- Date posted
- 2y
an advice + a small trick that has been helping me
1. reduce the time you spend on this app, because you could be unknownly stuck in a bubble, by being always surrounded by ocd and ocd and ocd..., however you're not ocd. You are more than just someone with ocd, so try not to let it define you. It's not healthy to be always surrounded by ocd content, because something that could happen is that ocd becomes everything you think about and without realising it you become stuck in a self-loathing bubble of compulsions and distress. Try to poke trough the bubble and do the things that you would normally do if you hadn't ocd, distract yourself. You're not just ocd. Try not to actively seek and surround yourself with ocd content. 2. useful tip: try to delay as long as you can the time in which you enact a compulsion, until you get used to not addressing it at all and just moving on. Try to keep doing the thinga you were doing before you were stopped by ocd, allow yourself to keep having fun even when you're uncomfortable. All these things stop giving power to ocd. Try to stop being so concerned and "immersed" about the type of theme that you are experiencing (all themes are just the same ocd) and try instead to recognize the patterns of how ocd works. The less you care about something the less ocd will bother you with it. Ocd feeds on your attention, that's why it picks a strong theme to make you worry about, so it can grab your attention. Don't feed it, try starve it as long as you can. I used to self harm too as a compulsion but it's been more than a month since I stopped doing it. The less you address the thoughts and the less you give attention to them the more you weaken the power that OCD has over you. I still get triggered and get intrusive thoughts from time to time but now I just ignore it. I feel less like shit and I'm able to shake it off eventually. What I basically did was "delaying" the compulsion (in my case compulsively addressing the themes by posting here or self harming) further and further until it becomes a habit and every day it just becomes a slight annoyance that you know you can overcome, because you already did it once. In some ways it's like maintaining a duolingo streak. Sure, maybe you can relapse from time to time, but everytime it happens try to lenghten the period in which you stop addressing the thoughts or episodes. It's like "faking it until you make it" but instead of faking it is trying your hardest to delay it, until the make it to tomorrow. It's not just sitting through the distress, it's also moving forward while sitting through it. Whenever I get triggered I try to sit through the distress and, even though sometimes I unknownly do a compulsion by trying to rationalise it, I just "forget" it and move on. I let it pass instead of letting it stuck and pile up. For example when I'm high with my friends and I'm having a good time sometimes it happens that I get bad intrusive thoughts but I try to sit through the distress, allow myself to be uncomfortable and just "swallow" it, "neglect it" by not giving attention to it, because you you shouldn't let ocd ruin a good time or dictate who you are based on fleeing thoughts. ocd has no power over us, and our identity is what we want it to be and not what we worry it "could" be. If it makes you uncomfortable it's because it doesn't reflect who you are, just try to keep that in mind. So delay and delay.