Hi all, I am genuinely curious about everyone’s coping methods when they are trying to go about their daily lives. I am doing a good job at not giving into my compulsions, but the accompanied anxiety and dread caused by the obsession is too much for my normal day-to-day functioning. Any tips, tricks, etc. that you are willing to share?
When you first get these thoughts your brain goes into fight or flight mode causing anxiety and being anxious. It helped telling myself “I’ll come back to this” and let your mind and body calm down, I normally forget about them or if I think about it I’m not not so stressed still. Hope this can help!
I remind myself that the discomfort of doing exposures and sitting with it will be worth it in the long run.
This feeling usually hits me when I’m about to fall asleep. Sometimes, I have to walk around, listen to a podcast or cuddle with my dog. Taking deep breaths help me so much.
I tell it to go F@#$ off and your not going to scare me. And then it kinda stops. It's weird..I know
Thank you all for the ideas. OCD is so tricky. Once I feel like I’m getting better, I fall back into a loop. Need to get better about ridding myself of the compulsions
So after my ocd has become more prominent, it gets harder to fight through these compulsion’s everyday. I don’t go to therapy or take any medications and to be honest I am very lost in my journey on how to navigate life with ocd. I don’t want it to take over my life. I want to be able to feel like I can live without a weight on my chest and to finally feel like I can breathe. Any suggestions or words of advice is more than welcome.
I’m a bit curious, I’ve come up with many ways to handle them, I don’t have therapy, but how do ya’ll deal with them? Is it normal to come up with other compulsions to kinda just tame them? Or to convince yourself they’re not real? I’ve had different ways of handling them, but most times I get obsessed with the way of handling it or the thought that helps me beat the bad/concerning/thoughts to the point it just stops working and I need to find a more effective thought, compulsion or thing.
Hello, I’m in undergrad and recently was diagnosed with OCD. Its a very new diagnosis and it’s both been stressful and relieving to receive it. Looking back at my past I’ve been able to explain a lot of behavioral issues that I thought were simply attributed to me being “crazy”. It’s comforting to know it’s something that others struggle with and that there are set coping mechanisms and treatments for it. There are a number of thing of which I obsessively think about, and it’s been getting really hard to deal with all of them. The most troubling are my thoughts toward suicide. I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s not really any intent, it’s just like my brain has tuned into a frequency that plays in the background at all times. Usually though this leads to more dangerous behaviors, and so I always try to do any preventative work to keep myself safe. As for the asking for advice portion of this post, what do you all do to combat unending loops of thought? Because I’m so new to my diagnosis, my therapist and I haven’t found good strategies for me yet, outside of just labeling those thoughts as OCD in an attempt to delegitimize them.
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