Tag: catastrophizing

OCD – It’s all a way of thinking

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OCD feeds off self doubt, loathing and negative thinking spirals.  It will make you think you are the worst person in the world, that you are capable of horrible things and that you don’t deserve love and happiness.  It will isolate you and drag you down if it can, so if you’re fighting this bastard every day like me then you have to get very good at telling it to go f*uck itself.

One of the best things you can do is simply like yourself (I’ve spoken about this a lot before), know who you are and don’t waver.  You are a good person who deserves good things to come to you and you are stronger then the thoughts in your head, yep that’s all they are, thoughts, not even something tangible or real.

I’ve recently tried to take the next step in my recovery.  For quite a while now I’ve been using my husband for reassurance when something happens that triggers an OCD spiral.  It’s worked so well for me, whatever it is I’m stressing about whether it’s something that’s happened on the drive home or in the supermarket or wherever I just run it past him, he just shrugs and that’s reassurance enough for me to know that I’m worrying over nothing.

Now initially I didn’t even realise that this was a coping mechanism, it happened so organically over time.  Then a while ago I read something that basically confirmed if you do this to relieve a thought then it is a ‘coping strategy’.  Of course they’re right and ultimately I need to be able to process these thoughts on my own without my husbands help.  So I’ve been doing my best to do this, I’m going to be honest it’s super tough, it takes me longer to remove the doubt feeling but it does go eventually which is reassuring.

Last night something happened when I was picking my kids up from pre school and I immediately started to catastrophise it in my head.  I could feel the doubt pulling me down, all the ‘what if’s’ starting to flood into my head.  My mood started to drop and I could hear myself becoming irritable and snappy.

I made a decision that I wasn’t going to talk to my husband about it and that I was just going to sit with it and not think on it.  This was incredibly hard, I busied myself
with making tea when I got home and distracted myself as much as I could, the doubt feeling stayed with me all night, though it did start to loose it’s grip as time ticked on.  This morning the thought has popped into my head a couple of times but I have been able to dismiss it relatively easily.

Something that has really helped me to remove the thought is choosing to put a positive slant on the situation rather then a negative one.  I’m sure I’ve said this before but if you must catastrophise then do it positively!  Realistically if you are going to live your life fully then you are going to come across situations that are going to trigger OCD thoughts, FACT it’s impossible not to.  You cannot avoid them and you know what, even if you try to you will still hit them occasionally, avoiding OCD DOES NOT WORK (take my word for it, I’ve tried).  

The best thing you can do is look at a situation and think on it positively.  So don’t think ‘what if this could of happened‘ but think ‘that didn’t happen’ or ‘I reacted in the best way I could, now I know I can deal with the situation if it happens again in the future’. 

Know you can’t control or predict everything and that that’s OK, you probably wouldn’t want to even if you had the choice.  Know you are a good person and you will always do the best you can in any situation, that’s really all anyone can hope for.  It takes so much strength to overcome these thoughts but you can do it I promise.  Do not let OCD win, do not let it pull you down!

I really hope this helps, even getting it down is helping me process it.  Writing the experience down even though hard can help detach it from your mind, you can then go and burn it if you wish!  By writing it down it’s like an alternative to telling someone, it gets it out and then it’s gone, yes!

As always, Stay Strong xxx

OCD and Blood

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Now I’m guessing this is a trigger for a few of us out there, I know for sure it’s always been one of mine.  There’s something about blood which just makes my mind go,

‘If you touch that you’re going to catch something horrible’.  

In the past if I walked past a plaster in the street it would play on my mind for the rest of the day. I didn’t even need to touch it, my Magical Thinking OCD could work out a way to make sure I could still catch something from it.  Sometimes it didn’t even have to be blood, just a red blob, it could be marker pen, jam, jelly, anything that could potentially be misconstrued as blood and my OCD would see to the rest.  I don’t know how many times I’ve thought about what I would do if I caught an infectious disease and how many hours I’ve catostrophised and stressed about all the possible outcomes, once again it’s actually very sad to think about.

Today I’m still battling these thoughts but I don’t seem to dwell on them or catostrophise about them anymore.  I still have an aversion to blood but that feels a little more ‘normal’, I’m not sure anyone likes other peoples blood on them or would want to voluntarily touch some.

One of the best things I heard when trying to combat this trigger (from my CBT therapist) was that,

‘diseases can’t live in blood outside of the body for longer then 48 hours’,

now I’m not even sure if this is 100% true, but I choose to believe it and it pretty much cured this phobia for me.  So if you see a plaster on the street that has blood on it, the likelihood it can hurt you is pretty much zero.

Once you can convince yourself of something then the thoughts are easy to bat away and eventually they stop coming all together.  All these things are a work in progress of course but I’ve found through my recovery sometimes you’ll hear something and it’ll just work for you and then that’s another trigger down.

Hopefully this one will help someone else out there.

Stay Strong xxx

My own company

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Now this is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember, I really do dislike being on my own and having to sit with my own thoughts, eeek!  In fact I’ve realised recently that I talk out loud to myself all the time and I think it’s partly so I don’t have to listen to my own thoughts and partly so I can separate the important thoughts from the jumble that is my own brain.

I find everything feels a bit more scary when I’m on my own, my anxiety is heightened and I catastrophize constantly, it’s also much harder to just dismiss negative thoughts.  For me this is a working progress and I do believe I’m better at it then I used to be but man I’ve got a long way to go.

So once again I don’t have a nice quick fix for this either, hummm.  I expect if I asked an expert they’d tell me I have to face it and just sit with the thoughts, feelings and inner ramblings.  Maybe eventually something more positive would start to come out?

I think when you have OCD intrusive thoughts it’s incredibly difficult to like yourself and therefore your thoughts, I think the version of yourself you see is completely different to the one everyone else sees and so you can’t understand why other people like you at all and you actually have no idea what they think of you.  Maybe they see more of the real you then you do, the you without OCD – if like me you have Pure O – now that’s a mind blowing thought!

So of course I must work harder on my self love and try to see all of the positives instead of the negatives.  I must push myself to do the things I know make me feel well mentally:

  • Get enough sleep
  • Do exercise
  • Eat well
  • Remove caffeine and alcohol
  • Remove any negative people who make me question my self worth from my social circle
  • Write a list of positives to read when struggling
  • Continue to write my blog
  • Appreciate all the beautiful things I have in my life
  • Live mindfully

So this is my little lecture to myself today to give myself that extra push that I know sometimes we all need.  Recovery is a marathon and not a sprint and boy don’t I know it, so until next time

Stay Strong xxx

 

 

OCD – Procrastination

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Now I’ve been dealing with my OCD demons for a fair few years now (over 20!) and although I feel I’ve gotten to grips with them to a certain extent, I know if I really look at my life that they still hold me back in many areas.

I have, I believe, reached a sort of plateau or ‘comfy place’ in my life and though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – to have a steady job, relationship and social life – it does make it quite easy to just coast along.  Never having to step outside of my comfort zone means some of my OCD ‘fears’ can just be left and never confronted so to speak.  It also means that when something does come along where I do need to step out of my comfort zone – say I have to drive somewhere new/faraway –  normally my first reaction is to feel anxious and think of all the things that could go wrong, catastrophize.

Another side effect of my ‘comfy zone’ is that I never seem to get anything unessential done, things are only sorted when they have to be, rather then when they should be and therefore normally done in a rush and without much thought.  I believe this stems partly from my fear of making decisions.  Final decisions can have OCD thoughts associated with them and so cause me anxiety, therefore I avoid them where I can, naughty, naughty I know.

I feel I do get overwhelmed quickly and it doesn’t take much for me to start spiralling out of control, it definitely makes achieving things tricky.  It can also make me lazy, if I can pass a decision/activity on to someone else then normally I will, not good for OCD recovery I know and ultimately very frustrating for me.

So less of my moaning anyway, lets see if I can try and implement some solutions rather then posing endless problems.

My overall aims are to become more confident, to not let anxiety be the first thing to hit me when trying something new, to find solutions rather than problems and tackle my OCD head on and not avoid it.

  • I think I might start with a list, by writing down all the things I have been putting off/avoiding and then finding a way to tackle them one at a time it will feel less overwhelming and more manageable.
  • It would also help to see new experiences as exciting rather than scary, after all if we never do anything new how do we learn/progress?
  • I should have more confidence and believe myself worthy of new experiences.
  • I should try and get to the route cause of what is causing the anxiety and tackle it head on.
  • Remember that uncertainty is a good thing, would we want to be certain about everything?  There is a good exercise for dealing with uncertainty here.
  • Looking towards end goals and achievements will help to spur me on.
  • Accepting the worse case scenarios so I have nothing to fear.

Wow, so that’s quite a list.  Even the list itself feels a bit overwhelming to be honest but by just trying to take one step at a time hopefully I will start to achieve more of my goals.

Hopefully it can help you too.

Stay Strong xxx

 

OCD – Never giving in

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This is probably one of the hardest parts about fighting OCD.  You can never give in, not even to one compulsion because if you do it will never go away.  OCD never gives in, so you mustn’t either.  It can be so tempting sometimes, particularly with a new intrusive thought which can catch you off guard.

When it is a new intrusive thought (as opposed to a recurring one, which over time can be dealt with and it’s power diminished) the associated anxiety can be more intense and sometimes before I know it I’m spiralling internally downwards, becoming outwardly more touchy and irritable, my heartbeat is starting to rise, I’m getting hotter, my brain is trying to work out what to do to return me to equilibrium and more often then not giving into the compulsion is the quickest fix at this point.

Here are some of the scenarios I have personally faced over the years:

Whilst making a sandwich I thought I saw a black mark on the bread and my mind starts catastrophizing about what the mark could be and before you know it, I’ve convinced myself its going to do the person who eats it irreparable damage.   At this point the thing I most want to do is throw the sandwich in the bin and start again.  Even though I know logically that the black mark I saw was actually just an air hole in the bread but can I convince my OCD mind of that?

or

Whilst buying items in a supermarket, I pick up some toothpaste which has a grubby mark on the packaging.  Once again my mind starts catastrophizing about what the mark could be and what I then want to do is just walk out of the supermarket and leave the basket behind.

or

Whilst leaving a store carpark I drive over a pot hole in the road.  Once again my mind gets riddled with doubt and all I want to do is drive back to the car park and check the pot hole I went over wasn’t a child or animal.

Because hey, wouldn’t that be easier??  Well actually no.  No, no, no, no, no, no NO!

This is where all your CBT training, mindfulness, distraction, the lot, all comes into play.

A couple of other tips that can sometimes helps me are:

  1. To take yourself out of the situation completely.  So if I’m in the kitchen washing something and all of a sudden I have the thought that it’s still dirty for whatever reason and I need to rewash it, I can very often start to find myself in a spiral (as described above) and the only thing I can do is step away.  Go and do something else for half an hour and then come back.
  2. Distraction:  sometimes I sing to myself, I realise this sounds a bit nutty but actually the process of singing or even humming out load is sometimes a big enough distraction in my head that I can get my task completed.  Even if I’m just singing “The washing is clean, it’s all fine” over and over to myself, lol.

Of course the price we sometimes pay for not giving into our compulsions is that they then hang around like a big heavy weight on our shoulders.  I have had intrusive thoughts which have stayed with me for days, years even and this does make the fight particularly hard at times.

I find sharing the thought with someone as early as you can (if you have someone you are able to share them with) helps to diminish the thoughts power significantly.  If you don’t have someone you can talk to easily about this stuff then try writing them down or say them out loud to yourself when you’re alone.  Almost by getting the thoughts outside of your mind in someway, you can help to detach yourself from them and diminish their power.  Sounds a bit crazy but this actually really works, give it a try.

and as always, Stay Strong xxx

 

OCD – Skewed gut feelings

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So many people rely on their gut feelings for big life decisions.  I have never been able to trust mine.  Most of the major decisions in my life have been hampered by OCD and so I’m never sure whether I’m unsure about something for a ‘real’ reason or an ‘OCD’ reason.  This has led to most decisions being incredibly hard for me.

I remember driving to look at wedding dresses and on the way a little girl was standing by the lights waiting to cross the road.  She was on the pavement but quite near the edge and I can remember driving past her and my OCD saying: ‘She was a bit close to the road, what if you’d hit her?’

From that point on the trip was completely pointless, as any dress I picked on that day would mean I would run over a little girl in the future.  Writing it now it seems completely crazy, somehow my mind had catastrophized the event, then connected that to the dress shopping.

I quite often have to ask my husband whether a situation I am stressed about is something someone ‘normal’ would also be stressed about or whether it’s just my OCD.

For example:

Whilst cooking if something you’ve chopped lands on the floor, maybe a carrot which is going to be put into boiling water.

Would you:

  • A) Throw it away
  • B) Throw it into the pot

or

If you got a take away coffee and the lid had a little mark on it would you:

  • A) Not even notice it (my husband)
  • B) Notice it but wipe it away and think nothing more of it
  • C) Throw the coffee away because it’s probably something horrible that will kill you (sounds a bit extreme but this is what catastrophizing does.)

I wish I could share some easy advice on how to overcome these situations but unfortunately you have to face them head on.  You do however have a wealth of tools to use against it:

To name just a few.  If it helps, every time I have found the inner strength to fight one of these thoughts/compulsions I have felt better for it in the long run and every time I have let them win I have felt worse!

The thoughts don’t go away and actually your OCD mind learns and will use new intrusive thought against you in other situations.  OCD is a huge bully which will use any ammunition you give it.  Don’t let it!

Stay strong xx

Catastrophizing

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So this has always been a big one for me, my mind seems programmed to always think of the worst case scenario.  This has sadly meant that over the years I’ve managed to talk myself out of all sorts of things, from simple things like going out to the shops, to bigger things like holidays, jobs, big purchases such as cars, houses, you name it.  As I look back over my life it is with a twinge of sadness that I’ve let OCD control so much of it.  I am however who I am and all I can do is look forward and not back.  So how have I started to take control and manage these negative thought patterns?  It is tricky and I have to admit I’m not always successful.

One nice method is to think in the opposite direction, think of the most positive outcome of a situation instead of the most negative for example:

The situation:  I need to go to the shops to get some groceries

catastrophizing thought:

‘If I go out in the car today I might hit someone, perhaps I should stay at home’

likely result:  you don’t go out, you stay at home and get more and more wound up about your thought and how to get the groceries you need.

Positive thought:

‘By going out in the car today I will get a step closer to conquering my OCD’

Likely result:  You get in the car, drive to the store, get your groceries.  You feel better for being out and distracted.  Nothing happens and you have achieved what you set out to do.

As hard as it is I have always found it much easier long term to confront the thought, they never go away, you can only dismiss them for short periods of time.

I have also found I can get massively absorbed into my own thoughts if I don’t fight them, causing me to be touchy and irritable, definitely not desirable personality traits.  It is important to remember to be mindful and live in the present, not the past or the future.