Using Mindfulness – Conquering OCD

So once you’ve had OCD for a while you start to know what your ‘triggers’ are. These ‘triggers’ can then start to control your behaviour. For me, public toilets, driving at night and drinking are just three of the things I can think of that can cause me anxiety, even before an event occurs. Most of this anxiety is triggered I guess, from past experiences.

If I go into a public toilet and there’s something on the seat, this will cause anxiety, intrusive thoughts etc but I’m going to take a punt and say not many people would like to sit on something unknown on a toilet seat?

Unfortunately for me that’s just where it begins, if there is a mark on the toilet paper dispenser or on the toilet roll itself – here’s betting most people don’t even look at the toilet roll – these can immediately trigger intrusive thoughts which can stay with me for at least the rest of the day. I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that I always rip off the first piece of toilet roll wherever I am through fear of contamination. If someone has placed the toilet roll on top of the sanitary bin or on the floor then that can be game over, I just turn around and walk back out.

I’ve already blogged about driving and some of the anxiety it causes me but at night I would say everything is multiplied and it’s much harder to dismiss, potholes, bumps in the road, noises from the car etc. I would say every time I drive somewhere at night I get back home and there’s some sort of intrusive thought on my mind which I just can’t budge, so frustrating.

So if you start to get anxious before you even get to your ‘trigger’ situation you are completely setting yourself up to fail. Your mind is already putting the thoughts into your head before you’ve even tried and so it creates a viscous cycle, which causes reluctance to do things and go places and so starts to create behavioural changes.

I’m not sure I will ever completely free myself of some of my OCD intrusive thoughts and thinking patterns, some of them are so ingrained in me after so many years. I do still make myself face them day in and day out but who knows if I will ever completely win. I guess the fact that I’m not letting them stop me doing things nowadays is a win in itself. To live life without the thoughts at all is the battle.

So the point of this post was to try and find a way of avoiding the preemptive anxiety, somehow trying not to fail before you’ve even tried. It’s such a tricky one because as soon as you start thinking about the situation you’ll probably start feeling anxious about it, another one of those ‘don’t think about the pink elephant in the room’ situations.

I would say the best way to try to combat the preemptive anxiety would be mindfulness. If you are living in the moment then you shouldn’t be worrying about whats happening later. If you know you have one of your triggers coming up, then do everything you can not to think ahead to it until you have to, this should help to stop the anxiety kicking in too early.

Every time you face one of your fears and succeed make a mental note of how amazing you are for beating the OCD and anxiety. We never give ourselves enough credit when we do well and we always beat ourselves up when we are weak – human nature I guess. Make a list of every win and refer back to it every time you are struggling.

Stay Strong xxx

So a couple of posts ago I said I was going to start looking a bit deeper into mindfulness. It’s something I’ve only really dabbled in previously but I have found that it seems to work, so wanted to see what else I could find out. I haven’t made huge progress so far – having a one year old doesn’t give you much spare time – however I did read something today which I managed to use quite successfully, so I thought I would, as promised, ‘pay it forward’ so to speak.

I am currently reading: Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world at the start of this book there is a section about how your posture, movement, facial expressions etc can affect your mood and the moods of others. So for example if you smile – even if you don’t feel like smiling – you will feel happier, other people will see you and smile back. The same goes for more depressed postures, if you are slouched with your head hanging low you are more likely to feel low and pass this on to others around you. Obviously the book goes into it in much more detail but you get the general gist.

So today I drove to a roadshow – I think that’s the right term? Basically an event where, lots of businesses come together to sell you things. For me something like this is filled with anxieties: driving somewhere I’ve never been before, actually finding the place, parking, talking to lost of strangers, crowds (man I hate crowds), I could go on and on and to add to all the pressures, I had my one year old with me as well, nothing like putting yourself out there.

So I’ve been making big strides forward with my recovery and I know to get over a lot of mental issues you have to face them head on – that’s what I keep preaching on here right? So when I tried to think of a reason not to go today, there really wasn’t an easily justifiable one.

Anyway I digress.

To be honest it mostly went well, I got lost once on the way but found it eventually and even found a double parking space, yippee! When my little boy started to run around the presentation and wanted to get up on stage, I coped and everyone seemed to find it funny rather than irritating but eventually it all got a bit much for him and he really started to play up. I can’t really blame him, it’s not the most exciting place for a one year old.

The challenge however really came when I got back to the car, he’d definitely had enough by this point and flatly refused to get back into his car seat. I could feel the stress which I’d managed to keep in check up until this point starting to rise, could feel myself getting hotter, how was I going to get him back in his seat, everyone’s watching, argh!

Then I remembered what I had read in the mindfulness book, if I’m getting stressed my little boy will feel stressed, if I’m getting angry, my little boy will just get angrier too and so, I laughed, I looked up at the sky, took a long deep breath and started to laugh and do you know what happened?

My little boy started laughing too, all of the anger and tears of frustration which he had been displaying just seconds earlier just disappeared – well for long enough for me to get him strapped in anyway. I’m not gonna lie I did have to sing nursery rhymes all the way home.

I know in that moment I was so happy I had read that chapter this morning.

Well that turned into a bit of an essay so I hope it all made sense. Mindfulness really is incredible and by just being aware of how you are projecting yourself you can completely change a situation for the better, what a powerful tool to have.

Stay Strong xxx

Tag: Using Mindfulness

OCD – Setting yourself up to fail

Mindfulness in Practice – Part 1