jojoe

The last sentence is me in a nutshell- I make progress and then something negative happens in my life and I immediately abandon it, usually subconsiously rather than consiously, only to realise about a week later that I have actually abandoned it because the thoughts get so overwhelming.

I feel like my own brain is limiting my own creativity... I'm a writer and whenever I formulate stories in my head, the negative thought "turn your brain off" happens in my head and I automatically think every idea I have after that will be bad, I become automatically stressed and the image in my head of what I was thinking gets blurry or I forget what I was going to do. Every time I try and go back and start again from before the thought happened what I wanted to finish never materialises How do I break this depressing and frustrating pattern? I get more insecure every time I think a lot of the great creatives never had this problem, and I'm stuck with it! It drains a lot of my confidence and stops a lot of my productivity. How do I stop this self-defeating process from happening?

I get a thought called "Turn your brain off" popping into my head whenever I'm thinking of something creative, and the anxiety that comes with it, actually feels like my brain is turning off, and I wont be able to think intelligently about what im thinking about/come up with good ideas. I know its just anxiety but the way the anxiety stops me in my tracks makes it feel like my brain is actually turning off- even though that's impossible.

I know CBT is a process but I feel like I've failed already. I feel like I've let a negative thought get the better of me and I'm so annoyed at myself that that has happened. It's all well and good saying that won't affect me in the long term but in the long term I feel I've failed my family, my friends and my therapist. What do I do?

when it is bad yes In the past I would disassociate as well

I was stupidly looking at social media last night and saw a picture of one of my friends and the phrase "dont have friends" popped into my head and Ive spent all day worrying that I'm going to lose all of my friends and Im going to be lonely and its all my fault, and then beating myself up because worrying about it will make it happen, therefore I'm doomed and its inevitable. I've created another vicious cycle for myself and I'm so annoyed at myself, because I'd been making decent progress up until now- I've been trying my CBT but I still feel anxious and this morning, I felt like I was on the verge of having a panic attack. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you, this is what my psychologist told me to do- Im really not good at being kind to myself though, because I hold myself to a very high standard, is there anything you would suggest to mitigate this?

For my OCD (Pure O) the only therapy that had any effect was CBT, I found mindfulness pretty useless (doesnt mean it cant work for other people) and the anti-depressants only decreased the anxiety associated with the OCD thoughts by about 20%, it doesnt actually stop the symptoms or the OCD thoughts in any way. For me I would start CBT training as soon as possible, it is effective for me, although it takes a lot of practice to train your brain to think in a different way, and am still experiencing some symptoms during recovery.

In my past I had done something wrong to another person, it had been forgotten about, but someone I knew brought it up and it started an avalanche of negative thoughts saying I was an irredeemable person who couldn't go on in life because I have this thing next to my name that I cant shake, that I dont deserve forgiveness because I'm a terrible person and I dont deserve to be happy. Is there anyone out there who may have had similar experiences who can point me in the right direction?

Yes I am, its just I havent found anyone who has the same thoughts worrying them/around similar topics that I do, also that there were no obvious compulsions that I was going through, none I could identify anyway. Thank you for this this was very relieving, I have overcome some other forms of OCD but this one has stayed with me since I started having it in 2016, so this has made it feel slightly less permanent.

Hello, I've been diagnosed with OCD for six years now and I still haven't found anyone who has similar symptoms to me. My thoughts are these phrases that seem to automatically pop into my head whenever I do something I enjoy; for example, when I'm writing, the phrase "turn your brain off" will appear either as a voice or in text form, and all of a sudden I feel I can't write anymore, the train of thought has been derailed, or when I'm laughing, the phrase "don't laugh" will pop in my head and my body goes numb and I feel like I can't laugh anymore. Whenever I start to enjoy something the phrases/thoughts pop into my head, like for example when I start to feel happy the phrase "depression/suicide" will pop into my head and I start to get anxious. Because the physical reaction of anxiety is so automatic its hard to ignore them/not ruminate on them as if nothing happened. Is this OCD, or is this something else? I've never come across people who have thoughts that are tied this directly to their day to day activities or things they like doing- so if there's anybody out there who suffers from similar symptoms it'd be great to hear from you