Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forest Hanson.

If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today, and if you've listened before,

welcome back.

I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hanson, Rick is a clinical psychologist, the best

selling author of books like Buddhist Brain and Resilient, which we wrote together, and

he's also my dad, so dad, how are you doing today?

I'm really good for us and always, always tickled pig to do this with you.

Yeah, very much the same.

I've been looking forward to today's episode for a little while, because today we're going

to be focusing on one of the questions that we get most frequently, which is how a person

can deal with intrusive or obsessive thoughts.

It's normal for thoughts to get stuck in our heads sometimes, or for things to happen

to us that we have a really hard time letting go of.

But when thoughts are negative, persistent, recurring, and generally uncontrollable, they

can have a really huge impact on our quality of life.

And we've got a lot of questions from listeners outlining how they've been tried to deal

with the same persistent thought for literally decades, which highlights just how difficult

these thought patterns can be to break.

So that's what we're going to be exploring today, how we can break out of cycles of rumination

and release obsessive thoughts.

So dad, I just used a word there, rumination.

It's a bit of a technical word.

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