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How do you guys make your mornings less hard? The ocd and anxiety is so terrible in the mornings… how do i make my mornings better so it will make a better start of your day

Hi - I’m a Mom of 3 with Harm OCD. I’ve had OCD for a long time since I was a teen, prior to kids. It’s been harm/sexual orientation, etc. pretty much every theme at some point. My harm OCD got set off so badly by the Lindsay Clancy case back in January. It seemed to settle down for awhile and now is so bad again. I question if it’s even OCD at this point or if I’m actually an awful person wanting to do these things. I’m really struggling. The thoughts feel like urges and it’s all day long. I think of the case everyday wondering and trying to figure out if it was OCD that she had that turned into her losing control and feel sick to my stomach then panic that will be me. Any other Mom’s out there dealing with similar issues? Thank you.🤍

I would like your guy’s opinion. I’m a practicing Catholic as well as a gay woman. The Church teaching is that attraction is not sinful but acting on it is. I’m trying to live in chastity. Single, alone, no girlfriend. It’s killing me to be quite honest. I like everything about the Catholic Church; except the view on homosexuality. I don’t want to be any other type of Christian. I’m afraid if I practice homosexuality then I’ll go to Hell. Im afraid if I don’t then I’ll be miserable and mentally unwell. I’m afraid the teaching is wrong and harmful. I’m afraid I’m missing out on love. I feel trapped and confused. Any advice?

I feel like OCD ruins so much. My boyfriend broke up with me because of it. It got to a point where I made him do compulsions (ex: open and close the door a certain amount of times). I have OCD in combination with PTSD so I would get triggers often. He got to a point where he got up and left me while I was at work and cut contact completely. I don’t know how to feel and I feel like a failure. It’s been two months and my OCD has been nonstop telling me I was an abuser or narcissistic and that’s why he left. Everyone tells me I’m a broken record… but they don’t know that this is torture for me, too. I wish I could start over with my ex, but I can’t, and that bothers my OCD, too. Lack of control. I also seem to have memory issues in that relationship, I can’t remember what happened or not, and I’m not sure if that’s part of my OCD.

This is my first post on here. My ocd started in 2020 and it mainly revolved around Covid and contamination from that. It has now evolved from that into other aspects of life. It has flipped my world upside down since it’s started. I now struggle with intense anxiety about anything poop/bathroom related. I wipe excessively worried about leaving something behind, I plan my showers around going to the bathroom, I can’t have sex if I haven’t showered that day, I plan my days around going poop. I always worry there is something on me and it can consume my thoughts. Also all poop bothers me dog poop, bird poop ect. I don’t even like petting dogs anymore because of it. This ocd issue causes me to take forever to go to the bathroom because I excessively check. Idk if anyone can relate to this but I am struggling. I miss the old me and wish she could come back

I’m not entirely sure this is OCD. This seems to be a very solid and progressive app, so I will explain anyway. Maybe I have people here who can relate. I’ve recently had a severe allergic reaction, and to what, I can only assume is tree nuts. I ate pesto, which I’ve had fine before, and had throat-tightening anaphylaxis. I have never been too careful, but I’ve always known to stay away from peanuts/tree nuts due to prior experiences. When it happened, I was sure I was going to die, and I laid there for a second with so much fear, pumped with the EpiPen (and what a scary feeling that gives you!) and sensational trauma. Since, I have been having panic attacks after every single meal. I can barely eat, and all I think about is the contamination of foods, their sourcing/preparation, how much time I have to save myself, etc. An allergy test would save a lot of this worry, but I am about to go to college and can’t book an appointment beforehand. Even when it’s not, my throat feels like it’s closing during every bite, and afterwards, I have to distract myself so I don’t break down. I cannot live like this everyday with every meal, my overthinking is insatiable and makes every experience with food miserable. I hope I don’t sound crazy. Tips are much appreciated

My therapist has made comments abt thinking I have OCD but I’ve never been officially diagnosed with it but it seems fitting based on what I’ve read. I also fall into the category of seeming to have bipolar disorder or bpd, adhd, and so on. It is so hard to manage my issues if I don’t know what is really going on & the professionals don’t either. One day I am bipolar then suddenly they don’t think that. It’s just a never ending battle. Life is. Things go well for a day then suddenly the next week is hell. I feel like I seem dramatic and I fear talking about my feelings or emotions because I have this fear of seeming annoying or dramatic. I have this fear that I am not making any sense & I just don’t know how to help myself. I am overall struggling right now. My financial situation is a joke as long with my home situation. My home situation “could be solved” with my own place but who the hell can afford that? My “love life” that’s a whole other thing. I started hooking up with my best friend & it’s been abt a year now & we’ve had the conversation of how we shouldn’t be hooking up bc we don’t want to hurt each other. After the first conversation we made it a month before breaking it. Then this past time it was a week later when we were as showing all these other signals. Is it that we don’t want to ruin the friendship or that we are emotionally unavailable? we we lived together for a year & didn’t stick to that boundary and still cannot stick to it now that he’s moved out we had that conversation again just for him to come over & us continue doing what we “shouldn’t”… it’s so hard when your childhood trauma consumes you completely, preventing you from happiness. “Everything takes time” I get that but I want to be happy now, you never know how much time you have… The thought of someone loving me is just so unreal to me since I’ve been hurt so much in the past. I understand we say we shouldn’t risk our friendship but we’ve been doing it for a year straight & when we are apart things seem off for both of us. It almost seems like we are lost without each other, I know me for sure. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend a year living with someone. I just wish he knew how special he is and worthy. It’s not fair that his family broke him growing up or that my family broke me, we still deserve happiness.

How can you differ that you have ROCD or your actually losing feelings. I have like every symptom of ROCD but I feel like maybe my OCD is bullshit and I’m not meant to be with that person. Or is that something someone with ROCD would say…? ^^^

So the other day I was left home alone for a few days with my mum which hasn’t happened before but my sister went away for a few days and it was the worst I suddenly started having these horrible thoughts and it felt like for some reason I wanted to think of them and it was really horrible and it felt like I was actually about to act on it and my ocd gives me weird feelings/sensations that make me feel like I would like the feeling of doing that horrible thing or it would ‘feel good’ to do that horrible thing and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since now I’ve been miserable for days because now I’m thinking it almost happened and I keep thinking now the only reason it’s not happened is because I’m not alone with someone and I got this scary thing that felt like I wasn’t anxious over the tnohjts and would ‘do it anyways for no reason’ and it’s really scary and feels like I didn’t want or not want to do it and that it could happen. I’m unable to be happy now because it keeps coming back to my mind and even yesterday my head gave me that same feeling of ‘imagine you done it anyways right now’ and that accompanied with that feeling that feels like ‘I like the feeling of doing that horrible thing and I know how it feels to do that’ makes it worse and feel like I’m just ‘choosing’ not to do it 😞 now I’m literally believing that I’m capable and would do that and it’s horrible i don’t know what to do

So I don't have this issue any more but wanted to share my experience as I've come through the other side with this. When I was between 14 and 16 years old I had voices in my head. They would tell me to do the worst stuff you could possibly think of. They were usually louder when I was alone, trying to sleep or with the light off. I had a counselling and art therapy to help and they did nothing but get me mornings off of school. I had one main voice that I can compare to a villain in a Disney like film or jack ripper if I were to be extreme about it, then there was this weasely voice that I felt was a hype man for the other, whispering stuff in its ear or cheering it on. I never gave in once to their demands and every night for 2 years my mind was like a war zone. 4 hours sleep at most a night. I'd usually sleep at school because the noise drowned them out. Now I knew that these voices were my thoughts but I felt as if I couldn't control them. Felt as if I had been reincarnated at some times from a very evil person and they were trying to reclaim my life as theirs. One day at school I opened up to a friend about them and he directed me to another friend of ours, he wasn't a close one but he was nice. He told me to imagine a door and picture these voices on one side, and on the other side imagine the most powerful thing you can think of. It could be an army, god, nukes, anything. Once I had this pictured in my head he said open the door. Now, I didn't think much of it at that point but I didn't hear the voices that night, or any night after. They were just gone. I still don't fully understand it but a mental exercise from a 15yr old did better than the therapists I had for 2 years. I was free from them finally. But my fascination with the outcome turned into an obsession with mental health so 🤷‍♂️and I researched the hell out of how the mind works because to me it was magic and wanted to kind of debunk it and see if I could help others. A few months later I felt alone and asked for the voices to come back. They didn't. I pretended they did, but they didn't. Apparently voices are quite common and a few of my friends had them and I didn't know about it. I knew my first girlfriend did and that's kind of how we bonded. As amazing as she was I do not recommend forming a relationship on how unstable you both feel 🤣🤣 I was a kid and did kid things. Lesson learned. I also had a friend who tried burning down the school because his voices told him to. Wasn't successful but the drama class was a bit smokey for a while. I also recommend that you don't do what he did either. Fast forward 17 years and I get voices again. This time it sounds different and it's only one. I threatened this one by saying I got rid of voices before and can do it again. It went away for a few days and came back. I did get rid of them again but this time the solution was different. The voice had an emotion behind it and I felt I had to read into that emotion rather than the words used. I asked myself why I would feel that way/ that emotion and solved the issue. The voice is now gone within 2 weeks of it starting. Turns out I was in love with my friend and didn't want to accept it as if I were to get into a relationship with her at the time I'd only push her away as I didn't know how to get better then and felt my compulsions would push her away. That scared the hell out of me and my ocd was acting like some firewall trying to protect me from that "threat". To summarise : My first set of voices were triggered by me not feeling good enough and guilty for something quite innocent when I was much younger. Visualisation exercises got rid of the first. Arguing with them and having a screaming match in my head every night didn't work. The recent one was because of my fear of losing my best friend. I read into the emotion behind the voice rather than the actual things it was saying. I hope this helps someone as I don't see a lot on here about it.

I don’t really know how to start this, but I suffer from social anxiety, I have a very hard time connecting with other human beings, so I deal with my anxiety in different way, one, is the way everything needs to be perfectly put, perfectly placed, so that I know I’m feeling okay, but my second one is more difficult to explain, and I’m very ashamed to talk about this. But my lack of emotional connections to others led me to pour my emotions into fictional things, especially fictional characters, I grew to get emotionally attached to some like I would be attached to a normal person, and with that comes happiness, but also pain. And that’s what causing me great distress, the emotional attachment that can lead to pain, and this is something I have a very hard time dealing with, because this is obsessive, and I don’t know how to turn it off, I don’t know how to stop thinking about it, I don’t know how to deal with the pain, and sometimes, the pain is so extreme that I can’t deal with it quickly, so I use self-harm, I cut myself, and the pain just goes away, and I feel better. So today I’m stuck in that situation again. A fictional thing that I am attached to just caused me pain and distress, and it’s so extreme that I am tempted to cut myself again so that the pain goes away quicker and I can move on. So that’s why I’m here, to talk about my situation, and to get help.

Im 14 years old and from Texas , I’ve been struggling with extremely bad intrusive thoughts/feelings/urges since I was a child. It started off as having thoughts of hurting my little sister, and then those thoughts started turning into “urges”. And the urges are what really made me suffer. I would cry to my mom everyday because I thought I was a psycho. My mom is Christian so we would pray together, at one point the hocd went away. Now everything after is a blur, but after hocd I remember in 4-5th grade I struggled with soocd, also called hocd. I had thoughts of girls and whenever I saw a woman I’d get feelings I didn’t want, I always thought I was in denial , but I think it was ocd. But at one point I accepted that I’m gay, because I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with me being gay and there isn’t still, but by accepting it, the ocd had nothing to bother me with. But now that in struggling with very bad sexual thoughts, they seem so real. Getting near a family member or pet makes me feel weird. I get weird thoughts and weird indescribable feelings that end up making me ruminate for the rest of the day because of how scared I am of them being real. I had panic attacks because there were children around me at a restaurant. Every single thing I do/feel around anyone or anything, every movement I make with my body that I don’t do on purpose, my mind starts saying “you did that on purpose” “you wanted your dad to see you like that” . It’s so tiring. I’m 14, I’m scared. It feels so real and it’s like my head is always making me feel uncomfortable and weird. I get feelings that I don’t want but then it feels like I do so I start ruminating about why it felt real. I try telling my parents I think I might have some sort of disorder, but they don’t listen. At first my mom was helping, but she shrugs it off and says that I just need to live with it like she did. I told her maybe mine is worse and she just scoffed at me. I love my mom but when it comes to mental disorders, I don’t think she listens to me. But she does try to help sometimes. And I’m thankful that she doesn’t completely ignore me. I just don’t know what to do, when I try talking to her about it , it’s like my brain freezes. And my hearts pumping out of my chest. There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not worrying about something and anxious. I just need help. And i don’t know how.

Hello! I’m struggling with my ROCD right now so I’m listening to worship music and praying and I just wanted to offer to pray for anyone who needs it right now so feel free to drop your prayer requests in the comments and I will pray for you tonight or tomorrow and will like your comment once I’ve finished praying for you so you know that I did. 💓 sending love to you all, stay strong

I feel like my compulsions are taking over my life. Every freaking night i spend so much of my time doing and redoing all my actions from walking up the stairs to crossing a certain part of my room to getting it o to bed. i close my bedroom door like 9 times until it “feels right” and have to sing songs and focus on bones in my body just so that i don’t have a negative thought so that i don’t have to do it again. I’m so over it. i feel like i waste so much time stressing myself out about my thoughts and not having the thoughts so i do things to combat and distract from the thoughts and i just feel freaking insane. yes my medication is helping and makes be wayyyy better than i was three years ago but it still feel like it’s taking over my life. i cant stand it and i feel like the more i do it the more i’m getting g comfortable with other people seeing me do it which just means i’ll do it more. i just can’t !!! so many thoughts and so many actions and it’s all based on people i love so i feel guilty if i dont do the compulsion. And even when i realize that this is all ridiculous and that’s it’s apart of my OCD, i just get sad because i’m still going through with the compulsions and start thinking about how this is my life and how i’m stuck doing this stuff forever!!

hi so i normally struggle with ROCD but right now I have the most random anxiety and I think it might be OCD so im curious if you guys think it is or if you have any tips on how to calm down. But first TRIGGER WARNING about weight talk (nothing too triggering but just in case <3) Me and my boyfriend have gained the typical relationship weight that comes along with a new relationship. However we’ve made some bad habits and are now trying to get those healthy habits back again and eat healthier and work out more. I ordered these premade meals from factor75 because I have fibromyalgia and cooking is really difficult for me especially with school and work so the microwaveable aspect is really convenient even though I know it would be better to cook myself. But anyways after I already ordered them to come on Tuesday I’ve seen some mixed reviews some saying they love it and some saying they hate it and it’s giving me a ton of anxiety. I’m super anxious that they won’t be good or will come late and have to be thrown away etc and I’m like hyperfixated on it. I’m not sure if it’s OCD but seeing the bad reviews feels like it’s making me ruminate. I know it’s not that deep or that big of an issue but I can’t seem to get it out of my head. They’re on the pricier side so I guess that’s part of why I’m afraid they’ll be bad because I don’t want to waste the money and I want something that will work for me and help me get into better shape. Does this sound like OCD and if so what can I do? I find myself trying to look for positive reviews but they don’t seem to reassure me that they’ll be good or at least alright until I can cancel if I don’t like them. Sorry if this is a dumb post I know there’s a lot worse I could be dealing with 💓

I just deliberately imagined this really horrible thought about my mum to test myself and I never got anxiety but it felt like my body suddenly tensed and I imagined it again and I get this thing where my whole body tensed up and my arms go all tense and I start almost squirming moving my arms all weird and now my back hurts from tensing but I never got anxiety just my whole body is really tense in that moment and then it hurts, does that mean I don’t like the thoughts? Because I never got anxiety but I got really tense and now my heads saying maybe I’m tensing on purpose to pretend I ‘hate’ the thoughts or that I’m bringing the tense on on purpose and I don’t hate it. Basically I’ve been having this thing where (this is the second time this is happening) where it feels like I ‘like the feeling’ of imagining doing that horrible thought or this time it was it felt like I ‘wanted’ to imagine these horrible thoughts of burying and dragging my mum and it felt like k wanted to imagine it for some reason and then I got hot and cold chills and heart was beating fast but for days I’ve been worrying about it screaming and crying to everyone around me but still convinced I now like it and I keep trying to imagine weird and disgusting things like how I would feel if my mum was in the ground and I was in the house and it’s so disgusting but I don’t know why I’m thinking weird crap like that. What level of messed up is that??? And what feeling??? What feeling is there associated to that? Like what the hell is going on. This is gonna sound really weird but it’s almost as if I have to imagine what it would feel like for me to be buried when my heads trying to imagine that about my mum and how would I feel about that??? And trying to convince me I want and like that and I feel really confused and worried. This all happened because I was left alone in the house with my mum (my sister went away for a few days) and I don’t know if it was out of worry but I deliberately started thinking of these disgusting thoughts I’ve never really thought of before about dragging and burying my mum and they were on purpose and for some reason felt like I wanted to imagine them and then I was getting hot and cold chills and rang my sister in the middle of the night worrying, And because it felt like I wanted to think of the thoughts then I was thinking oh I must like it and now I keep trying to imagine the thohhtns to test myself and also feeling crap because it felt like that was about to happen and now I’ve been feeling bad and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve always had a creative imagination, my English teachers were always praising me for my creative writing and now my head thinks of these sick disgusting things in so much detail and I don’t even think it’s possible for anyone to think of anything so weird as trying to imagine how it would feel for ‘my mum to be in the ground while I’m in the house’ makes me feel so terrible like what the hell is that and I was trying to imagine it like what the hell and I’ve been going through this for so long and I’ve become a bit numb to the thoughts like I don’t get really anxious like I use to and I can sit there imagining all sorts to test myself and not feel much and now it’s become a problem because I’m not getting anxious and instead it felt like ‘I wanted to’ think of the thoughts then I start imagining messed up things in detail and for days I have been suffering crying and shouting and feeling so hopeless and like everything is doomed there’s nothing I can do and I’ve never felt so helpless than these last few days like I just want help and I don’t know it feels like I’m actually believing this and everything is over and it’s inevitable. I stopped drinking Diet Coke and any drinks with caffeine tea,coffee,fizzy drinks/soda and I was better and I started recently And also eating a lot of fast food McDonald’s and kfc j don’t know if that’s why my problems suddenly Got so bad because I was coping a lot better before and all of a sudden I started eating this food everyday and drink caffeinated drinks and then this happens, it can’t just be a coincidence right? 😞😞😞😞

Hey, unsure if anyone will read this, but hi I'm phoebe , I have ocd contamination and phobias, alot of phobias around taking any medication. Well I went to my psychologist like a week ago and she put me on medicine but I of course did what I always do and looked up reviews, ect and im just so scared to take. It's to help stabilize my mood woth other off label things that could really help but I am TERRIFIED. I can't get past just taking it I of course talk my self out of it Is it the right medication for me? Do I even have any issues? And all the what ifs Sometimes I feel like I'll aways be in this cycle. Anyways good night and thanks for reading if you did 💗

I’m 16 (nearly 17) and I’m being a dick at the moment, I keep overreacting to things and speaking in a harsh tone, I don’t like it but I know it’s because of how bad my OCD has been at the moment, in fact it’s been horrific this is the worst I have known my OCD to get and even though my parents will give me the occasional kind or helpful words it just doesn’t feel like enough. I think Im feeling a bit badly towards them because of how badly I struggled with OCD my whole childhood and they never gave me any support or help during it, they didn’t even take me to a doctor even though I was clearly suffering mentally. I hate being angry it makes me hate myself even more and just feeds into my fears, I would much rather be depressed but they need me to function and if I try and force myself to function it just creates this anger and I hate it. I need help and wish they would stop acting like help from anywhere other that myself is impossible to obtain

After battling HOCD for more than three years, now I struggle for more than a month with the fear of being bisexual. It all started after reading an article about a women who was not even straight in the first place, but made the narrative of her story look as if she was it and at the end discovered the opposite. The problem was that I grew in my confidence about my sexuality and everything seemed clear again. I was still compelled to do compulsions and one of them was to google the stories of people who recovered from it as this would not only calm me, but it would give me a motivational boost. Her story triggered me and the thought afterwards was even more horrifying. I wanted to suppress it but it spilled out like water put under pressure. The thought was: "Yes, her story is exactly like mine! Yes, it must be! I am bisexual!" I was so weary and the fact that I did not feel so much anxiety made me truly believe that I had an epiphany and that these thoughts were of my own. Everything that I knew about this disorder was washed away in mere seconds. I tried to combat this thought with a compulsion by showing that I know that this is not the case, as everything I felt in the past for the same-sex was false, only something created by anxiety. Suddenly, I had a strange feeling and it left me to believe that I actually enjoyed these attractions, although this was not the case. I was to weary to put high enough resistance Now I spiraled down so deep that I cannot discern reality from these thoughts anymore. Sometimes I even believe that I am in denial. No compulsion seems to help anymore or very little. Sometimes it even feels as if I would abhor heterosexuality and would love bisexuality, although I find no comfort in these thoughts. They disgust me and they are very disturbing. Such thoughts never appealed to me, but now they feel as if I would think them intentionally. What should I do? Everything seems so strange and out of place. I want to be only with the opposite sex, yet the doubts takes forms that make believe this is not truly my wish. It makes me believe that there is "room for more" and it scares me but I am too tired of fighting these thoughts and feelings, yet I still find some energy to combat them. I can barely look in the mirror anymore and hardly I can remember for what I truly fought in the past and who I truly was. The nights are spent restless. My therapy session starts in just a few weeks, but my fear seems so true. It seems so close. I knew I was straight and in this I found great fondness. Now it seems like a distant memory. What should I do in this severe case? Deep inside myself, my rational part still knows that it is OCD. It must be, or else I would not do compulsions as long as the day is. I would not go through this anguish. I am sorry for the lengthy post, but I try to stabilize myself again before I attend my first sessions.

Sometimes I have so much going on in my head at one time - and I have layers of intrusive thoughts one on top of another - all together and sometimes I don't know or remember which one caused my anxiety but I have to go back and solve them or reproduce the feeling that came up so that I can "disregard" it properly. It gets so exhausting because I'm always chasing after random thoughts and feelings all about similar themes - that are constantly getting triggered - by silly things. The fear is - I won't know its ocd unless i go back and solve them. I think this might be a compulsion? Does sitting with the discomfort with this Also work?