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The past month or so I have been in and out of OCD spirals. I’ll have a couple days of spiraling and then a couple days of being better. Then a couple days spiraling and then a couple days doing better. Today is one of those days where I can feel the anxiety under the surface and where I am monitoring it to see/keep it in check. Yesterday I was good, I had good dialogue in my mind, I was content with making mistakes in the past, but being a better human and person these days going forward. I can feel the ebb and flow of it today where the anxiety spikes, my internal dialogue say “am I going to freak out”, “confess this”, “say that”, “don’t say that”, “I’m a bad person”, “I’m a good person that is learning and growing every day” etc etc. Then the anxiety comes down, my mind feels clearer, less noisy and less physical feeling, and I feel like I don’t care about the OCD and me as much. Just been feeling the ebbs and flows of OCD over the course of months and days, and even within the day itself.

Ruminating is such a sneaky compulsion. It feels like the only “reasonable” thing to do in the moment because your brain is screaming at you that something is urgent, important, and absolutely essential. It’s like your mind is sounding sirens, telling you that you have to think it through right now because everything looks so black and white in the moment. The trap is, if I don’t ruminate, it feels like I’m just ignoring reality and living in some magical fantasy world. But the truth is, even when things feel the most logical and crystal clear to me with OCD, they are almost always totally irrational to everyone else. Someone said something on here that stuck with me: “nobody ever ruminated their way to certainty.” And that’s it. Rumination is just an attempt to feel certain, but with OCD there is no such thing as enough certainty. The more you chase it, the longer you stay stuck. The work, as uncomfortable as it is, is learning to sit in the uncertainty and stop feeding the cycle…even when everything in you is screaming to figure it out. That’s the way forward.

Been doing ERP for a while now, and overall my OCD is leaps and bounds better than it used to be. I'm not in a crippling panic state anymore thank God. However, at this point I am just trying to figure out how other people with OCD manage their rumination and mentally replaying things in their head? A lot of times I don't even realize that I'm doing it, I will just be doing an activity such as yardwork and while I'm doing it, I will be mildly ruminating about a topic and just find it hard to avoid doing so. My therapist suggested setting a timer every so often to see where my mind is currently at and trying to redirect to something more appropriate (or do ERP exercises). Sometimes it just feels so noisy even though I'm not directly paying attention to it and it ends up being very distracting and affects my productivity. Overall, it's much better, honestly thought it was gone entirely, but OCD is attempting to relapse a little bit I've noticed. Thank you for your experiences and I hope you all have a safe Labor Day weekend!