- Date posted
- 1y ago
Suffering
All my days are pretty much consumed by real events I obsess with. I don’t know how to stop. I don’t want to lose my life, but I’m also tired of living like this.
All my days are pretty much consumed by real events I obsess with. I don’t know how to stop. I don’t want to lose my life, but I’m also tired of living like this.
my heart hurts for you. the best thing is to find ways to keep yourself present, breathing exercises really helped me. set a timer and box breathe, think in and out as you inhale and exhale. when thoughts pop up, label them "thinking" and try to focus on your breathing again. guided meditations have taught me a lot of simple ways to break rumination
@Grenoble hand on hobbies help too. gardening, arts and crafts, even just giving a little extra attention to pets. it's never easy, but the thoughts get a lot more manageable with time
@Grenoble I ruminate so much I can’t tell the difference between what’s an accurate memory and what’s not.
@Anonymous what helped me most is finding ways to focus on the present instead of trying to figure out real and false memories. memories are so unreliable, it's an impossible task. find ways to sit with the uncertainty and eventually it won't be so painful
This is a hard position to be in. I was in a similar boat and I can say that the only way forward is through. What I mean by this is you are going to have to put in hard, consistent work to get to the point where OCD strengthens you instead of weakens you. Stick with your therapy, keep looking for solutions, and TALK MORE. If you want a place where you can collaborate with others and continue these conversations you should consider joining my community. https://www.skool.com/the-ocd-advantage-7537/about
@Anonymous My memories are just so distorted I can’t tell what’s true.
@Anonymous - I understand that feeling. I really think the way to unscramble an internal mess is to make it external, from there you can handle it more tangibly. Aka, communicate every ounce of your thoughts and feelings. I am here for you.
I’ve been feeling so disconnected lately, like I’m not even living my own life. It’s like I’m being controlled by someone else, and I have no say in what’s happening. It’s hard to put this feeling into words, but it’s like I’m here physically, but mentally, I’m just... not. Every day feels like a struggle. I wake up afraid of what’s coming next, almost like I’m bracing myself for the next bad thing to happen. Sometimes, I don’t even want to get out of bed because it feels pointless, like I’m stuck in this loop of fear and doubt. I keep questioning everything, life, my purpose, my choices, and it’s exhausting. I just want to feel like myself again, to feel like I have control, like I’m really here.
My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.
It started when I became an adult, and started receiving my mental health diagnosis. I hyper fixated on each and every action I did and how it could be related to my diagnosis’s. It then lead to fixation to my physical health — making appointments and seeing every specialist I can to rule out every possibility. I currently have been suffering with obstructive sleep. I woke up the past few days with severe pain from the lack of sleep whilst believing I was oversleeping. Luckily my fit watch tracks my sleep cycle and it turns out I am not receiving any sleep. I had an extreme panic attack — bursting into tears on the phone with my mom wondering what this case might be. She told me it could be sleep apnea and that a simple sleep study could figure this out. However, knowing my family history I made appointments to every specialist I can to make sure it is nothing serious. The unknown of health can be scary to me. Watching my mother suffer with her physical health chronically since I was a child lead me to be very conscious and aware of how my body is functioning. This morning was one of the worst moments of physical pain. I should just take one step at a time with the sleep doctor instead of taking measures to see every specialist that could pertain with this issue. However, that is very hard to me. I don’t want to ever wake up in the pain I was this morning. Does anyone else suffer with health-related OCD? And if so, how do you find a sense of ease during moments like I expressed?
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