I was recently triggered and now I keep having thoughts again like “what if no one is real or what if you don’t believe anyone is conscious or what if you keep thinking like this” :( any advice?

immediate tips: try and find different stimuli. the more you engage these thoughts, even just by trying to think through them, makes them more powerful. you’re feeding a beast. until you feel more stable, try and find other things to distract yourself, take a breather. i know people always say avoidance is bad, but for now since you’re triggered it isn’t a good idea to try and do erp or anything. i like watching videos while i do something like write, read, or draw. stimulating as many senses and engaging your brain as much as possible helps you to get through the anxiety and will keep your mind distracted from intrusive thoughts. also hugging someone or a pet always helps for me. now here’s some long term advice ⛔️⚠️tw for existentialism, please don’t read this if you’re still triggered or feel vulnerable!! ⚠️⛔️ i’m not a professional, just a loooong time existential and death ocd sufferer and this is my personal advice. — i completely understand this. i tried so many things to try and solve my existential and death ocd. i read books and articles on existentialism, i tried to find peace with religion (and some people do, i just didn’t), i tried to avoid it. none of it worked. it really sucks, but after scrolling on the existentialism reddit looking for answers, the only thing i can say is just that there isn’t a way to fix it or stop these thoughts. the best thing to do for existential ocd is to just accept the unknown. it sucks, it hurts, and it’s hard, but OCD wants us to look for control and solutions where sometimes there just aren’t any. it’s hard for everyone to accept the mysteries of life, but it is so much harder for existential ocd sufferers. even when compared to other forms of ocd, i think existential and death ocd (along with other more intangible forms of ocd) are so tricky because it’s so much harder to resist mental compulsions because we do them subconsciously. if you can’t do erp with someone, then the best thing i can say is to just acknowledge the thought as an intrusive thought, accept it with a simple “yeah that’s a possibility”, and try to move on. there isn’t any point in trying to justify or reason your way out of it, it’ll just throw you into a spiral. ocd is not a rational disorder, and it can’t be treated like it is. trying to find answers/solutions/justifications for these thoughts jjst affirms them, and even if you do find some way to appease them while in an ocd episode, it’ll just come back to bite you with doubt later on. analyzing and over investigating intrusive thoughts IS a compulsion, and compulsions make intrusive thoughts stronger and more scary. look into other peoples views on existentialism and spirituality, but not to find answers. do it to see how many different interpretations there are, and to desensitize yourself to feeling like you need to know the answers. and you might also find useful advice too haha. also, acknowledging that knowing is not the same as accepting. you can know and say your ocd is illogical up and down, but accepting that it is is so much different. once you can get a good handle on “my ocd is making me overthink or think irrationally/illogically” and actually believing it, it is so much easier to allow intrusive thoughts to come and go.

Try accepting it. Tell your brain: Ok, So what? Then your brain will start to ask questions again and once you accept the uncertainty it’ll move on. So what if you don’t believe anyone is conscious? You can’t be 100% sure, because no one is 100% sure, so take a deep breath and tolerate the uncertainty. It’s so hard. It can be torturous but it will get better with time. So many things in life are uncertain. You could die at any minute, but you’re not focusing on that! Your ocd brain just picks topics that it knows will bug you snd latches on, but you can beat it. Maybe no one is real. You can still have a lot of fun being the only real person