insideout

Anyone? I am so exhausted but cannot sleep - I wake up again immediately, in a state of anxiety, gasping for breath.

Hello It's been a while since I posted here - I hope things are going okay for everyone. I have been managing better over the past while, but a very distressing event has caused my intrusive thoughts to flare up again. I am doing what I can to manage, but am struggling with sleep. I wake up very early in the morning, and as I fall back to sleep I find myself panicking (in a half-asleep state) which wakes me again. Any advice?

Recovery isn't a straight line Nikki, as I have to keep reminding myself too. It's painful and distressing and a lot of work, but we can only pick ourselves up and keep going forward. You aren't going to get certainty, and even if you did you know full well your OCD would replace it with another unanswerable torture. Believe me, I am hurting too - we have all either struggled here or we continue to struggle. Everyone feels that their theme is the worst theme you could ever possibly have, and everyone goes to hell and back, sometimes multiple times in one day. But you are strong, and you can get past it. You just need to keep going.

All the same, thoughts are just thoughts.

You're hyper-sensitive to the idea that you might find someone else attractive, so any thought that you might find someone else attractive is distressing for you. I'm guessing that you start to imagine yourself with them to check how you feel, which to me seems like a compulsion. It doesn't matter if you really fancy them or not, and given that your partner is so sensitive to this area, I would suggest that you don't need to tell your partner. Love is an action, and you choose what you want to do - if you want to choose to stay with your partner, stay with him. Thoughts are just thoughts and feelings are just feelings. Both go through you and eventually disappear.

Had a really awful night - kept waking up in a panic and awake for hours with my mind going crazy. Every time i dozed back off, I was panicking in my sleep and kept waking up again. My partner was woken early because of it - feel very defeated.

That makes a lot of sense Taurean, especially when I think about how this all kicked off again for me - it was probably one of the most stressful times I've been through in my life. Typical OCD to come along right when you need it least! On the plus side, I just got through a phone call there, which is something I was very anxious about - spiky thoughts all the way through, but I am here on the other side of the phone call and nothing bad has happened!

Thanks Taurean, that's really good advice. I really like the advice you gave to biscuitcat too! I am just back from picking up the keys for our new house, so OCD has been prickling away. It's odd just now, because today I feel like I'm just a little bit separate from OCD, enough to see that it is OCD, but the thoughts, as you say Taurean, like to have front and centre, and are none too happy about being put out of view. The temptation to let them back into the spotlight is huge, and also scary - it's like free falling almost? Does that make sense?

I think mindfulness can be amazing, but I know I have found it really difficult to do when my thoughts are at their worst. I was using the Headspace app, which is really good, but a little too long for me at the moment. On a recommendation I downloaded apps called Calm and Insight, which both have guided meditations of different lengths, starting at as little as a minute. I don't like the voices as much on these, but on the Calm app I found something I really like - there is a button saying 'Breathe', and when you click on it it has a continuous circle, with a dot moving round it, and the circle is cut into different sections for inhale, hold and exhale. Focusing on the circle has been really calming for me, and gives me a minute of mindfulness which I can build up over time

I'm trying hard not to battle with the thoughts or neutralise them - I'm saying 'that's an OCD thought' and trying to refocus myself on what I'm doing. Is that not right? Sometimes I worry that I'm shutting the thought down too quickly and refocusing too quickly, almost like I'm trying to ignore the thought (which I know isn't right either) but I'm not sure how to fix this - any advice?

Hello I'm continuing to work on accepting and labelling thoughts, and I am doing my best to reduce/stop compulsions. I am exhausted - is this all part of recovery?! One thing I'm finding difficult is work - it's definitely an improvement so far, as I've actually been able to do some work. but at the same time I find that I am not managing my compulsions so well - I'm struggling to accept and label the thoughts without reacting to them by shouting out 'no!' (I am working from home, so no one can hear me do this). Do I just continue as I am and eventually the compulsion will improve? Or is there something I should be doing to handle the compulsions better?

I feel this way too. We're not even midway through the afternoon and I am exhausted from the amount of times I have had to label and re-focus. I was reading last night that our minds naturally fall into the grooves we have created - our minds like the deepest grooves, which have been worn away by constant thinking. If you want to create a new groove, you have to keep chipping away until it is at least as deep as the one your OCD has made. So, people are right - so long as we keep letting our minds slip into the OCD groove, we can only expect our minds to keep gravitating towards that groove

Thanks both - having read more of Breaking Free of OCD, I can see the approach you have both described. CBT for me has been exclusively about workbooks, so it's interesting to understand this definition.

Thank you again Polar Bear, that is really good advice. I have been persevering with being aware of compulsions and refocusing my attention when they come into play. It's hard, exhausting work, but today I got a taste of how insistent OCD is, when I walked past three girls who were on the heavier side (not that there is anything wrong with this, it was just an observation) and I got tossed up "what if you have big kids?". A moment of bemusement amongst the pain...

Thank you both. Polar Bear, I think you may be right, and this is probably why I shouldn't consider typed therapy - it is so easy to interpret people's words to the tune of your anxious thoughts. However; I also think she just isn't very good - today's advice was to 'try relaxing and calming down, then see how you feel'.