How to deal with intrusive thoughts?

Don’t identify with thought. You are not your thoughts.

There are many tools of the mind. One of the most general and applicable is not identifying with thought. Instead, identify as the witness that is aware of your thoughts. In the same way you don’t identify with your clothes or the belongings you have picked up over your life. Here is Sadghuru discussing this in his book, Inner Engineering:

If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind.

The system of yoga is a technology to create a distinction between you and your mind. There is a space between you and what you have gathered in terms of body and mind. Becoming conscious of this space is your first and only step to freedom. It is the accumulated physiological and psychological content that causes the cyclical patterns in your life and even beyond. If you can be constantly conscious of this space between you and the body-mind, you have opened up a dimension of limitless possibility.

Human beings have invented millions of ways to suffer. For all this the manufacturing unit is just in your mind. Once you are no longer identified with your mind, you are free to experience life beyond limitations. Being a Buddha means that you have become a witness to your own intellect.
The essence of yoga is just this — to arrive at that moment where there is a clear space between you and your mind. Once this happens, a life of heightened clarity, perception, and freedom has begun. This is the birth of freedom.

Important to remember that this is only one tool. Sometimes, the correct reaction is to think and analyze why you are thinking a certain way and learn the lesson they are trying to teach. However, that bears the risk of overthinking — whereas witnessing for me is always a good practice.

Personally, I enjoy not identifying with my intrusive thoughts because that allows me to be kind to myself. Instead of harshly condemning why I am again thinking this or that — I can smile at how crazy the mind can be. In that smiling, there is relaxation of body and mind — and the intrusive thought loses some of its power over me and it often passes. As everything does.

Thanks for reading.