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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 youhubocd.com you can sign up from there. Let's talk about how to reduce and eventually eliminate compulsions. Let's say you have a certain amount of things that you are doing each day, so you have certain compulsions that you are doing. Let's say you have a hundred compulsions in the course of an entire day. If you reduce by one compulsion each day, in 100 days you will get to zero. If you reduce by two, in 50 days, you will get to zero. The caveat here is that you cannot add in other areas. So that list of 100 has to remain just that list. Because what's going to happen likely is as you are getting rid of the list little by little, your OCD is trying to gain power somewhere else. So it's trying to pull from other areas. So it's important that you don't add. And if you happen to add, then your task is to reduce by more. So you get back on track with your goal number of compulsions that you are reducing by each day. I hope you understand what I mean. And always remember that you basically have two options when OCD pushes you to do a compulsion. If you, once you're in this, you're at level 10 anxiety, right? So OCD pushed you to do a compulsion, send you a scary thought, scary feeling. You are at level 10, right? If you choose to do the compulsion, perhaps, maybe not a fact, but perhaps you might be able to drop your anxiety low temporarily because you did reassurance, like compulsion reassurance behavior. But within a few minutes, an hour, you're going to feel like you need to do another compulsion because you just fed the disorder versus the other option is if you don't do the compulsion, your anxiety remains high and your OCD be like, oh, you're never going to be okay for the rest of your life. You'll just worry about this one compulsion. Do you believe that? Like, give me a break. So if you don't do compulsion A, you're kind of delaying the rest of the compulsions. I hope you're following what I'm saying. And by delaying the rest of the compulsions over time, right? Like throughout the time of the day. So let's say you were going to do compulsion number one at 1 o'. Clock. By 1:30, you already want to do another one. But if you delay the compulsion number one to, let's say four o', clock, then that time you were compulsion free. Now, of course, there's also rumination that feeds into it. And if you were ruminating the entire time, it's not the best. But if you are right now in a situation where you're trying to eliminate compulsions, these are just some of the important things to keep in mind. You're not winning by doing a compulsion. If anything, you're feeding the disorder more and your level of anxiety being at a 10, whether you do the compulsion, it's going to be at level 10 and then let's say after the compulsion, it will drop a little and then go back to level 10 with some other one, or if you delay, it's going to be at level 10, it's going to be at level 10 both ways. But in one of these ways you recover. So don't be afraid. When OCD tells you, well, you're going to be so anxious, it's going to be overwhelming anxiety. You have to do this compulsion. You will be anxious anyway and you were already anxious. And you're going to be able to push through that anxiety just like you push through it already up to this moment. Don't let that scare you. It's not going to be some incredible anxiety. It'll be the same anxiety that you experience all the time. But if you refuse or at least delay a compulsion, you're feeding OCD less and less and less and less. And that reduction of, let's say, 199, 98, and in 100 days, you're zero. That's what you want to do. But it takes dedication, determination, every day pushing forward. Look at it like this, that this is your life. This is your number one priority. What's more important than getting your life back on track? So treat it like that. 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 youhaveocd.com I'll see you tomorrow.