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- [00:01]
A
Hi, everyone. I'm Ali Grayman. Today I wanted to talk to you about why this thought. Why did this thought get stuck? Why did I get this? Why is it still coming in? This is something I touch on fairly frequently, but I had a full video on it a while ago, and I haven't done one since then. And I find that some of the people who are new to this channel may not have this information. So I wanted to go over it in more depth, specifically doing a separate video on it. So why this thought? First, if you may or may not know, they've done studies on how many thoughts does a person get per day? An average person, OCD, not OCD, doesn't matter. The study showed about 50,000 thoughts. 50,000 thoughts. So as you can imagine, they can get pretty weird just by sheer number of them. Right? And that's again, for everybody. A person with ocd, a person without ocd. So as these thoughts are kind of streaming through your mind throughout the course of the day, one.
- [01:09]
Kind of came. And instead of disregarding it just like every other thought, just like, okay, it's just a constant stream, you said, oh, this is important, that this means something about me. This makes me a bad person, maybe. Or, what if. What if this thought hurts me or hurts someone else? You know? Right. A person without OCD would get the exact same thought. And again, they've done studies on this as well, that people with OCD and people without OCD get the same exact thoughts. So a person without ocd, or the one person who's not in danger of developing ocd, got the same exact thoughts at that. Whatever, I don't care. Moved on, right? A person with OCD said, oh, my God, what does this mean about me? And then started to think and analyze and analyze. Now, I equate this to. If you can imagine your brain has 50,000 boxes, little tiny boxes in front of it. It doesn't know what's in each box because that part of the brain doesn't understand each individual thought, so it doesn't understand what's. What's in the box cognitively. Like, what does this mean? What type of thought is it? You know, on a kind of an emotional level, he just understands it as a signal, this type of signal. So signal one, signal two, signal three. You know, there. Every box is numbered as a signal, okay?
- [02:28]
You dig in to this big, giant pile of boxes and you say, oh, this one is important. You pick it out and you give it to your brain. You say, this is important. This is very scary to Me, this is dangerous, right? When you react to OCD thought, this is exactly what you're doing, you know, so the brain's like, okay, don't worry, I will protect you. I'm going to put a little marker on it, little flag on it that says, this is important. I will bring it up all the time. I will also bring up the fear to make sure you're reacting, you know, to get you into a reaction. Don't worry, I've got this. So now it starts to bring it up again, because again, that first time you reacted with fear.
- [03:10]
It brought it up again. Now what do you do? You react with even more fear because now fear is coming in. So now fear came in and then you upped it by analyzing some more, right? So say the thought came in, or a variation of that thought came in with level six anxiety, and you started to analyze and got yourself all the way to a 10.
- [03:33]
Right? So then the brain's like, okay, it's. It's even more important. I'll put two flags on it. You know, I'll. I'll keep bringing this up all day long, right? And it starts to have this cycle of bringing up this thought over and over again, but doesn't stop there. It finds similar boxes that say it's not like. Like we said, 1, 2, 3, right? But it'll find box that's 1.01, 1.02. So boxes that are similar. So the thought can be slightly different, you know, so say, for example, if you have harm ocd, you'll want. You'll. You'll feel like you want to harm this person, but then maybe that person, you know, so it's like, or maybe you have religious OCD and you feel like you sinned in this way, but then maybe also in that way, right? So that's how the brain works because it starts to flag similar boxes because it sees how severely you're reacting to it, you know, and now what happens when you stop reacting? So at first the brain is kind of, you know, for lack of a better word, shocked by your behavior. You know, it's like, why you're not reacting. This is scary. You just, you literally just told me that this is scary, and now you're not reacting. Okay, I'm gonna send you a million more thoughts just to get you back into reaction. And it really. Usually what I see is there's like a lull period. So at first, when the person starts to refuse reaction, the brain can't. Doesn't catch on for the first maybe day or so. But then the brain really springs into gear and really tries to bring up thoughts all the time. I mean, the person. This is what they call the pummeling effect. The brain will be bringing it up all day long, you know, because it's trying to get you into a reaction. That machine is programmed for one thing only, is to keep you safe.
- [05:22]
And now it's kind of like you're crossing the street on the red light. You've crossed on the green light all the time, but now you're just going on the red. You know, that's not good, you know, and it needs to really warn you about all these kind of scenarios and details and all of this kind of stuff. And if it doesn't have details, it will make up details or it will connect the unconnectable things, you know, so it. No matter what needs to do, it will do something to get you back into a reaction, you know, and this is the period where you absolutely have to stay strong. You know, there is no room for. Well, of course there's room for error, and, you know, you can undo everything, you know, later. But it's. I mean, this pummeling period is pretty bad. You know, it's pretty taxing emotionally. And you want to get out of this period as soon as possible, because after a while, the brain will see that, okay, well, you're still crossing the street on the red light, but nothing bad is happening, you know, and it will start to see that maybe it's not all that valid anymore. Maybe the situation has changed because it's also programmed to shift with the. With the times, so to speak, with the situations. Right? So maybe it's not all that valid, and it starts to unflag it little by little, you know, and what usually my clients see that. I mean, I hear this all the time, is they'll have a period where, you know, like, they'll. They'll have a break in the day where they had very little or no ocd. Maybe they got caught up on something like just, you know, real life stuff or, you know, but they have very little ocd. And then it becomes, oh, for the whole day, I've had almost no ocd. And then it becomes that one day a person has ocd, then one day they don't, and then they start to have more good days than bad. And then the good days eventually overtake the situation entirely, and they very rarely have a bad day, and then not at all, you know, and then that's how OCD goes away. But this pummeling period is when the brain is really doing the shifting, you know, so you really have to stay strong. This is when it's going to attack you the most. And it doesn't matter what kind of OCD you have puro. If you have compulsions, you know, all these thoughts are coming in on autopilot. Why did this thought come in? Because back then, when you first got it, you reacted with fear. Then it came back. You reacted with fear again and again and again. In this way, you trained your brain over time that this thought is important. If, you know, you reacted to a red balloon and retrained your brain the same way, you would have viewed red balloon as being serious and scary. You know, this is how people get into situations with, like, fears of, like, clowns or.
- [07:59]
I don't know, certain, like, like, say, reptiles, you know what I mean? Like, or stuff like that, you know, because every time they get into a situation where they're faced with it, they react with a lot of fear. And that fear over time grows, you know, and it can grow to enormous proportion with that. And I can tell you that, you know, exposure and response prevention, even if you take to take it a step further, say, for example.
- [08:29]
What'S a very common situation.
- [08:33]
Say, waking up in the morning, waking up early, right? The more you dread it, the worse it seems, you know, and the more you dread it next time, right? This is a very kind of simple example, but it doesn't. It's important to note that the brain is not wired for ocd. So any thought that you give it is scary, you know, and if you keep doing it, it eventually develops into ocd, you know, because just like I gave you the example of this, every person gets this, right? Like, oh, I don't want to wake up. And then the person dreads it. If they dread it to the level of three out of 10, you know, maybe even four out of 10, which I don't really see it going that far, you know, but, you know, they start to. As they go up, they start to get more and more obsessed with the situation, more and more fearful of it. But if they get to 10 out of 10, yeah, that's OCD when they're. That's all they can possibly think about, you know, and really, any situation, if you give it enough fear, enough thought, can become an obsessive OCD situation, you know, not necessarily involving physical compulsions, but the pure O type of situation as well, you know, with the thoughts, we're more talking about the pro. Although another good kind of thing. To note is that I've never really seen a true pure O. Any thought, any pure O situation, Pure obsessional ocd. It's still accompanied by compulsions. You know, researching on Google is a compulsion. Asking is a compulsion. Confessing something is a compulsion.
- [10:10]
Avoiding things not to get triggered or to prevent something bad from happening, you know, is a compulsion. So. So any ocd, really, if you really dig into it, it does have compulsions, but that's kind of besides the point. So I hope from this video, what you understand is that the thought came in just by chance. You know, 50,000 thoughts a day. Anybody could have gotten this thought, but when you got it, you reacted with a lot of fear, you know, and over. You know, I can tell you over the years, you know, because I talk to not just my clients, but other people in their lives as well, you know, and it's kind of interesting that the other people say that, yeah, I could have gotten this thought, but I would have never reacted like this, you know, and that's quite common as well. But the person with OCD thinks, no, I'm the only one who could possibly get this thought. And again, 50,000 thoughts a day. People can get some weird thoughts, you know, it doesn't mean anything about you, and you have to look at it as it's just a faulty signal. It could have been anything. But the problem is not the thought, but the problem is it got stuck, and now you need to unstick it. And the only way to do it is to refuse any reaction. You know, that part of the brain, it doesn't understand things. It's not cognitive. It can't give you any new information.
- [11:34]
Do you know what I mean? It can't prevent danger in the way of, you know, giving you new information. It can prevent danger by telling you what you told it. So you told that it's scary, so it kind of replaced that. Oh, you remember? You didn't forget. It's still scary, you know, and just plays it over and over again for you, and you keep falling for it over and over and over again. So you have to choose to refuse. And at first, it will pummel you with all kinds of thoughts. It will really try to get you back in there, but you just have to hold on, hold on and refuse. I promise you, if you do this, you know, it will get better. It will start to get easier. That pummeling stage, the very first stage, is when you're expected to be the strongest, when you're at your weakest and you're getting the most amount of thoughts. What you're going to see is the thoughts are switching a lot but the actual anxiety to each individual thought if you take it separately it's it's not going to be as strong and it's going to start to get weaker as the days go. As you are keeping strong you will see that maybe at first it will be strong but as as it goes it will start to get weaker, you know because the thoughts are switching so fast that it's hard for the brain to get really emotionally attached to every single thought. Or maybe the thoughts are not switching in the way of a entirely new thought but the details of the existing thoughts that you're focused on keep switching, you know so that's also common as well. Well I hope you find this information helpful. If you would like to do the recovery program all the information is on youhubocd.com you can sign up from there. Thank you so much for watching. Please subscribe. I'll see you next video.