Guys i was fine for a second, and then i wanted to rewatch one of the Chinese dramas and i started constantly looking at how long the episode is left without watching it peacefully . how do i stop this???? at work also i started getting anxiety of doing stuff wrong and getting fired.
We can practice some exposures with those compulsions. First, try to establish a limited time of watching the series without looking how many minutes are left (10 min. for example), and as it progresses, you increase that limited time (15, 20 min, etc.). Do not attempt to achieve at once, start with baby steps. With work, you can do purposefully wrong a task without telling others that it is an exposure, that way you sit with the distress of failure and uncertainty, which will decrease when the obsession reappears in the future.
Hi Aisha! Sorry to hear you're feeling some distress. First of all, kudos to you for watching a show you enjoy! But, what we don't want to happen is that you start to enjoy fun things less or that you avoid them all together. So, in these situations, I would just put off my compulsion. For example, if I thought I had a typo in an email. I would obsess about that typo and fear looking unintelligent. My compulsion would be to check my email over and over to make sure there were no typos. Instead of giving into my compulsion, I would tell myself "check in five minutes." Then, when five minutes passed, I would say "okay, check in another five minutes." I would do this until the urge to check went away. That allowed me to sit with the anxiety of making a typo and potentially looking silly without giving into OCD by doing any compulsive checking. So maybe applying that method can help while you watch you tv. Then regarding your anxiety about your job, it always helped me to apply the "maybe, maybe not" technique to those thoughts. "Maybe I'll get fired, may I won't." Maybe, I'll lose my job and my only way of supporting myself, maybe not. Who knows?" We don't get to have any certainty and I won't even know if I'll show up to work tomorrow and be fired. And no one knows this. Maybe I'll get an email in the next five minutes saying I'm fired! I don't know! Sometimes, humor helped me too! Using humor to respond to my thoughts made the thoughts less scary because it's hard to laugh and be anxious at the same time. So, I would tell myself "Oh yes!! I hope I get fired. I can't wait to have no money." Humor doesn't work for everyone but it helped me a great deal. If you're currently working with a NOCD therapist, you can ask them how you can find creative ways to respond to thoughts. In the meantime, here is an article that suggests ways for responding to thoughts. This was an article my NOCD therapist sent me when I first starting working with her and it's by Jon Hershfield, a leader in the OCD community! I hope this was helpful to you. You got this!!! :) Link: https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/how-to-respond-to-unwanted-obsessive-thoughts/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20one%20right,if%20you%20wish%20to%20entertain.
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