Dealing With OCD: How To React The Instant OCD Attacks You (3 Steps)

Introduction

Most OCD patients recognize that their OCD thoughts and urges are disconnected from reality. However, many OCD patients feel extreme anxiety as a consequence of not performing their compulsions and eventually succumb to the urge, perpetuating the symptoms. In this post, I am going to outline the way to escape from this vicious cycle. Follow the steps outlined in this post to fight back OCD and regain mental health.

 

1. Check If Your Thoughts Are OCD Or Not

First, you should be able to differentiate between OCD thoughts and non-OCD thoughts. This is the part where people struggle the most. However, this should be the easiest step. The main reason that people find this step difficult is because they focus too much on the content of the thought. OCD, in essence, is not about the content. It’s about emotions. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how horrific the content of your thoughts are. If a thought gives you anxiety, then it is an OCD thought. If not, no. This greatly simplifies the process of identifying OCD thoughts. Just check if you are feeling anxious or not. If you are feeling anxious, yes, you are having an OCD thought.

 

2. Ignore All OCD Thoughts

Now that you know which thoughts are OCD, you should begin to ignore such thoughts. There is no fixed way of carrying out this step. You must find your own way to do so. However, there are things that you shouldn’t do when dealing with OCD thoughts.

 

First, don’t argue with them. It doesn’t matter how logical your arguments are. OCD is a dumb liar. OCD won’t understand anything you say, and will always respond the same way: by making you anxious. Therefore, there is absolutely no point in arguing with OCD.

 

Secondly, don’t TRY to ignore them. If you are thinking, “Yes, OCD is in my head, but I must ignore it”, you are not ignoring it properly. The better way is to focus on more important things and pretend that OCD has never been there in the first place. This can be difficult to accomplish, but if you don’t procrastinate and actually start, you’ll be able to master the technique pretty quickly.

 

3. Don’t Do The Compulsions

Assuming that you have successfully carried out the first two steps, it is now time to do the most challenging part. Again, there can be many ways of ignoring compulsions. You must know that this is a very challenging step, and that you probably won’t succeed the first time.

 

Think of this as resembling the process of building muscles. No matter how hard you exercise, you can’t get muscular in two or three weeks. You must go to the gym regularly for a prolonged period of time to get the result you wanted. Likewise, in order to master the technique of not doing compulsions, you must be willing to put enough time and effort. It is okay to fail several times and end up doing the compulsions. As long as you are convinced that you can get to the destination, to overcoming OCD, you will definitely get there.