Anxiety Stemming From OCD & Addressing It

[taurean]

This is a subject I know well from personal experience, and before I realised my anxiety problems arose from OCD I was trying to treat myself from anxiety self-help books, with some benefit but without the necessary addressing of the OCD. 

Anxiety is an alert mechanism we have that makes us aware of a threat and gives us the opportunity to tackle it. 

I was taught in therapy to view this alert mechanism as a sentry inside of us looking out for threat. 

When the sentry sees a potential threat, he compares it to other threats in his memory. If he finds a match to a known  threat, he sounds the alarm. 

If no match he analyses the threat and if he thinks it's real, he sounds the alarm. 

This is fine for real alerts like fire, burglary, flood, attack - and when alerted we can deal with them.

With attack we can stand and fight, or flee - and the anxiety response of our mind and body sends fuel to our muscles through stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline to enable us to do this. 

With other real threats we can call for help or resolve them, and our anxiety response will reduce from resolution. 

In OCD the anxiety response follows a threat which is created by OCD from a falsehood exaggeration or revulsion. We cannot fight or flee and burn up the stress chemicals in doing so, so we feel anxious and headachy and full of muscular tension and distress, as that induced high arousal is unmitigated. 

The real and lasting way to deal with anxiety caused by OCD is to work through cognitive behavioural therapy, so we learn not to believe the OCD, that the threat is not real and there is no need for a behavioural response that leads to anxiety.

But there are additional ways too that can meantime ease our anxiety. 

We can learn to treat intrusions as OCD, leave them be and refocus away. 

We can learn distraction techniques. 

We can learn and apply relaxation techniques. I am doing so now by writing, and at the same time listening to "smooth classics"  on classic fm. 

I was reading an article on mitigating stress, and it said sales of classical music are soaring and many people find it helps them relax and unwind. 

You can also buy special relaxation music ( I have a lot of this)  and learning meditation skills helps us to reduce stress and anxiety. 

Finally mindfulness has proved enormously helpful to me. As explained by my clinical psychologist, who  teaches mindfulness-based CBT for OCD,  we do all our obsessing and compulsing in a part of the brain she calls the active "doing" part. 

We can learn to switch our mental focus to the benign "just being"  part of the brain, where our brain is calm and we are practising mindfulness - just operating in the present in the moment. 

This mindfulness approach, together with learning self-forgiveness (for we are not responsible for our OCD-induced thoughts and feelings and so are not bad as a result) and love kindness,  proved to be the means whereby I was personally able to break free of constantly-repeating OCD intrusive thoughts. 

We OCD sufferers can resolve our OCD issues in these ways.

It's not about taking pills. It is about changing our thinking and behavioural responses to OCD through CBT, and meantime learning simple additional ways to calm the anxiety response. 

Edited January 19, 2019 by taurean

[bruces]

Anxiety is an evil thing 

[taurean]

Anxiety from a real threat, as opposed to an OCD threat, is a necessary evil, with a valuable purpose to alert us to take action. 

 

Edited January 20, 2019 by taurean

[worriedjohn]

In my case acknowledge the thought and gently refocusing in other thoughts only help. Engaging with the thought anyway would start endless loop. And yes, mindfulness is the thing I am getting interested most in managing my OCD.

[malina]

I also think that your attitude is really important. It's so easy to get caught up in the pain and to hate the OCD or yourself or life in general for putting you through all this. That kind of thinking is unhelpful and will only make you bitter. I guess it's important to just accept the situation that you're in and that you will have to put in a lot of work and effort to change things.

[taurean]

12 hours ago, malina said:

It's so easy to get caught up in the pain and to hate the OCD or yourself or life in general for putting you through all this. That kind of thinking is unhelpful and will only make you bitter. 

That's so. This is where "The Four Steps" are helpful. We learn to see that intrusions are OCD (step 1 "relabel"  then "re-attribute" them to OCD (step 2).

Step 3 and we leave the intrusion be and "refocus" away. 

And in step 4 we "revalue" - the realisation, for me, that the real we is still there with our core character values intact. We aren't bad evil or whatever for having thoughts and urges that were created by OCD - we bear no stigma or responsibility for them. 

When we learn to apply these four steps on top of the core therapy of CBT improvement should begin, but we must work hard on each step, and not connect with, or give belief to, the intrusions - at the same time weaning ourselves off carrying out compulsions - they only make things worse not better.