I ruminated too much this morning and got distressing mental images (and confirmation) which sent me spiraling again. How do I stop thinking about this and how do I get back to myself? I feel destroyed.
Here is the best advice I can give. Go do something. Go for a walk. Watch a movie. Read a book. Play a game. Run an errand. Clean something. Literally anything. Your mind will make up 100 reasons to not do those things, but ignore them. Tell it you can think about that stuff later (that's a lie, but it might help to trick your mind) and then go do something. Don't try and fight the thoughts. Don't analyze them. Don't do anything about them. They are there. They are just thoughts. Let them be there. They'll go away eventually. But you've got things to do. Go do them. Do not stay still. Do not research or post or scroll or think about it. Right now, you should act.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had to navigate this at the start of your day. I wish I could say I also had the answer to help stop the thoughts and make sure they never come back. But unfortunately I don’t. What I will say is that you will have to get to a place where the discomfort no longer overwhelms and that’s incredibly difficult because it takes time. You have to learn to sit with the discomfort and be okay with the uncertainty. If you’re not already in the process of connecting with a therapist about ERP, then I highly highly recommend it. There will be days ahead where it’s harder than others and there will be days where the distressing images will be fleeting thoughts. A prevention rip I’ve learned alongside my NOCD therapist is “Discomfort is not danger.” It get better,it truly does
I don’t know either. It feels like all I do all day is ruminate, and I have no idea how to stop because I’ve been doing it my whole life.
I should,,,,it’s hard. I’ve torn my thoughts apart and it feels like I’ve torn myself apart
This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.
Two things are happening: I get thoughts that just keep looping. They almost feel like song stuck in my head. Also, I’ll imagine something and I feel my stomach drop. Then as the seconds go by I keep getting fragments of the this thought but with different details. For example, it’s kinda like how a “vision” is portrayed. I’ll get a glimpse of the thought and then it’ll rapidly expand into something worse every few seconds. I don’t know if I’m causing this or if it’s just an automatic thing like any other intrusive thought. It feels unavoidable, idk if this is a compulsion or if it’s just another manifestation of an intrusive thought. Apart from that remembering an intrusive thought triggers the full thought again and then it just keeps looping or expanding. I don’t know how to stop any of this. Help?
So hard to not engage the thoughts because even though it's from the "past" (i don't even know if im remembering things correctly and it kills me) and i can't change it, I just NEED to prove it to myself that it didn't happen this way. If you'd asked me questions maybe a few months ago, I would have been able to lucidly explain things. Now I just feel like I'm in a constant swarm of thoughts, not knowing if anything is real. If my brain is to be trusted. Wish I could just get hypnosis to forget
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