It helped me with recovery to recognize that judgments are the first compulsion. Non-judgment is something I now work on frequently with clients. We have a superpowered label maker in our skulls. It’s incredibly useful, but when we start slapping those labels on random brain indigestion, we can create so much struggle for ourselves.If we…
Something that helped me immensely with recovery was learning that I would experience whatever I believed was a valid reason to do compulsions. So if physical sensations and pain were reasons that made compulsions ok, then I’d be having all sorts of physical issues and checking Dr. Google or taking weird supplements. If real events…
My post on the newly launched Unsinkable Stories is all about an issue that I now know is quite common when people are making progress on recovery from mental illness, but it’s not something anybody had prepared me for when I was interacting with the mental healthcare system. Overcoming this challenge is key to preventing…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has evolved and changed significantly over the years. CBT is a category of therapies that include cognitive and behavioral components. It’s a category in the same way that “cardio” is a category of exercise. What a person does within that category, can lead to profoundly different outcomes. And the exercises evolve over…
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…
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…
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…
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!
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.