Have you ever felt painfully stuck in a thought loop in your head? While it's common for you to think about a specific issue, situation, thing, or person, there's a difference between being preoccupied with something and having obsessive thoughts that actually invade your life and inner peace. If the latter sounds familiar, know that you're not alone, and there are two ways to tell if OCD is a problem for you, and what you can do to cope with the symptoms.
As Dr. Tamar Chansky, founder of the Center for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety in Children and Adults and author of "Free Your Child from OCD ," tells Bustle, OCD is a disorder in which you have "unwanted, time-- "Intrusive thoughts. Consuming, and possibly painful. "
"In other words, they invade your mind when you don't expect them to," Chansky said. "It's different than being upset about something in your life and you feel like you're stuck in a cycle of thinking."
It's also unpleasant, Chansky said, but with OCD, the content is often not really relevant to your life. It may feel weird. You might think about harm, contamination, being a bad person, or the uniformity of things around you.
"Another part of OCD is that people engage in 'compulsions' or rituals to neutralize a certain thought," Chansky said. "Obsessive-compulsive disorder creates barriers for sufferers, making them feel the need to repeat, redo and rethink things that never need to be on their worry list," Chansky said.
"The core problem with OCD is an unwillingness to accept certain types of uncertainty," consultant Stephanie Woodrow, LCPC, NCC, who was recently named an Emerging Leader by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, tells Bustle .
Woodrow said obsessions are recurring, persistent, unwanted, intrusive thoughts or images that are disturbing and cause significant anxiety or distress. The compulsions or rituals that accompany people with OCD are mental behaviors designed to reduce pain, anxiety, disgust, or feelings of "not being right."
"Research shows that everyone has unwanted, intrusive thoughts and images," Woodrow said. "The difference between someone with OCD and someone who can ignore it is the ability not to attach importance or value to these thoughts and images."
Some common OCD themes include bacterial or bodily fluid contamination, perfectionism, unwanted sexual thoughts, fears or superstitions about illness, and more. Some common obsessive behaviors or rituals include checking and reviewing, seeking reassurance or confession, thinking safe thoughts or sorting and arranging things, etc.
While research suggests a person must be biologically vulnerable to develop OCD, research doesn't yet know what causes the "OCD gene" to turn on, Woodrow said. But she did reiterate that "people don't cause their OCD" and the same goes for parenting. "
Treatment options are wide-ranging and include medications, outpatient, inpatient or partial hospitalization treatment programs, mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), among other modalities, Woodrow said.
Elise Hall, LCSW, a clinical social worker with a private practice specializing in OCD and anxiety disorders, tells Bustle that the "gold standard" for OCD treatment is exposure and response prevention, in which a trained therapist Guide you through different exposure tasks to help your brain and central nervous system learn that the dire consequences of obsessive thoughts are not possible and/or can be tolerated.
Chansky also says professional help is definitely the best option when you suffer from OCD. But in everyday life, the first step is to relabel your thought as having nothing to do with you and not your fault.
"It's a brain hiccup that's verbalized but still as meaningless as a hiccup," Chansky said. "You need to train yourself to 'underreact' to scary thoughts because they only carry the weight you give them, and unless you give them enough attention, they have no authority in your life."
Of course, this doesn't mean recognizing that these thoughts are obsessive will make them go away. That could be a lengthy process, Chansky said. But one of the treatments for OCD is to essentially start skipping or "breaking the rules" of what your OCD brain tells you to do.
"Over time, when you stop tapping, touching, redoing, washing, etc., through neuroplasticity, your brain will re-recognize these warnings as unnecessary and start filtering them out," Chance said Key said. “Don’t avoid OCD situations—face them and gradually change the rules to shape your behavior into the way you would want to react if you didn’t have OCD.”
If you're still struggling with getting stuck in a loop of non-OCD thoughts, Chansky says it's good to use neuroplasticity in this area, too.
"Instead of jumping into worry mode whenever any thought pops into your head, plan, create structure, and worry instead of letting those thoughts interfere with your work," Chansky says. "If you can't quit worrying completely If you have a habit, set a 5-minute worry time, name your fear, and then fact-check it.”
Chansky says we have to consciously break out of the worry pattern to see that it's not serving us.
If you are concerned that OCD may be your problem, seek professional help. This is a treatable disease and can be put into remission.
expert:
Tamar Chansky, Ph.D., founder of the Center for Children and Adults with OCD and Anxiety and author of Free Your Child from OCD.
Stephanie Woodrow, LCPC, NCC, who was recently named an Emerging Leader by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, tells Bustle.
Elise Hall, LCSW is a clinical social worker with a private practice specializing in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders.
Research source:
Hezel, DM and Simpson, HB (January 2019). Exposure and response prevention in obsessive-compulsive disorder: A review and new directions. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6343408/.
