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Mindfulness exercises for OCD that will actually help when you're feeling incredibly overwhelmed. Now, mindfulness is a skill that will supercharge your OCD recovery, but if not applied correctly, it can sometimes lead to you focusing on the wrong things, maybe doing more compulsions, maybe catastrophizing some more. And I want to really get to the bottom of this with you today by teaching you my favorite mindfulness skill. So today we are going to learn how mindfulness can be used in a way that actually supports your OCD recovery, especially when you're overwhelmed. I'm going to teach you my absolute favorite mindfulness skill. I teach every one of my clients and I teach my students. And at the end, I'm going to give you some of the tricks that OCD gives you that makes you fall back into old behaviors. So we're going to really make sure that we cover all of our bases here today. Okay? So welcome to your anxiety toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you everything I know about anxiety so that you can go and live your biggest, most meaningful life. Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I'm an anxiety and OCD specialist. I treat people with OCD and OCD related conditions, and my mission is to help you suffer less. That is my main goal with all of my students and all of my clients, and that's we're going to do today. Okay, so let's first look at what is mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the present moment, this moment right here, not moments down the road. It's noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensation from a place of nonjudgment. And it's allowing them to be there without trying to fix them or analyze them, resist them, or change them. That is what mindfulness is. It sounds pretty simple, right? But it's actually quite hard to practice. So. So my goal today is to give you the skills that I teach my clients and hopefully make it really easy to practice. Now, as always, my goal with your anxiety toolkit is to actually give you skills that you can take with you and practice anywhere you go. And so this is the one I want you to practice as much as you can. It's the one that most of my clients say was really, really helpful. So let's get started. I want you to envision a stream of water. And it is beautiful. There are flowers and there are trees, and it's green. And the water is. And the water is moving through, meandering through a bunch of rocks. Usually a riverbed or a stream bed has a bunch of rocks, around the outside and over through the water. A part of being in a stream is going around and over and through these rocks. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to imagine that you are the water. You are the flowing, moving, flexible water. And what you're going to have every single day is these emotions and thoughts and feelings that you don't have control over that are going to cause you to hit them. And you have to make a decision on how you're going to respond to these rocks. When you hit the rock, you could make a big splash and say, I hate the rocks and I don't want the rocks to be there. Or you could notice that the rocks are there and go around. Now, each one of these rocks we want to think of as an intrusive thought or an intrusive feeling, as intrusive sensation, an urge or an image. And you don't have control over these rocks. You cannot decide why they're there, what they mean and so forth. And so as you hit these rocks, I want you to practice first mindfulness skill of not judging why they're there. Every stream has a rock. We have to accept that that is a part of being in a stream, and it's also part of being a human, that you will have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable feel. Some will be really uncomfortable, some will be moderately uncomfortable. And that is just a part of life. Okay? So you are the water, and the rocks are your intrusive thoughts or your intrusive feelings. Now, sometimes the stream is very gentle, and sometimes the stream is very, very rapid. It's like, you know, the rocks are big and the water is moving fast. Again, we can't control that. But we're here to learn how to cope. Now, what I want you to practice here is this skill of being very gentle, flexible water. As you hit an intrusive thought, we are not going to judge it as bad. We are going to notice it, and we are going to gently move around it. We are not going to try and avoid it. We're not going to try and make a big splash. When it comes again, we're going to notice the rock, do literally nothing about it, and go around it. Now, what you're going to find is after you hit one rock, you're going to hit another rock, and you're going to have to make the decision to mindfully hit that rock. Observe that it's there. We're not going to try and analyze why it's there and what it means. We are going to move around it gently. And we're going to be as effective and as efficient as we can by moving around it at a pace where we do not slow down for it. We don't slow down and go, oh, my God, I don't want this thought. It shouldn't be here. You know, again, like, and stop in front of it and have a tantrum. We're just going to note that it's there and we're going to move around it. Now, what you're going to find here, and this is the beautiful part of this metaphor, is at first, when water hits a rock, the rock might be quite jagged, but the more you learn to hit the rock and move around the rock, the constant tension and traction around that rock smooths the rock and makes it nice and gentle. And the more we practice having a thought and not responding as if it's an emergency or a dangerous thing or a terrible thing or making meaning, the more we will soften those rocks as well. They will feel less jagged. They will be less jagged because we have softened it by moving around it many, many, many, many times. Again, rocks on a riverbed are usually nice and round and smooth, and that's because the water has worn it down by practicing going around it each time, not avoiding it. So your practice here is to imagine again that you are the water and every time you hit a rock, you're going to go around it. We're not throwing a tantrum about it. We're not judging it. We're not reviewing what it means or just hitting it and going around it. Now, what often happens is when you do this, you will start to get exhausted. I understand this is a practice of repetition. And I say this to all of my students in the rumination reset, which is course we have for rumination, is you are going to suck at this. Like, this is going to take a lot of practice. So I want you to armor up for this. This is going to take some work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn't have this problem. And so I don't want you to think that this should be easy. No, it's going to be pretty dang painful to start with, but nothing good comes from easy things, I have found. Right. This is a strong strength that you are going to have in your brain that you can use in any environment, Literally. This morning, my daughter went to have her finals. She's in high school. And I taught her this skill because the more you can practice having uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and not giving them attention and not Stopping and ruminating and being angry about them. The faster you can move by them and the less tension and the less suffering you have. And we're in the business of suffering less now. Often what people do is once they've done this for, I don't know, three, four, five times, they've noticed a thought. They go around the thought, they notice the thought, they go around the thought, they're not judging it, they start to pivot it and look down the stream and go, this sucks. I'm going to be doing this all day. Look at all the rocks down the river. I have to do this all day. This is not fair. This is not right. Surely there's another solution. And I want to remind you that no, there isn't a better solution. If there were, you wouldn't be in this scenario a couple of times you would have done it and it would have fixed it completely. So I want to remind you a part of being mindful, as we went back at the very beginning with that definition, is to remind you it's staying present. It's paying attention to the rock you're hitting right now. Mindfulness is not anticipating all of the things you're going to have to do throughout the day. It's staying present, just dealing with one rock at a time, not looking down the river and the stream and saying, oh my gosh, I give up. Because I can see how bad the day is going to be. Just focus on the here and the now and that's going to be your work. Staying present, staying non judgmental and being flexible. A big piece of this is our flexibility. We get really headstrong. I shouldn't have to do this. This isn't right. I shouldn't have these thoughts. Guess what? Brains have thoughts. Brains have uncomfortable thoughts. Sometimes our brains come up with complete crazy stuff and that's normal. What? Where we get into trouble is when we resist that. And this mindfulness practice is to teach you over and over again and remind you this is the only skill you need for right now to stay mindful. Okay? So if you're looking for effective OCD.