Key points

• Paranoia is an unfounded sense of threat or mistrust in relation to other people e.g. people are talking or laughing about me behind my back, I’m being watched.
• If you’re experiencing paranoia, you’re not alone: about 1 in 5 people experience some form of paranoia.
• Paranoia is about how we interpret what happens to us.
• One way of responding to paranoid thoughts is to weigh up the evidence for and against them. In can help to speak with someone you trust to help you do this, because it can be hard to be objective when we’re feeling threatened.
• Making sure you take time do the things you enjoy, relax, eat well, exercise and sleep enough, as feeling stressed, anxious or low can increase paranoid thoughts.

What is paranoia?

Paranoia is a sense of threat or mistrust in relation to other people. It’s the unfounded fear that other people may intend to cause something bad to happen. These fears are usually made up of certain elements:

• a perpetrator (e.g. a particular known or unknown individual, an organisation),
• a type of threat (e.g. physical, psychological, social, or financial harm), and
• a reason (e.g. because of who we are, because we’ve done something, or there’s just a sense of being a victim).

Here are some common paranoid thoughts:

• People are talking or laughing about me behind my back.
• I am being watched on or offline.
• I’m at risk of being physically harmed or people are trying to steal from me.
• People are using hints or double meanings to secretly make me feel bad or to threaten me.
• Others are trying to interfere with or control my thoughts or actions.

Paranoia can vary from mild to severe, and it quite common in the general population: around 15 to 20% of people have frequent paranoid thoughts. Most of those people aren’t much troubled by their suspicious thoughts, but 3-5 % have pretty severe paranoia.

What causes paranoia?

• Stress and major life changes e.g. relationship difficulties, problems at home or college or work, becoming socially isolated.
• Anxiety & depression: how we feel influences how threatened we think we are.
• Unusual internal feelings (e.g. feeling odd, aroused, threatened) due to stress, lack of sleep or drugs.
• How we seek to understand what happens to us: it’s natural to try and understand what’s happening but when we’re stressed or low we can tend to think the worst of other people, so that we can start to blame them for causing the unusual or unpleasant experiences we’re having.
• Jumping to conclusions because we can’t think of alternative explanations for the things that happen or don’t fully think about the evidence for and against our worries.

So, when we are stressed and things are perhaps not going too well, we can become anxious and interpret how we feel in terms of threat from other people, without fully weighing the evidence or considering alternative explanations.

Take a look at how paranoia might lead to safety behaviours, isolation, worry and sadness, and stigma by visiting the charity Mind’s website: Effects of paranoia – Mind.

What helps with paranoia?

Some of the things that may help you in overcoming paranoia are:

• Look after yourself so that you’re less likely to be stressed, by sleeping and eating well, taking regular exercise, and making time to do the things you enjoy, such as seeing friends and/or family and doing your hobbies. If alcohol or drugs might be a factor in your paranoia, try to cut back or stop. The charity Mind provides information on mindfulness, managing stress, and relaxation techniques, which may also help.
• Weigh up the evidence for and against your suspicions. The more you feel that others don’t share your worries and your worries persist despite reassurance from others, that there’s evidence against your worries and there are no indisputable facts in support of your worries, that it’s unlikely you’d be singled out, and that your worries are based on feelings and ambiguous events, the more likely it is that your worries are unfounded. So, you can ask yourself:
  • Would other people think my suspicions are realistic?
  • What would I say to a friend if they came to me with a similar problem?
  • Is it possible that I have exaggerated the threat?
  • Is there any indisputable evidence for my suspicions?
  • Are my worries based on ambiguous events or feelings rather than indisputable evidence?
  • Are there alternative explanations?
  • How likely is it that I would be singled out above anyone else?
  • Is there any evidence against my suspicions?
  • Do my suspicions persist despite reassurance from others that they are unfounded?
• Test out your thoughts: paranoia can make you feel so afraid that you avoid the situations that trigger these fears, but this means you don’t get to find out whether what you fear will really happen. Testing out your paranoid thoughts means actively seeking out the situations you’re afraid of, which is pretty scary, so you need to go one step at a time. Make a list of tasks you find difficult and start by doing the easier ones, then work your way up to the more difficult ones. This doesn’t mean putting yourself at unnecessary risk e.g. going out alone in a dangerous neighbourhood at night – focus on activities that other people don’t share your fears about or where you think your suspicions might be exaggerated (see the pro and cons suggestion above).
• We may not be able to completely stop suspicious thoughts, but you can find better ways of responding to them: by not focusing on or fighting them. See if you can get a sense of distance from the thoughts – it might help to say to yourself “they’re only thoughts, not facts.” Like a cloud in the sky or a leaf on a stream, can you allow your suspicious thoughts drift past you without letting yourself get hooked on them?
• Telling someone you trust about your fears can help put them in perspective and make them less upsetting.
• You could try keeping a diary of your paranoid thoughts to see when they tend to occur, what they tend to be about and what might trigger them. Writing them down can help create some distance between yourself and your paranoid thoughts. It can also give you a way to identify situations that are likely to be tricky so that you can plan what to do about them, perhaps after talking about it with someone you trust.
• Try to save up all your worries for a half-hour ‘worry period’ once a day. If worries occur outside this period, you can write them down and then postpone reflecting on them until the dedicated ‘worry period’. Try to come up with solutions to your worries, or let them go. If it feels impossible to do a worry period at the moment, you can build up to it by having ‘worry-free periods’ (e.g. starting with half an hour) during which you might acknowledge the worry by writing it down but not letting yourself get caught up in it. It might help to do something that you enjoy that ‘takes your mind off’ your worries for that period of time.

Here are some personal tips from individuals experiencing paranoia about what helps them.

Resources:

Daniel Freeman is a researcher specialising in understanding and overcoming paranoia. His new book on this is out in February 2024. Here’s an extract of the book from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/20/are-your-friends-talking-about-you-the-truth-about-paranoia-and-why-its-higher-than-ever

A lot of the info on this page is taken from https://www.paranoidthoughts.com/about-this-site/ – go directly to that website to learn more.

Some of the material on this page is taken from Mind – you can find out more info here: What is paranoia? – Mind