How can I self-soothe when my OCD symptoms are overwhelming?

You can’t. Literally the only answer is to sit with it. You have to be uncomfortable. You have to allow yourself to be uncomfortable. It’s how your Brain heals from this. You’re gna have bad days where it’s loud and you question everything but all you can do is let it be and not argue with it until it passes. It sucks 1000 percent, but it’s the only Sure way to get through it.

The best advice I’ve ever gotten for getting through it is when you have a bad day is to tell yourself “ ok it’s practice time” and sit with it.

Yes I do! 🫶 Check out my most recent post, that has a good self soothing technique on it. Here are some others: - tell yourself you’re going to sit and set a timer for one minute and just breathe. Focus on the sounds around you, the feeling of you sitting on the ground, your breath, as best you can. - Keep a feelings journal. In order to avoid reassurance, focus on the feelings you had that day - and validating those rather than telling yourself whether your fears are true or not. Here’s something good to say to yourself: “I can’t tell you whether or not your fears are true.. but I am always here for you. I know how hard today has been for you, and I love you” - Understanding and having compassion for our intrusive thoughts. If you can trace it back to the source - for example, with my HOCD my real fear was that I’d never find love. So I decided to direct love to that part of myself - that was so afraid she’d never find love that she spent endless hours questioning her sexuality to try and figure it out. So when I’d get an intrusive thought about that, instead of freaking out - I’d say “I can’t tell you if that’s true or not. But I know that you are deserving of love and will find it one day”. Validating the feelings, but not reassuring against the fears - is the key. (This can be tricky to avoid reassurance - I wasn’t getting OCD thoughts about never finding love so I knew this was okay. But be careful here.) or you can say “I understand. It’s hard to not know whether this is true or not.” - other things: take care of your physical health needs. Doing that gives you something else to focus on, other than the thoughts. This is a good way of practicing self compassion. Especially when dealing with really rough intrusive thoughts - sometimes we may feel disgusted by ourselves or even nauseous. But here it’s even more important to be kind to ourselves - because we’re dealing with heightened OCD. Hope these help. ❤️

Yes it’s important to just let it be until it passes on its own, but I’d also say that it’s totally ok to take extra care of yourself on the harder days. Whatever brings you joy and peace and is fun, don’t be afraid to do those things. You just want to be careful that self-soothing doesn’t turn into a compulsion, otherwise I think it’s ok to do things that you enjoy to help healthfully re-direct your attention from OCD. Don’t stop living your life because of ocd.