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I'm trying to ignore my thoughts, why am I still nervous?


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Give it time. It takes a long time to build up your compulsions and for the anxiety to build up so it's going to take time for things to settle down.

Congrats on trying to ignore the thoughts. Look at them as a pain in the butt that's not worth your time. Good luck.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yesterday, it was so easy to ignore my thoughts because they were so over-the-top in their badness that I could easily not feed them, but now, they're bad enough that I couldn't take them, and yet they no longer have the effect of being so over-the-top in their unpleasantness that I want to ignore them.

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I think the more you try to ignore your thoughts, the more they will come back stronger and provoke more anxiety. Instead, you need to accept the thoughts. Even though they are intrusive and unwanted, when a thought pops into your head, just label it as an obsession, if necessary, tell yourself that there is no evidence that you act upon the thought, and just simply say "it's my OCD". OCD thoughts are ego-dystonic and go up against who you are as a person. I don't know you at all, but I can say that the more you try to stop or ignore the thoughts, the worse it is going to be for you. The more you can try to accept the thoughts and just say "it's my OCD", the better off you will be. Sometimes I even try to make a joke out of it. If I am driving my car and I get an intrusive thought of driving it off a bridge, I sometimes try and think "haha, yeah I will drive off a bridge, come on". Instead of forcefully trying to ignore the thought or saying something like "OMG what if I drove off, I would die, my family would be devastated", I would just try to quickly play it off as, "what a silly OCD obsession. Like I am going to drive off a bridge". Then I just focus back on the road or look at the car in front of me. It might provoke a bit of anxiety, but the more i habituate to that type of scenario, the less anxious i feel over time. 

 

Accept the thoughts, don't ignore! They are just thoughts, not threats! Hang in there! We are all sufferers together!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sometimes, I feel so calm, then I have negative thoughts, then I try to calm myself, but still they fester.

Edited by efes
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That's the issue I deal with regarding losing my best friend as a friend. Whenever I have these thoughts I know aren't true I can't fight them off sometimes though I can fight them off a lot better then I used to be able to 

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Also, said thoughts tend to be more insidious when I haven't had any "real'' OCD thoughts for a long time, aka thoughts that actually last for more than a minute and actually feel like threats, and I guess such thoughts feel worse when I haven't had them for a long time. 

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On 4/12/2017 at 23:38, efes said:

Also, said thoughts tend to be more insidious when I haven't had any "real'' OCD thoughts for a long time, aka thoughts that actually last for more than a minute and actually feel like threats, and I guess such thoughts feel worse when I haven't had them for a long time. 

Pretty much what I feel now.

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Having problems and anxiety with the "lesser" thoughts is probably more common than you think.  The Biggies of OCD like fear of harming someone say , although terrifying when we first have them (and know nothing about OCD) are easier to recognise  and work on dealing with.  All my big OCD types, once I learned about the condition, were fairly easy (ish) to eliminate.  That left me with "odd" smaller doubts, often quite minor but nonetheless, just as debilitating and unsettling.  To this day I have to work on not being duped by doubts and thoughts that are far from obvious and that you won't read about in the books.  That's why I'm a work in progress, a manager of my condition rather than describing myself as recovered.

What I have learned (and continue to learn) is that when I find myself beginning to be troubled by a thought, thinking about it too much, I look at the way it makes me feel, at the anxiety (such a minor thought) is provoking and reasonably accept that this too is OCD.

As to why you still feel this way when you're ignoring the thoughts....OCD doesn't just pack up and go the moment we change tack, it's a hard slog and as PB has said, it's taken a long time for this anxiety to develop, it takes time and repeated effort.  Stick with it :)

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On Wednesday, March 01, 2017 at 01:39, PolarBear said:

Give it time. It takes a long time to build up your compulsions and for the anxiety to build up so it's going to take time for things to settle down.

Congrats on trying to ignore the thoughts. Look at them as a pain in the butt that's not worth your time. Good luck.

See when you say it took time for your compulsions to build up does that include thoughys to? Then it takes time for your compulsions,thoughts and anxiety to go back down to normal? Is that how it works?

Edited by GG150
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What I mean is that it's usually taken years worth of intrusive thoughts and compulsions fir a person to arrive at a point where they ask for help. It's not going to be fixed overnight. It's a slow process weaning yourself off compulsions and giving meaning to obsessions.

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The latest manifestation of my OCD would be another way of obsessing about political correctness, this time it's worrying about hypothetical jokes and whether or not they'd be offensive. I hope I'll ignore this theme. 

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  • 3 months later...
10 hours ago, efes said:

As long as you're nervous, you just are.

As an anxiety sufferer of more years than I care to recall, I know from personal experience that there are a number of techniques that can be employed to reduce the intensity and the duration of nervous episodes: more effectively managing one's thoughts through cognitive therapy, meditation, mindfulness - all take practice but are well worth the time and effort. Nobody has to be at the mercy of anxiety. We can all choose to take control of our emotions.

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12 hours ago, OceanDweller said:

As an anxiety sufferer of more years than I care to recall, I know from personal experience that there are a number of techniques that can be employed to reduce the intensity and the duration of nervous episodes: more effectively managing one's thoughts through cognitive therapy, meditation, mindfulness - all take practice but are well worth the time and effort. Nobody has to be at the mercy of anxiety. We can all choose to take control of our emotions.

I recently went through a nearly week-long episode of anxiety, and I remember that I only stopped getting nervous when it was finally my time to recover. I hope that won't happen again. 

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45 minutes ago, efes said:

I recently went through a nearly week-long episode of anxiety, and I remember that I only stopped getting nervous when it was finally my time to recover. I hope that won't happen again. 

I'm sorry to hear that efes. Did you try to employ any techniques to combat it? To reiterate, we can take control of our emotions. It just takes hard work.

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On 3/1/2017 at 05:48, efes said:

Who else here has felt this way?

We all. Just ignoring your thought won't stop the anxiety and uneasiness right then. It takes time for your brains chemical eco-system to change. But if you preserve, it will do with time. The time required depends on many factors but it does improve. To manage OCD you do need to learn to be easy with anxiety and not to escape from them quickly.

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On 8/12/2017 at 15:10, efes said:

I recently went through a nearly week-long episode of anxiety, and I remember that I only stopped getting nervous when it was finally my time to recover. I hope that won't happen again. 

Like, my worrying style when I'm in such episodes is that it's hard to shake me out of them, and that I have to try everything from ignoring thoughts to reassurance in the meantime when I'm still worrying. 

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BTW, I try to tell myself a lot, "You're thinking of things from an OCD perspective, so it's most likely not thinking of things objectively." However, I sometimes still stumble in convincing myself that.  

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What I found really helpful was learning about habituation and seeing the graph that shows how our anxiety drops off after a period of time. Before that my anxiety would last for days, now it is much shorter. Just knowing that it drops off helps me although of course I have a long way to go. Or you could think of something that worried you in the past and turned out to be nothing and try to apply it to this current thing. Hope you feel better soon. :)

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