What’s an exposure I can do for physical symptoms? Part of my OCD/anxiety is getting brain fog, tension in my body that associate bad thoughts of going crazy, never getting peace, never experiencing happiness again.

For physical symptoms, you can recreate them. For many people with anxiety issues, their therapists will have them do things like run on a treadmill (which elevated your heart rate and makes you breathe quickly, similar to having a panic attack) to habituate to the physical sensations of panic. Running, clenching all your muscles, sitting in a small crowded space, etc to recreate those sensations is how you’d do ERP for them. Cause them purposely and then sit with the anxiety without performing compulsions. Do it again and again for a few weeks and see if you notice a difference.

You can do a worry script describing in detail how all of that will affect your life.

But start small! Don’t just sprint to the next crowded public bus and sit in misery as you listen to your heart race. That’s just torturing yourself. Take small steps to push yourself a little more each week. Start with light jogging and maybe some muscle clenching of areas you frequently feel tense. After doing those a week or two, make it harder: run faster, clench more, maybe do both at once. Maybe sit in a crowded coffee shop for 5 min. Etc. The whole crowded bus scenario could be your end goal after weeks of habituation. But take it one step at a time. Habituation takes patience.

@pureo my physical symptoms are brain fog, tension in chest, butterflies and nauseous. Hard to concentrate. My thoughts associated are never going to experience peace, what if I am handicapped and in hospital, very tired with little motivation. I was an D1 athlete and still workout strenuously almost every day so I’m used to that feeling but nothing is more doom and gloom then how I feel

Worrying about becoming handicapped when your an athlete is a pretty understandable fear! And it makes sense that your OCD has latched onto it. It sounds like the physical sensations aren’t really your focus at all then, thats just how panic feels when you’re experiencing worries from your obsessive thoughts. To “stop” the panic, you have to deal with the obsessive thoughts, not just expose yourself to panic for panics sake. Your ERP should be about your main fear (becoming handicapped). Unless your OCD was about panic itself, exposing yourself to the sensations alone wouldn’t really do much. The only way to combat OCD is with uncertainty: maybe you’ll become handicapped some day. But maybe not. You can never be 100% sure of that. Accepting that can be very hard for the OCD brain. So you have to train it slowly. Keep in mind that being uncertain doesn’t mean there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll become handicapped. It just means the chance is greater than zero. For ERP, you’ll probably have to do imaginary exposure. I would write out a few different scripts, maybe 5. In each one, write out a very short story about becoming handicapped. The first should be a mild but still upsetting kind of injury. Something where most of your life would be the same but not all. Have each story get progressively more upsetting. The last story should be your absolute worst case scenario. Start with the 1st script for a week: record yourself or just read it out loud over and over for 5 min each day. Let the anxiety that arises from imagining the scenario come and naturally pass without engaging in compulsions (ie ruminating over all the ways your life would change, trying to analyze a way to make it better or worse, or to suppress/neutralize the thoughts.) after a week, see how you respond: is your anxiety lower? If it’s around a 3 or 4/10, move up to the next story for a week. Repeat until you’re listening to your worst case story every day without doing compulsions and keep doing it until you stop having an anxious response. Some thought restructuring (another part of CBT) might also help. If you were to become handicapped, there is a chance you would be okay and even happy with your life. The inevitable risk isn’t even 100% true to begin with. You may want to buy a CBT workbook to guide you through since there’s obviously a bunch of details I can’t cover here. Good luck!

I meant handicapped with my sensations and emotions the anxiety and OCD thoughts. Not physically lol

You can still do the same. Write out each script with varying degrees of emotional impairment due to your anxiety. I think you may want to speak to a professional. They can walk you through how OCD works, pinpoint your actual fear, and show you what to address.

I been talking to OCD therapist. My 2 are the physical sensations of OCD and HOcd

Great! I’m sure they can help you structure a proper hierarchy for ERP. Your HOCD may be a good trigger for your OCD about the physical sensations of OCD.