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Ali. I'm Ali Graymond. I'm an expert in OCD recovery because for the last 19 years, I've been helping people fully recover from OCD. If you would like to do personal coaching with me, all the information is on. You have OCD.com you can sign up from there. Let's talk about the first 60 seconds after an OCD spike. This is the most critical time where you need to make sure that you are reacting correctly. Literally your entire recovery, and I don't say this lightly, but your entire recovery depends on you, little by little, developing this ability to react correctly in this very short amount of time period. This is the thing that matters the most. When the thought came in, the thought was bothersome, the thought was intrusive, could be coming as a thought, as a feeling, as an image, as a sensation. A spike came in in some sort of way. And now what? What are you going to do? And that first 60 seconds decides where this new OCD thought goes. Because if you react the wrong way, it's going to give you even stronger wave of anxiety. It's going to keep wanting more of a reaction from you. You start to research, go online, secret assurance, try to piece things together. You get worse and worse and worse. It takes days to get out of it. Then you have this OCD aftertaste. Then, because you've just powered up one spike, another spike comes in. So all of this starts, this giant snowball of OCD starts because in that 60 seconds, and I'm not saying exactly 60, but that first little bit, you reacted incorrectly. So all the training you are doing in OCD recovery is for you to react correctly when you have an OCD spike and correct reaction, meaning whatever, doesn't matter, not important, very neutral. Show your brain that this doesn't really matter. You don't want to say, I'm afraid of it, I want to run away. You don't want to say, I don't like it, I want to push it away. You're saying, I, I don't really care if it comes or goes. I don't care if it stays. I don't care what it does, because it's not important. If we take a person who doesn't have ocd, how do they react to maybe similar thoughts? Like, if they had a similar thought, how would they react? They would react with indifference. They'd be like, I don't care if I have these types of thoughts, it doesn't bother me. I, I don't really care. And because they react that way, they don't get one after the other after the other on this topic. Sometimes they'll get. Anybody can get any kind of thought, but they don't get this topic over and over again specifically because they're not flagging it as important. You, on the other hand, so far have been flagging it as extremely important every single time. So your brain's like, okay, yeah, we gotta send them more of this. So now we have to unflag it, meaning correct reaction. So let's go through this one more time. Thought, feeling, image, sensation comes in. It's disturbing. It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine. Maybe you feel like a bad person, maybe you feel guilty, maybe you feel like you need to prevent something bad from happening, that you will be responsible. This is automatic OCD spike. OCD thought feeling coming in. You're not responsible for that, but you are responsible for. What are you going to do next? The, the first 60 seconds, what are you going to do? You're going to take it seriously for 100 millionth time, you're going to do it again. You're going to have the consequences if you do it again, right? It's going to feel more and more intense. Other thoughts are going to come. We know how it goes. Or are you going to take the brave step and say, no? This time I'm choosing not to react. This is ocd. So again, you don't need to accept worst case scenario, you don't need to push it away, just let it be there, like, yeah, whatever, and go on with what you were doing. Don't alter plans, don't change anything, just go on with what you're doing. The more you react like that, the less thoughts over time you're gonna get. Now there is kind of a caveat to it that in the beginning, because your brain is used to you getting these thoughts, you actually might get a little, maybe a little more thoughts. Not to kind of scare you. It's not really bad. It's just how the brain operates that it might send you a few more just to test you. Like you're gonna react, you're gonna, you know, know. And again, if you don't take the bait, you stay cool, calm and collected in the first 60 seconds, you go on with life. Little by little, you will start to see that the thoughts are coming in less. This is what I'm seeing. I mean, all the time I pretty much, I hear the same thing from all my clients, that at some point, right, and some people recover much faster, some people recover much slower, but everybody Hits that point where they're like, well, I'm. I'm not even getting that many thoughts anymore. I'm. I'm kind of living my life. That's the point you want to get to, but you will never, ever get to that point if you keep having an extreme reaction every time a thought comes in. So you gotta find the strength and the bravery to say, enough is enough. This is thought number 1 million. It can stay if it wants. I am making a brave, active choice to move on. I swear to you. I've been doing recovery work with clients for 20 years. I've never seen a person be wrong, and they should have reacted, but they didn't. It's always ocd. And ocd, when it comes in, it has that unmistakable flavor where it's like. It almost kind of makes you almost, like, physically sick a little bit. Like, it's kind of. It's hard to really verbalize how it feels. Obviously you know how it feels, but it's. It's. It's. It's this feeling. It's like. And it wants a reaction from you immediately. Whether to check, to analyze, to ask for reassurance. It wants something from you. So if it has these components, make the brave choice. You will not be wrong. And the practice of you doing this over and over again. So another spike came in again. How. How did you react in the first 60 seconds? Another spike came in again. How did you do it over and over again? Eventually, I promise you, you will get good at it, because you'll start to catch yourself more. I see this with clients all the time, that the further we go through recovery, the more they're like, oh, you know, I had a thought today. Made the choice not to react, and then it didn't develop, because that's what you're doing when you're not reacting. You're not allowing it to develop further. So let's say that week of suffering that you were gonna have, if you would have reacted incorrectly. And we've all been there, right? Where you react to something and it's just a snowball effect, doesn't happen anymore. You might feel a little bit unsettled at first. Right? But it goes away pretty fast. Also, it's a good idea that when you get a spike and you're trying to do the right thing in that first 60 seconds, try to be busy. It's. It's much easier to disregard something when you're busy than when you are not doing that much. So how would that look in practice? It would look like, you get a spike and you're. And your brain wants you to do the behavior, to solve whatever, and instead you're like, oh, I got to call Bob. Oh, I got to do this, I got to do that. I'm going to go do that. And you actually start doing that. And at first it might feel almost unbearable. Like your. Your mind is in two places at once. You can't really concentrate. You can't really get your words right. That's also very common. So you might feel like that. But you will notice that after a while of, let's say, talking to Bob, you start. It starts to actually ease off and you start to feel a little bit lighter. So this is how the process goes. Like the anxiety curve, right? Where it goes up, goes up, goes up, hits a peak. You feel like your knees are getting weak. You feel like, I absolutely have to react. And when you choose not to, I promise you it will not last forever. And in my previous video from yesterday, I was talking about the delay technique, when if you just delay for a little while, by the end of it, most likely you won't even have to do the behavior. So always remember the first 60 seconds. It's really, really important that you get it right. And it's going to take a while to react correctly. So don't get discouraged. Just use every time you get a spike. Instead of being like, oh, my God, another OCT thought, another spike. No, this is good. We're practicing and you need that practice. Thank you for listening. If you have not subscribed, please subscribe. If you would like to do private coaching with me, please sign up through you have ocd.com I'll see you tomorrow.