This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

Permalink

First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

Permalink

I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

Permalink

The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

Permalink

All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

Permalink

It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

Permalink

Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

Permalink

It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

Permalink

This is a very common issue and one where we can learn lots from physical fitness. Improving mental health and fitness is just like improving physical health and fitness. So when this question comes up, I always ask people: "If your family member was in very poor physical shape and you knew they had to start exercising or they risked serious health complications, how would you get them to start an exercise program and make changes throughout their life to support that?"

It's not going to be easy. Nobody gets into great shape because they're forced to do it. Personally, I started to get help for my mental health issues because I saw that they were interfering with my goals in life. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. At that point, I still didn't think any of my compulsions were weird or unusual--I had reasons for all of them--but I was aware I wasn't able to do things I knew that I could do. And that's likely a factor for many people that start on a physical fitness program. They see that they're not able to run or walk or be active like they could in the past. Their participation in the life they want becomes diminished or challenging. That can spark a change, but it doesn't always. Many people will run into challenges and say that's who they are and those are things they can't do and they leave it at that.

Something else that helped me was seeing other people taking care of their mental health. I had a friend who was open about how he had overcome mental health challenges and how he was maintaining recovery and improving his mental health. That was the first person I talked to about what I was going through. Just like with physical fitness, it helps if you're around people who are also doing the difficult work of improving their mental health and fitness and making major life changes to support that. It can be very difficult to imagine what change looks like if you're not close to people who are practicing change on a daily basis. So if you want to tell a family member get into better shape, consider how you would want to be told to get into better shape. Who would you take advice from on something like that? Would you take fitness advice from somebody that doesn't exercise themselves? How would you like to hear somebody tell you that you need to get into better shape?

Permalink

It gets better over time if you do things that will help it get better and stop doing things that make it worse. Mental health is chronic, just like physical health. You will always have varying levels of health and you can always do things to improve or worsen your health. I don't have any symptoms of OCD now, but I could always go back to having OCD if I chose to start engaging in compulsive behaviors again. I get lots of questions about curing OCD but "curing" OCD would be like curing slowness--you get rid of slowness by practicing running on a regular schedule, challenging yourself to push past your limits, and making changes throughout your life to support running. If you stop doing all of the healthy things to support your running program and you stop practicing running, then you'll very quickly go back to being slow again. You won't become a better runner by hoping that slowness goes away on its own, and you won't get over OCD by hoping it'll get better on its own. Health isn't something you hope for, it's something you need to do, every day. Unfortunately, when people wait for anxiety disorders to resolve themselves, they often end up avoiding the things that make them anxious or challenge them, progressively shrinking their lives, until they live in a tiny cage built from from their fears and unhealthy beliefs about what they can or can't do. So get out there and get running up and over the OCD hill in front of you.

Permalink

For a very important, entirely serious reason: YOU ARE NOT YOUR FARTS.

I suggest people not get too wrapped up in identifying with mental illness because it's no different that building your identity around farting.

Farting is the result of things your organs do, influenced by genetic and environmental factors and the decisions you make each day, just like mental illness. Understanding the genetic and environmental context and the impacts of your decisions, empowers you to make choices that limit the amount of farting in your life. Or empower you to increase the amount of farting in your life. If you know something makes you fart, and you do that thing all of the time, you're going to be farting all of the time. This happens with our brains, too.

But farting is transient. There's a deeper identity you have beyond that. There's a YOU that exists when you're not farting and it's the same YOU that exists when you are farting. You can build your identity around farting if you want to, but people are going to expect it from you. You'll have to make that transient thing permanent. But maybe there's going to come a day when you really don't want to feel bloated and smell farts any more. Maybe you decide you're sick of that thing that makes you fart and you don't want to do it any more. But now everybody expects it of you. That's who you are! That's what you told them. You're a farter! Keep farting! Tell us more stories about your terrible farts!

Then you're stuck with it, even though you'd rather move on. The same thing can happen when building yourself around mental illness labels.

Here are some other reasons:

- I've been talking in public about mental health and recovery since 2011. That's not a super long time, but it's given me the opportunity to meet many people who have recovered from mental illnesses and many who have continued to struggle. Every person I know that's recovered has made the switch to building a healthy life instead of fighting an illness. I can't guarantee that's going to be an anecdote that will be true forever, but so far, focusing on health instead of illness seems to really help prevent relapse.

- We're social animals. Do you want to build relationships around trying to do healthy things or build relationships around complaining about unhealthy things? If you build your relationships around things you hate, you'll be amazed at how the things you hate just seem to follow you around.

- Recovery is time consuming. After years of working on illness, there's so much to learn about maintaining health amongst all of the internal and external challenges we face. So it's helpful to spend time listening and talking about health. The illness has taken up enough time already.

- The mental illness lens can be totalizing. We can start to see everything as a consequence of the illness. It becomes this monster we have to drag everywhere with us, whether it's involved in that activity or not. New job? But what about my social anxieties?! New relationship? But what about my codependence issues?! Going on a trip? But I might have a panic attack! Managing the fear of the illness becomes an all-consuming compulsion and everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the illness.

- You might have Stockholm Syndrome (we fall in love with our kidnappers). One of the scariest experiences of recovery was the day I was walking to school a few months after finishing a course of therapy and I realized I wasn't anxious about anything at that moment. I didn't know what to do. I had only known how to feel safe and feel happy by managing fear and reacting to anxiety (ALL OF THE TIME). Without fear, I didn't know how to feel safe or happy. It was terrifying! I had to totally relearn how to function. That experience highlighted just how much I depended on anxiety and depression. My worldview and day-to-day existence depended on keeping them around so I could want to get rid of them and solve them and overcome them. LEARNING TO NOT LIVE LIKE THAT IS AWESOME!

- I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who used to stand in front of his stove to make sure it didn't spontaneously erupt in flames and who used to see people get ripped apart and their blood and guts spread across intersections, and I want to encourage you to please entertain the possibility that there is actually nothing wrong you (or me). Labels invented by committees with a vested financial interest in those labels, are an unusual thing to build an identity on.

Everybody has varying levels of improvable mental health (because everybody has a brain), just like everybody has improvable levels of physical health (because everybody has a body). And mental health is chronic, just like physical health--we need to take care of both everyday or else they worsen. So you have a brain. That's all. Sometimes we run into challenges with our brains, and those are very real challenges. But those challenges are things we overcome on the path to doing the things we want to do in life. We don't have to let those challenges become our lives.

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First of all, I always remind people that I am not a doctor and I didn't take any medication to recover from OCD and the related anxiety disorders and depression I struggled with. So I'm not an expert on prescribing or taking medication.

When people are making decisions about medication, I encourage them to not frame the question as: "Should I take medication?" but instead as: "What supports are going to empower me to make the healthy changes I need to make to be healthy and happy five years from now?" It helps to make treatment decisions around where you're going and what you want to build.

Whether somebody takes medication or doesn't take medication won't change the fact that they need to make healthy changes in their life if they want to improve their mental health and prevent relapse in the future. If a person takes meds, they still need to make those changes. If a person doesn't take meds, they still need to make those changes.

Changing your brain is just like changing any other part of your body. For example, let's say somebody injured their leg while exercising and it became painful to run on it. They're going to need to rehabilitate that leg if they ever want to run again and that's going to involve working with a professional to help them change how they move the leg so it's moving in a way that's healthy. Going through that rehab process will be painful. They can decide to take medication to relieve that pain or not. In some cases, the medication might help them do more of the exercises, which means they'll recover faster. In other cases, the side-effects from the medication might interfere with their recovery, or the lack of pain might lead them to exercise the leg in the old way again and cause further injury. But seeking relief from the pain is separate from doing the exercises that are going to ensure long-term health and recovery. Medication can be an enabler that empowers people to make the important changes that need to happen. Many people also make the same changes without medication. It’s those changes that matter.

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I've never heard their music but it's a great name for a band.

If it's a supplement and not a band, my thoughts on it would still be the same as any supplement or medication people want to take for anxiety or depression: It wouldn't mean you get to skip making healthy changes and taking healthy action in your life. There is no supplement that can achieve your goals for you in life. Chasing the "right" supplement can easily become a compulsion on its own. On top of that, people are often trying to find a supplement that makes anxiety go away or helps them ignore intrusive thoughts. But OCD or any anxiety disorder is all about trying to make anxiety go away. That's the problem, not the solution. Anxiety and intrusive thoughts are symptoms of the unhealthy things we need to change, in ourselves or in our environments. Trying to escape the symptoms doesn't remove the problem. It's like taking painkillers to get rid of the pain when a lion bites you. The painkillers won't get rid of the lion. The lion is the real problem, not the pain. And if you get rid of the pain, you might be oblivious to the fact that the lion is eating all of you.

But if rodhiola rosea is a band, I look forward to checking out their music videos on YouTube 🙂

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The same ones you do--the ones where you're uncertain about something that has happened or could happen and then you do things to try to make that uncertainty go away.

A common challenge to overcome when tackling mental health issues is something called "special snowflake thinking". That's when somebody believes that their symptoms are different from another person's symptoms unless that other person describes their symptoms in exactly the same way.We are unique and special snowflakes and nobody can understand what we're going through!

But all OCD symptoms follow identical patterns. It's OCD that pushes us to judge and discriminate and try to fit things into tiny boxes of certainty. The problem is that this can prevent us from getting the help we need unless the things we're hearing or reading fit into those tiny boxes. Because of that, I try to keep my videos and stories as general as possible. I was very lucky to have never heard about the concept of OCD themes before joining online mental health communities. On the recovery journey, it was very helpful to tackle everything is a single beast.

When you catch your brain judging things as not being applicable to you or specific enough, recognize that as part of OCD. That's your OCD trying to get in the way of recovery. There aren't different solutions to different themes. They all follow the same basic patterns.

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All memories are real things in your head. The labels you stick on them are under your control. If you choose to get into judging and discriminating between memories because you want to be certain about whether you did something or not, you're setting yourself up for ruminating and worrying. It is so helpful to accept the stuff in your head as stuff in your head. Trying to put labels on that stuff is only going to lead to more misery. The problem here isn't about knowing whether it's real or not, the problem is the desire to know if it's real or not.

Check out this video on "False/Real Memories":

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It’s not possible to be awesome at focusing unless you practice focusing and push your limits, just like it’s not possible to be awesome at running unless you practice running and push your limits.

Here are five ways to practice focusing that have really helped me get my mind to stay in one place at a time:

1. Meditate. Start with short periods and then gradually extend the time you spend meditating. Setting aside three minutes every day for meditation and learning how to make that consistent can be a massive step in the right direction.

2. Stop checking your phone. When you get that urge to check, don’t. The more you respond to every distracting urge that pops up, the easier it becomes to be distracted. You’re training your brain to respond to urges automatically. That’s not going to help you.

3. Eat healthy. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your mind is all over the place.

4. Try uni-tasking. Try to be in your home, with no music or TV on, your computer and phone turned off, and then do something. Just do one thing. You could cook dinner and be present cooking dinner. Prepare the food and don’t think about anything else, not from the past or the future. Be mindfully present while doing one thing, once a day.

5. Eliminate all of your other compulsive behaviors. If you’re practicing reacting to urges and fears and uncertainties in many areas of your life, your brain is going to act that way in other areas of your life, whether you want it to or not. Eliminate compulsions one by one, starting with the easiest.

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Because you think it is.

One of the components of an anxiety disorder is rigid, black-or-white thinking, with lots of judging and discriminating and labelling. It's not surprising that people struggling with OCD have developed all of these different classifications--that's part of the illness.

The superficial elements of the specific fear are irrelevant. If you were worried about hitting somebody with a car and now you're worried about accidentally poisoning your friends by under-cooking food you're serving them, then you're worrying about the exact same thing. There's an uncertainty about causing people harm and you're engaging in compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on, or control that uncertainty.

Tackle OCD at the most basic, fundamental level possible. Learning to accept each little fear separately leads to a very long, drawn-out, exhausting process. All anxiety disorders are essentially about engaging in behaviors to avoid something you don't want to feel. A person controlling their eating and constantly checking the mirror or the scale in the hopes avoiding a particular feeling, is no different from the person constantly checking their email and writing and rewriting responses to their work colleagues in the hopes of avoiding a particular feeling.

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It's all stuff in your head. Regardless of whether you label it as an urge, a feeling, an intrusive thought, or a penguin, that's a label that you choose. It's subjective. Somebody else might call that experience something totally different.

Personally, a big part of recovery was relearning everything I thought I knew about emotions and thoughts. OCD doesn't fall from the sky. Everything in our lives is part of how our mental health deteriorates to the point of illness. So recovery involves making changes everywhere, and in how we do everything, and that's likely going to involve relearning how you interpret your internal experiences.

No matter what's happening in my head, it doesn't change the healthy things I need to do everyday. It helps to shift the focus from the stuff in your head to your actions.

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