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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 younhubocd.com you can sign up from there. Let's talk practically what you should be doing when you get an OCD thought. The basic OCD formula is your rumination plus your compulsions plus your avoidances equals your current level of OCD and your current level of anxiety. In order to lower OCD all the way to zero, we need to lower rumination all the way to zero. This brings us to the point where when you get an OCD thought, feeling, image, sensation, an automatic spike, an automatic trigger that comes in, we want to react very neutrally, meaning pretty much no reaction. But the word no reaction kind of, it confuses people because it's, well, how can I have no reaction? You want to react to it for what it really is, which is it's just a thought that came into your mind. People get 50 to 70,000 thoughts a day. You got a thought. Another person with a different type of OCD would view it exactly like that. They wouldn't be surprised by it or worried about it or thinking about it. They would react neutrally, like, whatever. That's how I want you to react neutrally. I don't care. This is just coming in. It's fine. I'm choosing to ignore. Then as we progress further, right. It still bothers you. It still is trying to get you back into, or to get you into a reaction or back into a reaction you continue to disregard. So this is, this is where people kind of say, like, well, I, you know, I've reacted correctly. Why is it still here? Well, just because you reacted correctly, it doesn't mean that the OCD thought will go away instantly. It's going to be here. But your job for the rest of the day is not to give it a reaction. Don't look into the content, don't dig in. Any percentage of you zooming into the thought. Let me just, let me just think about it. Let me just figure it out. A little reassurance. Any percentage of that is the same percentage or more that it's going to take you to get back out of that. So don't zoom in because you are the one who's later going to have to do the work to zoom back out. It's bait. It literally is bait. Where your. When your OCD tells you, well, just ask ChatGPT. Well, just look online. Well, just ask somebody. It's bait, and you're gonna suffer the consequences. I cannot emphasize that more because I lived it. You've lived it. My clients have lived it. And your journey in recovery is largely a journey of saying no to this. What feels like an immed relief, an immediate fix. Like, if I just do this, I'll get my answer, and then this thought will go away. And in the. In the moment, you actually really believe that. That, you know, the OCD will go away. Even if I just solve this one thought, it's not true. OCD will not go away. If anything, you're powering it up more for the future. So again, when you get a new OCD thought, it's actually, you know, it's. It's a good idea to be prepared if. I mean, sometimes you can't be prepared, but if you know that certain situations spike, you try to go into it. Or even in the morning when you first wake up, try to go into the day with the idea of, I'm gonna get spiked. When I do, I will choose to disregard. It's really, really important that you focus on disregarding as soon as possible, because again, as soon as you start to dig yourself in later on, you're going to have to dig yourself out and making those correct choices. It's critical. You need to make correct choices because your entire recovery, again, going from the model of rumination plus compulsions plus avoidances. And if we ask, well, how much. How much did you ruminate today? Well, was it more than yesterday or was it less than yesterday? Like, even if you're not, you know, like, being accountable to, like, precisely accountable with it or anything like that. Just if I ask you, like, did you ruminate more or less, how was the rumination? And if your rumination is getting worse, if your behaviors are getting worse, then your OCD is getting worse. So the correct choices are critical for your recovery. So you wake up in the morning, try to set that plan for yourself, and you'll start to see progress, actually fairly fast with clients when we do this. I mean, of course, with my help as well. But they're doing it where we start out. Level 8 anxiety, level 9 anxiety. Within a month, they're down to level 1 2. That's hardly even. I don't even know if a doctor would classify it as OCD at level one anxiety. Could argue that everybody right now is at level one anxiety, you know, but it's important to get to zero and to stop being the ruminator also in real life. And that's another thing that I work with clients on. But anyway, that's a side note. Focus on your reaction as neutral as you can possibly be, and it will be scary always. Also, remind yourself that OCD's job is to give you the most, the most disturbing thought it can come up with. So it's kind of like the brain. Imagine this, right? Just for an illustration, the brain's like, okay, well what can we send this person to get them to react? Oh, okay, I know the worst possible thought that they can get is this. So let's send them this in a really, really scary kind of scenario. Let's do that. That's really what's happening. And then here you are. Okay, I'll take that bait. Let me just get reassurance. And then why is my OCD getting worse? So, and the reason why I'm telling you this is you need to clearly understand where you're making a mistake in order for you to fix the mistake. Not trying to call you out, not trying to it, you need to understand clearly what you're doing wrong. And then also we've talked about it in other videos, the secondary part, then let's say you didn't take the bait on the con, on your disturbing content of the thought. Then it will come up with, well, maybe you'll be stuck in OCD forever. First of all, my clients, like I said, like, they're feeling better within a month. So, like, you're not going to be stuck in OCD forever if you do the work, but your OCD will tell you that. And you need to recognize that as meta ocd, because then it will be like, oh, why don't you go on Google, Chad, GPT, Reddit, and see if other people are recovering. It's the same thing. So whether you're researching your theme or you're researching meta, you're ruminating and researching. So you have to see it as exactly the same thing. For me, when I do recovery work with clients, if one client is doing meta, ocd, rumination behaviors and stuck in that type of theme versus stuck in more classic OCD themes, it doesn't make any difference in terms of recovery. Zero difference. If anything, I would say meta is worse for the client just because it's harder for the client to catch it. So it requires a lot more training and understanding. And we talk in depth about meta. So because it's like, okay, if you have a harm OCD thought, okay, you can clearly identify it. But with meta, there's also a little bit of well, but I do have a problem, so I should kind of be looking stuff up about it. And if you do have meta ocd, no, you shouldn't. So again, not to go off topic, thought comes in, you react neutrally to your original theme thought, then it can potentially come in about the recovery. Again, you react neutrally about the recovery. You will recover. It's fine. This is just ocd. Sending beat number two and you go on with the day. Don't change your schedule, don't change what you're doing. Continue to go as you go. 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.