You’re waiting in line at a busy coffee shop and have an intrusive thought about the barista making your latte, how slow they are, and how you’ll be late for work because of them. A person dealing with thought broadcasting, a condition in which people believe that others can hear their thoughts, might worry that everyone on the line caught wind of this silent inner conversation with yourself.
So, what’s really going on here?
Keep reading to learn more about the phenomenon of thought broadcasting, the mental health conditions it’s linked to, and what you can do about it.
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What is thought broadcasting, and what causes it?
Thought broadcasting is characterized as a type of delusion—or a fixed false belief that someone grips onto, even when there is ample evidence that it’s not true.
Thought broadcasting is when you’re convinced that other people are able to hear your inner thoughts. Maybe you’re concerned that the people in your immediate surroundings can hear what runs through your brain. Or maybe you believe that your thoughts have a broader broadcast range—through TV, podcasts, or the radio, for example.
Schizophrenia
One of the disorders that thought broadcasting shows up with is schizophrenia, which doctors often describe as a type of psychosis, as people are not always able to distinguish their own thoughts and ideas from reality. There are many types of delusions associated with schizophrenia, but thought broadcasting can be one of them.
It’s worth mentioning: Schizophrenia has long been misunderstood as an untreatable mental illness, which adds to its stigma. In reality, many people who receive treatment—which usually involves medicines and psychosocial therapy—can manage the disorder and live their lives with symptoms in check.
Bipolar disorder
Another condition that can include thought broadcasting delusions as a symptom is a bipolar disorder, a chronic mood disorder that causes intense shifts in mood, energy levels, and behavior. In bipolar disorder, psychotic events involving delusions (yes, including thought broadcasting delusions) usually occur during manic episodes, but they can happen during a depressive state as well.
Typically, treatment for bipolar disorder involves a combination of at least one mood-stabilizing drug and/or atypical antipsychotic in addition to therapy.
How thought broadcasting can affect you
It’s not uncommon for people who experience thought broadcasting delusions to experience a high degree of distress. They can become overwhelmed by simple tasks like visiting a grocery store or a post office—worried that everyone around them is hearing their innermost thoughts. This can lead to a lot of avoidance, meaning they simply don’t go places when they believe that their thoughts will be heard. This phenomenon can also lead to them cutting themselves off from other people and becoming socially isolated.
These are all reasons why it’s crucial to treat the underlying cause of thought broadcasting. If you think you might have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and you’re not in treatment, it’s critical to seek professional help.
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The relationship between OCD and thought broadcasting
Sometimes, the fear that people can hear your thoughts isn’t a sign of paranoid thinking at all and may be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) instead.
OCD is a mental health condition characterized by repeated unwanted thoughts or obsessions. Often, the obsessive thoughts come down to worries, doubts, and fears. To cope with these thoughts and the anxiety they produce, people with OCD engage in compulsions—mental actions or physical behaviors done in an attempt to find relief from their obsession or to stop something bad from happening.
Since obsessions in OCD don’t align with a person’s values—in fact, they go against the very things that people with OCD care about the most—people with the disorder can feel a lot of shame about their innermost thoughts. And in some cases, they can fear that these thoughts might be heard.
“The fear for someone with OCD is really about people discovering the content of their obsessions,” says Dr. Patrick McGrath, Chief Clinical Officer at NOCD. “Being afraid that someone could read your mind is just one expression of that fear. The main reason is simply because the idea that others could know about those thoughts is so terrifying.”
Sometimes people wonder if they have “thought broadcasting OCD”—and while that’s not a thing, it’s definitely possible to have fear thoughts in OCD that sound like this:
- What if my priest heard the violent intrusive thought I just had?
- My partner seems upset. What if they can tell what I thought about them earlier?
- What if everyone on the bus knows that sexual intrusive thought I just had?
How to tell if it’s OCD or something else
The key distinction here is that people with OCD usually have a level of insight into what’s going on—that is to say, you probably do understand, on some level, that other people can’t truly hear your thoughts.
“With psychosis, schizophrenia, or delusional disorders, people actually think that people can read their minds,” says Tracie Zinman-Ibrahim, LMFT, CST, and Chief Compliance Officer at NOCD.
What’s more, “people with psychosis will not question if their thoughts are being read. There are no ‘what-ifs?’ that we typically see when it’s OCD—they actually believe it.”
Another notable difference: People with OCD will respond to their anxiety so that people can hear their thoughts by engaging in compulsions. So people with an OCD-related fear that people can read their mind might attempt to change their thoughts, try to think positive thoughts instead of negative ones, or ask for reassurance by asking someone if they can hear their thoughts.
OCD treatment you can afford
Use your insurance to work with a NOCD specialist.
How to stop thought broadcasting
As mentioned earlier, medications like antidepressants and antipsychotics are usually prescribed to treat underlying psychiatric conditions that cause thought broadcasting. Medications can also reduce or stop the frequency of thought broadcasting. Typically, combining psychotherapy with medication leads to improved outcomes.
For OCD, however, a different treatment approach is needed.
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is the go-to treatment for OCD, and it can significantly reduce OCD symptoms. It is a specialized therapy designed to treat OCD and is backed by decades of research, with 80% of people who do ERP therapy seeing improvement in their symptoms.
It’s important to seek out this truly specialized treatment for OCD because the wrong type of therapy can actually make OCD symptoms worse. If you were to address your fear that people can hear your thoughts in traditional talk therapy, for example, your therapist might spend your sessions investigating why you might be so worried about others hearing your thoughts or reassuring you that you have nothing to worry about, since people can’t actually hear your thoughts.
The problem with this approach is that it reinforces compulsions like rumination or reassurance-seeking. OCD is never satisfied with any amount of certainty or reassurance, and these compulsions only keep you stuck in the vicious OCD cycle.
ERP works differently. In your sessions, you’ll work with a therapist to slowly but deliberately face your fears. ERP teaches you to respond without compulsions (known as response prevention techniques)—so you’re not endlessly ruminating or seeking reassurance—and over time, the thoughts that cause so much distress lose their power over you.
The bottom line is that you can never fully control your thoughts, nor can you control the irrational worry that others know what’s going on in your brain. What you can control is what you do to give these thoughts and fears power—and there are highly trained professionals out there who can help you do so.