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Hi, everyone, I'm Ali Grayman. Today I wanted to go back to mechanics of OCD recovery. Why you are getting these thoughts, what makes them go away? What makes them come in? So, first of all, just like I was saying in the previous video, 50,000 Thoughts a Day is the average amount of thoughts that any person gets with OCD or without ocd. Second, they've done studies that show that people with OCD and people without OCD initially get the same thoughts. So your thought that you think is so weird that nobody else would ever get. Well, people without OCD get those thoughts as well. So in the course of a day, out of 50,000 thoughts a day, some can be pretty strange. And again, for people with ocd, for people without ocd. Now, why did this strange thought get stuck? If we take, for example, a person is driving a car, a person, let's take two people, one person with ocd, one person without ocd, and they have. Both of them have the same thought of, oh, what if I swerve into oncoming traffic? So this thought can happen to a person with ocd. This thought can happen to a person without ocd. Now, a person without OCD who's not about to develop ocd, let's say that that would be more correct way to say it. They would just say, well, that's a weird thought, whatever, move on. You know, they wouldn't take it seriously. They wouldn't attach meaning to it. A person who's about to develop OCD on this topic would say, what does this mean about me? I'm a bad person. I've actually my hand moved a little bit. Does that mean that I could actually do this? I felt in that second that I could do this. Oh, I'm really, really bad. I can't be trusted. Maybe I shouldn't drive anymore at all. I feel so guilty. I feel so ashamed. All the other people in the car wouldn't have this thought. It's just me. No. And this logic goes on and on and on. So the person that's not about to develop ocd, they've already forgotten that they've had this thought. The person with OCD can think about this thought for days, weeks coming. And this is how OCD develops. Now, behind the scenes, what's happening in the brain now, the brain, you know, just processes 50,000 thoughts a day, you know, as it goes, but all of a sudden, you are reacting intensely, with intense fear to this one specific thought. Why? It doesn't know that part of the brain, it's not its Job to know what the thought is about. Its job is to process thoughts. So earlier in previous videos, I was trying to kind of let you picture it as a theory of little boxes. Imagine that your brain just got dumped with 50,000 little tiny boxes. In each box there's a thought it needs to sort them. It doesn't like, it's not going to go through and figure out each one. It's not its job. It just needs to sort them. Which ones are scary, which ones feel good, which ones feel bad. So you tell me, right? It's looking to you. You tell me which are important, which are not. Now you all of a sudden started to react to this box number, you know, 1005. You know, you started to react with a lot of fear. So the brain flags this box with fear. So now it's been flagged, it's been flagged to remind you that a. You still fear this. This is still important to you. It was important yesterday, so it probably is important today, you know, and boxes that are similar, you know, within that same realm, let's say, right? So it also flags those as well. So now that those boxes are flagged, the brain mimics the fear that you experienced and sends it back to you on autopilot. What do you do? A person who doesn't understand that this is now developing into an ocd? Because nobody, none of us have been, you know, trained to understand ocd, right? They react again with fear and again and again. And the neural pathway that connects fear and this specific thought, the specific signal, grows stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger with every repetition. So if you had OCD for half a decade, you can imagine how strong that connection is. Now, that's not to say that you cannot break that pathway if it's been ingrained over a long period of time. On the contrary, I actually find that people who recover fastest, not, I mean, it's not a rule, but, you know, I see patterns. I talk to people all day. I see patterns as a pattern. What I see is that usually when I talk to people. And again, this, this came just with experience of talking to people. I always kind of, in the beginning, right, 10 years ago, assumed that if you haven't had it that long, you'll recover really fast. And sometimes that's true. But more often than not, if a person only had it for say, like a month or two, they come to me and they're still in a state of shock. How their life can go from normal to this extreme misery and extreme anxiety level of which they never Even experienced and thought would be even possible. And it's hard to break them out of that shock because they're just. They're just besides themselves with shock, you know, while if you compare that to a person who's had OCD for a decade, they'll say, oh, yeah, I know what it is. I've been dealing with this for a while now, Ali, you know, let's just do this. You know, let's just overcome this. What do I need to do? They're not shocked. They're not surprised. They know their patterns. They know what time of the day they get better, what time of the day they feel worse. They. They know what triggers them. You know, they're just better aware of the scope of the situation. So if you had it for a while, don't think that it's all over. It's doom and gloom. It's not really like that at all. I've had people recover, you know, from any length of time having ocd. So that doesn't really seem to matter. So anyway, so going back to the theory. So this is how OCD operates. This is how that part of the brain operates that creates. Creates ocd. So basically, whatever you pay attention to grows. If you pay attention to something in the great. In. In like a positive way, it grows. If you pay attention to something in a negative way, it grows. If you pay attention to something in the anxiety way, extreme anxiety, it grows. And that's what creates this OCD pattern of repetitive behavior. Now, where does the repetitive behavior come from? Well, if you are in a situation where you want to. You want to prevent some sort of danger, like in real life, not. Not OCD related, right? You. You do some sort of reassurance behavior, right? You check, you ask. You know, that's normal, right? That's what people do when they don't have ocd. But what happens is, because the situation is fictitious to begin with, or maybe the situation was slightly real but extremely overblown. Such as maybe you like going back to the driving story, right? That maybe the person, you know, maybe moved their hand, jerked their hands a little bit, right? But they weren't gonna swerve. Swerve, right? So, you know, and then they. They'll say, well, I kind of did it, so maybe I would have done it all the way, you know, kind of thing. So. So sometimes. Or maybe the person say. What would be another example, Say the person was mean to somebody, you know, and they'll say, well, I'm a bad person, because it just over overblow the situation. So doesn't matter what the situation is. Your reaction is not. Doesn't justify the situation. Because of that, there's not. It just becomes a repetitive thing. There's no way the brain gets kind of locked on trying to fix it. But because you're continuing to react with fear, the thoughts continue to come in and come in and come in. Now why would. For some people, it would create this repetitive behavior, and for others it won't. It looks like it's. And again, from 10 years of experience, I can tell you this is just. Seems to be predisposition. Most people, I would say 90% of people who I talk to, they've had OCD since childhood. In childhood, OCD, and I had a separate video on it, but in childhood, OCD seems very, very mild. And, you know, if a person is, say, 30 years old, they can hardly even remember having these thoughts when they were young, right? And children's OCD is obviously different. You know, they'll worry, what if something bad happens to my parents, usually? Or they'll avoid stepping on cracks. You know, things like that, you know, or I. I have to only eat this food, but not that food. Like those kinds of things, you know, counting to a certain number, avoiding certain numbers, avoiding certain colors, you know, so. So those kinds of things I see more so having a bad thought with kids, you know, so most people have had it at least a little bit as, as kids. And then as they grow, um, they can have years. When they don't have it, then it comes back, Then they don't have it, then it comes back. Um, but usually around 20 years old, I would say probably, if we kind of take a larger scope, probably somewhere between 16 to 22, maybe 23, usually that's when it really ramps up to like, this is a problem, you know, when it's with the child, you know, it's kind of like, it's kind of a little bit of an issue, but it's not a full extreme issue most of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time. But this is where it kind of. It becomes fully grown ocd, so to speak. So the fact that you got stuck in that specific situation. So say this, these people with the driving, right, with the example, the fact that the OCD started with the driving is very, very trivial. It really could have been anything. The brain in that, on that day, at that time, was specifically primed for starting ocd, starting an OCD obsession. If it wouldn't have been that, it would have been something else. Within, you know, the upcoming week. That's what I mean. That's the impression that I'm getting, again, from the experience that I have. So a lot of the times, you know, you kind of go back and you start to think, well, if I was just not there, if I, you know, something was different that day, maybe it wouldn't have happened. You know, it would have happened. So it just wouldn't have happened that day with that situation. It would have gotten into something else, or it would have been, next time you were driving, you would have got into that, you know? But the point is, this is scary. This is important to you, and it's the opposite of who you really are, and that's why it's getting stuck, you know? So it is extremely important for you to really understand what I'm saying here and for you to really kind of understand it. Not just like, oh, I heard Ali talking about it once. You need to remember to the point that if somebody woke you up in the middle of the night and asked you, how does. How did OCD happen? You need to be able to just kind of say it. If you woken up in the middle of the night, you need to have it in your subconscious. You need to really understand this is a mechanical thing. They're just symptoms. You know, the fact that it feels real is irrelevant. The fact that you feel guilt, shame, all of these additional feelings, you can have physical sensations as well. It's all part of ocd. It's just like, you know, if you had the flu and you're like, oh, why am I having all this, like, liquid coming out of my nose? I don't know, why am I coughing? Why. Why am I more tired and my eyes are, you know, red? And why do I have a fever? Same thing. Exactly the same thing. They're just symptoms. Physical symptoms. Feeling real, getting images, getting feelings of guilt and shame. Symptoms. They're just symptoms. And why are you getting symptoms? Because this is the opposite of who you actually are. And why is it getting stuck? Is because you keep reacting with fear. So to undo all that, you have to stop, choose to not react with fear. And every time the thought comes in and the question I get most often when I say this is, people say, well, I get thoughts a million times a day. So should I disregard a million times a day, Ally? And the answer is yes. Yes, a million times a day. Because before a million times a day, you paid attention to this thought, which got. This is what got you here. And now you need to undo that by refusing over and over and over again every day, all day. Because if you're not refusing, it means you're paying attention. And if you're paying attention, it means you're getting worse, you know, and it's not a perfect process because you won't be able to withstand a million attacks per day. So at least most of the time you need to do the right thing or moving towards doing the right thing most of the time. So if right now you're like at zero and you're just doing reassurance, so again, 5% per day in 20 days, doing 5% more each day. In 20 days you will be doing 100% response prevention. You know, just do 5% more than the previous day. You know, even if you take a few days off, it'll be a month, you know, balance back out, whatever, you know. So it, the recovery doesn't take that long. But again, the recovery. I just want to be clear that recovery is not going to take a month. You know, I would say full recovery takes about. It depends on your situation. It's hard to. It's hard to say. But I would say about six months is what I see on average. But when I say six months, I mean six months of extreme focused work. So if you're kind of like, well, I've had this for years and I'm not even getting better, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about suffering, I'm not talking about kind of doing the work. I'm talking about getting your hands dirty. Figuratively or in some cases literally. If you have contamination OCD and really making it the focal point of your day, this is the only thing that matters. I'm focused on my recovery 100% from that point when you start to take it really seriously. From that point, about six months, you know, and after about, I would say three months, you will feel like you're probably almost fully recovered at this point. I'm kind of like reviewing a lot of the previous videos because I feel like it's important because new people might not know this information. But after three months, you might feel like you're fully recovered. You are not. And as soon as the wind blows the wrong way, some sort of real life stress happens. It can trigger OCD all over again. The further you go in your recovery, the less of a chance of you being triggered. But in the beginning, the chance is very high of you to get triggered. And OCD can switch to a different theme or whatever, you know, or just give. Bring you more from the old theme, it can be really either or. So you just have to be focused. And just because you feel good, it doesn't mean that the brain is fully healed. So continue to do exposures, continue to do recovery work. Be very focused where that you need to eradicate this thing 100%. Because if you leave it at say like 5%, oh, it doesn't really bother me. I have thoughts come in every once in a while, but, you know, it doesn't have any impact on my life anymore. Life is great. It's great to a certain point. But what's going to happen if you have some sort of an extreme life situation happen to you, as we all have happened to us at some points, you know, then what? Are you going to fall down or are you not? You know, and you need to be done with OCD to make sure that, you know, you won't get a random thought. And because you're so focused on life emergencies, you get caught up in it and start to react the wrong way and get this. This thing started again, you know, so that's just a word of caution because a lot of the times I see that happen where the person is kind of like, because they're so happy to be out of it, right? They're celebrating too soon a little bit. So. And you know, and I've made that mistake when I was going through recovery as well. So, you know, so it's totally understandable. But no, you need to finish it. You need to get it to 100% gone. And that means just continuing to do the work even after you feel like you really don't need to at this point anymore. So I hope you find this video helpful. If I missed anything that when it comes to OCD theory or if you have any questions about anything I said, please leave a comment below this video, not below others, but below this specific video, because I'll take a look and I'll make sure that I answer those questions. Because again, it's vital for you to really understand how OCD works and to understand that this is just whatever theme you have, no matter how scary, disturbing it is, it's just a theme. It's just your brain thought, I wonder what the worst thing would be. Oh, I know this. And that's why it got stuck. It's literally because you think this is the worst thing ever. So that's why I hope you find my videos helpful. Thank you so much for watching. If you haven't subscribed to this channel, please subscribe. I talk daily about all things related to OCD recovery. If you'd like to do one on one recovery program with me, all the information is on you have OCD.com if you do decide to sign up, please book. If not all your sessions, then as many sessions as you can because it comes in packages. So if you say you signed up for 15 sessions, book the full 15 sessions so you get the times that you you need. Because it might be hard if you don't do that, then it's hard to book kind of in the future can become a little bit of an issue. Thank you for watching. I'll see you tomorrow.