How can I reduce my anxiety and OCD?
If you have OCD you may recognize that your life is spent in a continual vicious cycle of thoughts, feelings, and rituals. One helpful way to start to disrupt this cycle is to change or delay rituals. Let’s say you have an unpleasant thought (for example, having a thought of stabbing your spouse) that happens to “pop” into your head. If you attach unhelpful meanings to the thought (for example, “having this thought means I’m an evil person who is capable of murdering a loved one”), you will probably feel very anxious as a result. Now, because it is uncomfortable to be anxious, you are likely to find ways to lessen that anxiety. For example, you may repeatedly check to make sure the drawer where you store all the sharp objects (e.g. scissors, knives) is locked and say a prayer to yourself every time you have the “bad” thought. Unfortunately, you find that even though these strategies help you to briefly lessen the anxiety, you need to do them more and more often because your “bad” thought seems to occur even more frequently when you try hard not to have it. You feel trapped because you do not know what else to do but keep using these strategies. The next thing you know, your life is being consumed by the “bad” thought and your constant efforts to control it. This is how the vicious cycle of OCD develops and keeps going: As you learn more about OCD and become committed (hopefully!) to making changes by fighting back against your obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), you may be feeling hopeful that exposure and response prevention (ERP) can actually work, and that your life can become a little less stressful and a little more normal, once again. However, feelings of hope may also be shared with feelings of being overwhelmed by just how many areas of your life are ruled by OCD. The more years that OCD has held you hostage, often the greater the areas of disruption. While ERP can be very effective, it may take time, sometimes weeks or months, for you to start to see the positive effects of your ERP efforts. In addition, if you chose to take a systematic approach to using ERP for your OCD and, for example, to do 1-2 exposures a day or about 1-2 hours of work, that still leaves another 22-23 hours when OCD dominates. The following section includes five tools that will be useful in providing you with ideas about how to manage the other 22-23 hours in the day. These tools can be used alone or in a combination that makes sense for your needs:
Does OCD anxiety go away?Obsessive-compulsive symptoms generally wax and wane over time. Because of this, many individuals diagnosed with OCD may suspect that their OCD comes and goes or even goes away—only to return. However, as mentioned above, obsessive-compulsive traits never truly go away. Instead, they require ongoing management.
How can I treat anxiety and OCD without medication?Psychotherapy or talk therapy has been used effectively to treat OCD. This type of therapy works especially well when it is combined with medication. Your therapist may suggest cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help with your OCD. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is a type of CBT that works well for OCD.
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