Thermally activated magnetic-flux entry into a pickup coil through a flux dam in high Tc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) is studied. The behavior of this thermal activation is analyzed in terms of the circulating current flowing in the pickup coil. It is shown that the thermal activation can be prevented when the circulating current becomes much below a critical current of the flux dam. It is also shown that we need a long waiting time in order to realize this situation since the circulating current logarithmically decays with time in the case of the thermal activation. The relationship between the thermal activation and the circulating current is qualitatively confirmed with the experiment. We also show a method in order to forcibly reduce the circulating current instead of the thermal activation. In this case, we can prevent the thermal activation without the long waiting time.