Things that seem to make my OCD worse: Have a look at this list and see if these affect you. If they do, you can start to make positive changes! ~ Sitting around ruminating. I have the worst cold at the moment and all I’m doing is sitting around pondering my existence. Not helpful! ~ Spending a lot of time on technology. Makes me feel foggy. ~ Not drinking enough water. ~ Skipping ERP. If I don’t keep up my ERP every day or am lazy with it, I start to relapse. ~ Being insular. Sitting around, inside my own head, not focusing on the world around me makes things a million times worse. ~ Being inside all the time. I have vitamin D deficiency anyway, so this is definitely not helping. ~ Going a few days without vitamin B-12. Makes my brain sticky, I get fixated on things easier. ~ Researching OCD/Anxiety/DP/mental health. This is the big one. No matter how positive your research seems, at some point you’re going to find something that sets you off. It only takes one misinformed person on a sketchy forum telling you there’s no hope, and then all of a sudden you’re in a spiral of anxiety. ~ Talking about my OCD all the damn time. No matter how much everyone in your life loves you, they will grow tired if you only talk about your mental health. ? But more importantly, what are you doing when you talk about it? Generating fear, and making it a central focus of your life. We need to be lowering the importance of our OCD and becoming less afraid of our obsessions, not fixating on it and making it a focal point of our lives. ~ Not doing anything productive. Again, focus on things other than you and your obsessions. When you’re not actively doing ERP/CBT, you should be doing other things and taking your anxiety with you. Acceptance means learning to live with the uncertainty of these obsessions, and LEAVING THEM ALONE. This is where I messed up for so long. I read up tirelessly on acceptance, trying to understand what it meant. To me, it means learning to leave these big questions unanswered, and moving on to other things, and that didn’t come from research. That came from me. ~ Fixating on recovery. Yes, be determined to recover. Absolutely. But don’t be going “no no. I can’t do this until I recover. I can’t go here till I feel better.” Recovery comes when you start focusing on the rest of your life and stop attaching importance to your thoughts, as well as through habituation/medication/CBT. Ultimately, recovery comes when you accept the uncertainty and move on. It doesn’t come from staying still.