What are your coping strategies to get through ERP in a positive way?

I always tell myself that the risk of the bad thing happening is worth it if I can overcome my mental illness. For me it was (and still is) compulsions and ruminations around covid 19 and suffering to death on a ventilator. I had to do a lot of work to choose which hard I was going to tackle and in the end I managed to come up with the ERP mantra that if I died because I didnt do a compulsion, it was okay because it was in an effort to stabilize my mental health. I really got to a point where I had to decide that the life I was living in fear, was not a life at all and that compulsions were fuelling all the horrible things in my life.

The kind of ironic thing about erp is that it is meant to teach us how to not use coping mechanisms .... in a way, the response prevention part of an exposure IS the new coping mechanism we are trying to adopt, if that makes sense. The more we try to make erp more comfortable, the further we get away from the whole point of it in the first place. That aside, my therapist always suggests reducing the external stressors in our daily life that make us more vulnerable to the ocd. If we are well rested, well fed, watered, etc. We are more likely to feel confident enough to do erp in the first place which makes a world of difference in feeling like we can handle it

I do a breathing meditation before and after