In the movie “As Good as It Gets,” Jack Nicholson’s character Melvin finds his breakfast ritual derailed when the one waitress who knows how to serve his OCD-driven requirements leaves her job. It’s a funny movie yet illustrates how everyday activities become mountains to climb for people with OCD. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) wreaks havoc in a person’s everyday life and keeping the chaos under control takes psychotherapy and sometimes medication.
Good self-care techniques help life become simpler and less stressful for people with OCD. It takes considerable effort to put self-care routines in place because with OCD, a person’s enemy is their own mind. What seems to be the truth, what appears to be real often isn’t in OCD, so learning new ways to behave feels strange, almost like inviting disaster.
Learn to Cope Effectively with Adaptive Coping Skills
Stress coping skills and anxiety management are great ways for people with OCD to turn down the pressure. To use good coping skills with OCD requires breaking down the components of OCD. Let’s start with obsessive thoughts.
Obsessive thoughts are intrusive. They’re not welcome and not wanted but inject themselves into the front of our consciousness regardless. People with OCD attribute great meaning to those thoughts and act on them as if they were premonitions of truth instead of transitory garble from our brains
Indeed, most people have strange or unwanted thoughts pop up from time to time, but the reactions of those with OCD and those without OCD are different. People without OCD don’t attribute important or relevance to those thoughts. They don’t feel compelled to do anything about unpleasant, intrusive thoughts. People with OCD do attribute significance to these thoughts, which fuels worry.
Worry about intrusive thoughts is the impetus for anxiety-reducing rituals that form the basis of externalized anxiety reduction. Essentially, the rituals that accompany OCD reduce intolerable anxiety, but the jump between the anxiety-provoking situation and the accompanying ritual or rituals is so fast that most healthy stress-reducing techniques simply aren’t fast enough to get the individual’s stress level down rapidly enough.
Confrontation self-talk, however, works. When an obsessive thought arises, the client learns to contradict the message of that though with self-talk. Saying “That’s not so, that doesn’t happen, and I’m in charge of my thoughts” doesn’t work miracles immediately, but these kinds of self-talk interventions become habitual. They interrupt the “circuit” between obsessive thought and compulsive actions.
Damaris Aragon, ARNP, BC provides a full spectrum of mental health care to people in Spokane, Washington and the surrounding areas. She focuses on providing compassionate personalized care that adheres to current evidence-based standards. Reach out to Damaris through her contact page or calling 509-342-6592.
