you’re jumping off a cliff in trust. Every time you let a thought pass without engaging it, you’re choosing to rely on God’s love rather than your own management strategies.
That is not weakness. That is some of the most vigorous spiritual work a person can do.
The charge fades over time. The urgency decreases. What you’re moving from is a fixing mindset — always trying to resolve, suppress, or escape — to something far better: relationship trust. Trust in the One who holds you, even when the storms of your own mind are loud.
That’s what freedom looks like. And it’s available to you.
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