Feeling the panic ebb and flow
A client shared this awesome adventure he took his brain on recently: I can experience anxiety and panic attacks pretty regularly. They used to control my life. Any work meeting, restaurant, confrontation, exercise, bodily sensation would send me into an hour long panic. I dealt with this for years-not knowing what was going on with…
Pedalling out of Bike Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Anxieties around panic attacks triggered by exercise, and specifically issues with riding bicycles, have been popping up frequently when I’m connecting with people online. Bikes get the heart pounding and bring up physical sensations that we can easily engage in compulsions around. Overcoming these challenges is fun because we get to hop on our bikes…
How to deal with Real Event OCD
It’s easy to get caught up in compulsions around things that really happened. In fact, over the years, I’d say that getting tripped up by real events and judging them as a rational reason to do compulsions, inside and outside of our heads, tends to be the biggest reason people relapse. So it’s useful to…
Scott’s story so far…
I think back to when I was a pre teen and there was so much happening, not only physically but also mentally… That’s when I first recall OCD happening to me–I was around 12 years old and I began to count and touch doors, handles, count my steps, turn off the TV at the “right…
How I Finally Recovered From OCD
I had watched Mark’s videos over and over again, especially my favorite one, “How to Deal With Intrusive Thoughts“. The end of the video was always my favorite part, it seemed to sum up what you need to do for OCD recovery (and really, recovery from any anxiety disorder) really well: Accept all the stuff in…
First episode of The OCD Stories podcast
Stuart Ralph has launched a podcast to go along with The OCD Stories site, all about exploring OCD and recovery from OCD. For the first episode of the podcast, which you can watch here in video, we discussed a slew of topics about recovering from OCD. Check it out:
So you think you can’t recover from mental illness… (video)
Ruminating on reasons you can’t recover because your symptoms are different or you have very unique circumstances that prevent you from moving forward… is one of the most common symptoms. You’ll always be able to think of reasons why you can’t cut out compulsions, why you need to keep doing unhealthy things right now, why…
10 Mindfulness Tips for Everyday Practice
If you’re new to the practice of mindfulness, these ten tips can help you incorporate the practice into your daily life. Any moment can become an opportunity to return to the present!
How to Deal with Intrusive Thoughts (video)
When it comes to dealing with horrible, weird, upsetting, terrifying intrusive thoughts or whatever else your brain is throwing up when you’re struggling with mental illness, learning to practice accepting the stuff in your head and shifting your focus to doing the things that will actually make you healthy, can stop the struggle in your head.
Help won’t always come in the way you want it to.
Receiving or providing mental health treatment requires significant amounts of tolerance and acceptance on every side of the equation (and it’s an equation with many sides). When seeking treatment, we can often trip over our judgments and let our short-term likes and dislikes become massive barriers to what’s going to make us happy in the…