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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.
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Big hugs.
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And now let's get back to the show.
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Now let's look at some of the tricks that OCD plays on you. Okay, I'm going to go through a few of them. Number one is OCD is going to say, this is not just a thought. This is really important, and we have to slow down and we have to make a splash and we have to try and figure this out because it's oh so important and it was oh, so terrible and dangerous for us not to do it. That is a trick OCD is playing. You have to learn to catch that and say, a rock is a rock is a rock, or a thought is a thought is a thought. There is no good thought and bad thought. There are uncomfortable thoughts, yes, but there is no good and bad thought. We're not. Thoughts don't determine or define a person. So I want you to catch when OCD tricks you into taking thoughts as if they're still special, there is no OCD thought that is special. None. No matter how absolutely disgusting it is, there is no OCD thought that you need to treat as if it's special. Now, the second piece here is often. A lot of people on the Internet have taught us that being mindful means that in this present moment, if you have fear, that you should focus on that fear and really like. Like have it and dissected. And being mindful about it is really just another form of ruminating about it. And so I want you to remind yourself that mindfulness is not staying looping around and around. You never see in a stream water, like going around and around a rock. It hits the rock and it moves down the stream. It's going with gravity. It's not going back upstream to check out the rock and make sure that that rock was really a rock and not a porcupine. You know what I mean? Water isn't doing that. It's hitting each rock and moving on. And so your work is to do the same. The next myth or trick that OCD plays is it says being mindful is irresponsible, responsible. Having a thought and not tending to it. Having a thought and not resisting it. Having a thought and not judging it is irresponsible and that it's bad for acting that way, or you're a bad person for not dissecting it. You know, again, that is a trick that OCD is going to play on you and is going to keep you stuck, keep you ruminating, keep you doing mental compulsions. We do not want to get involved with that type of behavior. The next one is a lot of people, and I have fallen into this trap myself, so I take full responsibility for that is we will often, often, as educators and therapists will say, just sit with the feeling, or you're gonna just sit with the feeling. And I'm not particularly against that term, but I think people misinterpret that as that you just have to sit there and, like, have it and stare at the wall and just be like, yep, anxiety's here, and I have to let it be there, and I just have to sit here with it. No. And that's a trick that OCD will play on you as well. No, we want you to go and act, be an active part of the world. While you're having these thoughts, you're, again, the stream is not having this thought and then just, like, stopping and being like, okay, I'm just going to stay here because it's uncomfortable. No, we move on to the next one. We want to keep active. We want to keep reaching our goals, learning new things, interacting with people. We're not just sitting with. I'm not actually saying to sit. If you need to sit, let's say you have to go to class. Yes, you can sit and be anxious, but you don't have to just sit down and, like, focus on anxiety. That's not what we're saying. Now. Another trick that gets played with OCD is that allowing or not resisting a thought or a feeling means that you must want it, that accepting it and moving on must mean that you want it. And that's, again, another trick that OCD plays to get you back into the content of your obsessions. Again, no, we're observing. We're giving zero meaning, and we're moving around it. We're going on to the next thing, and we're trying to keep that cadence as consistent as we can. So if you're noticing that you have a thought, you go around it, you have another thought, you go around it, you have another thought, and you slow down. You're probably giving it too much attention. So try and keep that cadence or that beat as consistent as you can. All right, now let's go over Very clearly what mindfulness is not. Mindfulness is not trying to feel calm. No. You may get a resultant calm feeling from it, but it's again, we're not resisting what we're presently experiencing. It is not getting rid of thoughts. Right. It's not figuring out what thoughts mean. It's not monitoring your anxiety to see if it's improving again. We're not looking down the stream to be like, please, please, please, please, please, I hope there's no more rocks in the stream. That's resistance. We're just going to say what will be, will be. And I have complete confidence in myself that no matter how many rocks I hit today, I can simply go around them. No matter how much discomfort I have today, I can observe it, allow it and move on. Okay. When mindfulness involves urgency or resistance, it stops being mindfulness and it starts being a compulsion. Right? So we really want to remind ourselves it does not involve urgency, it does not involve resistance. Okay. So if you want to go deeper into how to really manage intrusive thoughts or urges or feelings or sensations, I have an entire toolkit called your OCD toolkit which will walk you through, step by step, the exact steps I take my clients through when I'm treating ocd. I walk you through the exact education, I give them, the exact assessment kind of structure I give them and I teach them the exact skills in an order so that they can put it and get the treatment that they need. Now, this is not therapy, but it is for those folks who don't have access to therapy or maybe you're not quite ready for therapy and you want to try doing this on your own. This would be a perfect solution for you. I also have the clinicians OCD toolkit. This is where I teach therapists how to implement exposure and response prevention and cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness to help their clients with OCD. So you can head over to CBTSchool.com and learn all about that there. Now what did we learn today? Number one, we learned that mindfulness is a science based supplement to OCD treatment. It is going to be incredibly helpful, but we have to watch out out for OCD's tricks. And we've also learned that you can do this right, that today is a beautiful day to do hard things. I say that in every episode and that with this skill we can actually simplify the work so that we can hit one hard thing after another and build an incredible strength and resilience to those thoughts. We want to hit them so many times effectively that we soften them and we round them out. That's the beautiful goal here. All right, please be gentle as you practice this. This is not easy. You will suck at it and that's okay. Please be gentle. Learn to laug yourself. There'll be days where you're like, oh my gosh, I got so stuck today. But that's all right. That's a part of the process. Okay. As always, I want to thank you. I know how valuable your time is and I feel so honored that you're spending your time here with me. I cannot wait to see you in next week's episode. I hope you have a wonderful day. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting CBTSchool.com.