A reader sent in this personal story of overcoming compulsions at a difficult time in his life. He’s now working on becoming a therapist: I’m 26 years old and I’ve been struggling with my mental health ever since I was just a little kid. In December of 2017 my mother got the bad news that she only had a year to live due to her cancer coming back. My mental health, which was already very bad at the time just …
Tag: compulsions
Build a new relationship with uncertainty throughout your life or your daily practices will just logically and rationally have you struggling and suffering and relapsing back into a depressive anxiety hole. This video explains an approach that I credit with helping me recover and maintaining great mental health for the past eight years:
Recently, Matt and I did a couple of videos exploring intrusive thoughts or anxieties and why it’s useful to look at why we’re afraid of the consequences of those thoughts or anxieties coming true. There’s an exercise for doing that, The 5 Whys, which I shared in my book, The Mind Workout, and Matt explains near the end of this video:
I’m teaming up with Mind Matters to do a workshop at The Drake Hotel in Toronto on May 15th, at 6pm, all about techniques for cutting out online compulsions and learning how to make the internet work for you (instead of you just clicking away on a mouse for little hits of dopamine like you’re in some start-up’s lab experiment). Tickets are $45 and you can get them here: www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1472846?utm_medium=bks Space is limited so grab tickets quickly. I had so …
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 your head while DOING the things you really care about. When you focus on the things you actually care about, all the worries and uncertainties your …
We can always come up with a rational reasons to excuse self-destructive compulsions while we chase safety. But chasing that feeling is no different than chasing any other feeling: it only leads to more of the experiences you’re trying to avoid.
It’s very popular in OCD patient communities, and in mental health communities in general, to get stuck on labeling superficial symptoms. But it becomes just another way to practice the judging and categorizing and discriminating that can fuel so many compulsions. A more effective approach to support recovery from OCD is to understand (and eliminate) the compulsive patterns of thinking and behaving beneath any symptom. This might be easier to understand by looking at the sub type of OCD that is, without …
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: