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I just wanted to talk a little bit about productivity while having ocd. When I was going through college, I had untreated ocd. And let me tell you what, it led to an uphill battle when it came to productivity and studying. And just a small example of how that happened in my OCD journey. One of the things that I had for a very long time, I still have it, is the urge or feel like it's necessary for me to read something forward and then backward and then forward. And when I say backward, I mean, for instance, if I were reading the word stop, I would have to read stop and then pots and then stop again to make it feel just right. And so me trying to read and study for tests and just in general was just a struggle because imagine I'm trying to read sentences forward and backward and forward. And sometimes I wasn't sure if I did it right, so I'd do it again. That's one example of how somebody can impact your productivity when you have ocd. Hi, I'm Tracy, and I have OCD as well as treat OCD here at nocd. So let's get into today's topic. Ocd, sort of a brief overview of what it is. It's having obsessive thoughts or obsessive doubts that are followed by compulsions, whether mental or behavioral, physical compulsions to try to neutralize or do away with those scary and bothersome obsessions and those behaviors that people do, or those mental things that people do as compulsions. Those feed the ocd, if you will. And the OCD over time tends to get worse and worse the more we compulse pulse. So that's a little explanation about ocd. OCD can affect your focus and your daily tasks in so many different ways. And we're going to talk about a couple of those right now. Sometimes people are having intrusive thoughts. It can be something like, it happens to me all throughout the day. It can be like, oh, you're going to throw yourself out a window, or, hey, you're going to push your daughter down the stairs. Or I'm just trying to do my work. Maybe I'm. I'm trying to type up a report and my OCD is saying, you have to read this forward and backward and forward. Which I don't do because I've been treated with ERP and I don't do those types of compulsions anymore. But I still get the intrusive thoughts and the intrusive feelings and urges. Like that is something that I need to do sometimes. It's something like checking. This happens sometimes at work. So maybe you're sending an email or a text message to somebody and you want to just keep reading it over and over to make sure. Does it. Is it perfect? Is it the way that you really wanted that to be? Did you accidentally put a bad word in there or something along those lines? And then maybe you keep going back to tweak it. Things like that, that can really just start getting in the way of you completing tasks that you have. The same thing can happen whether you're a student, whether you're a worker. It can even happen to people who are at home with home duties. Maybe it's that you are trying to clean something in a certain way a certain amount of times, or maybe it's, you know, disinfecting yourself in some way over and over, and now you're late to do other things you needed to do. Or it's getting. Getting in the way of your day. So even an example of that, when I was raising my small kids who were small, now they're all old, but I had very, very intense, untreated ocd. And so a lot of things that would protect. Would affect my productivity during the day were doing my compulsions with my children. So, you know, watching to see what they touched and decontaminating them and all of these other types of things, avoiding certain places. And so all of those kinds of things really got in the way of me being able to do the things I needed to do. Maybe I just needed to go grocery shopping. That's another example. I would need to go grocery shopping. I would get into a grocery store, and sometimes I would have intrusive images and thoughts and also, like, urges that felt like I was going to harm people at the grocery store. I'm going to throw a heavy can of something at somebody's head at the grocery store. Sometimes it was an intense anxiety, like I'm gonna pass out while pushing my child in the cart, and then I'm gonna fall on the ground and I'm going to break open my head, and then somebody's gonna steal my kid. And. And so again, just trying to even do something simple like go grocery shopping could turn into an absolute disaster and impact my ability to get through my day. And I think a lot of people don't realize that those things are ocd. And that OCD can impact us on every level of what we're trying to do. It could be sleep. You know, how is it interrupting your sleep? Well, if you're getting up to Check if you're getting up to. Sometimes I would watch my kids breathe to make sure that they were breathing. I would check the door lock. I would want to make sure the stove was off so no fires happened in the night. Maybe it's getting in and out of bed because it didn't feel just right how you got in or maybe you saw something and you want to change your sheets or so it can really just interrupt everything that you are trying to do during your day. In the evening maybe you're just trying to cook. Even sometimes I'm cooking now and it's something happens and I oh, you know, was was a piece of the spinach that you put in, you know, contaminated? I don't know. So even just the thoughts and it can be really draining. The good news is that therapy can help. The proper evidence based research supported therapy. We use ERP because it is the gold standard treatment for OCD and related disorders. We help people manage their symptoms and improve their productivity as a result. One of the examples of that is for instance I gave the email example. Maybe so back in the day I used to go over my emails so many different times before sending them. I would rewrite tiny parts, then I would send them, then I would read them over and over again in my scent to make sure that it said what I thought it said and whatnot. Now I can just send an email. ERP taught me how to set limits for myself as somebody who's going to have those types of urges and intrusions come into my life. So now when I want to send an email, I write an email, I read it over one time, I hit send and I don't allow myself to go back and check. So you can see how much time that freed up for me even when it just comes to emails. And I send a lot of emails every day, I respond to a lot of emails every day. And that's just one area of demonstrating how you can get some time back in your day by learning about the ways that OCD is interrupting your day and learning the tools that help you to get those better managed so that you can get your productivity back. It's also really important to develop healthy routines. Things like making sure that you get enough sleep and you're not doom scrolling on your phone in bed until late hours when you have to wake up early, eating, eating reasonably healthy things. Obviously nobody has to, you know, live off of just, you know, spinach or anything like that, but things that are help healthy in a holistic fashion. How are you taking care of your body? Are you only putting in sugar and caffeine? You know, we know things like that don't can work against you in a normal day, let alone in a day where you're trying to manage your ocd. Things like being physically active, whatever that means to you, at your level of ability to do so. Even if that means like you, maybe you work from home. I work from home. My job is to be in this very chair. And so I do things like I get up and I stretch and I go outside. Sometimes I'll just walk around my house, um, just go up and down a hallway, you know, whatever it is. But even in the smallest ways can add up and be really important part of your overall care routine when it comes to productivity and being refreshed and feeling good. As you can see, OCD impacts every aspect of your life, including productivity. Getting access to the right tools and treatment can help whether you've tried ERP or not. Head over to nocd.com and schedule a 15 minute call with our care team and see how we can help you.