You may have heard of OCD, but do you really know what it is? Is it just excessive cleaning? (No!) Read on to find more about this difficult mental health problem.
What is OCD?
OCD is a type of anxiety disorder characterised by intrusive thoughts or urges (called ‘obsessions) and ritualised behaviours (called ‘compulsions’) that significantly disrupt an individual’s daily life.
It is common to carry out anxiety-fuelled behaviours occasionally like checking we locked the door a few times, or having the odd inappropriate, unpleasant thought. However, OCD is much more severe than that.
It involves obsessive thoughts or images that can be described as unwanted and relentless. When they pop into your mind, they can worry the person, leading to feelings of anxiety, sadness, or even disgust. This is usually coupled with compulsive, ritualised physical behaviours or mental exercises, that are done to temporarily relieve the difficult emotions brought on by the obsessive thoughts.
What keeps OCD going?
OCD is maintained by these compulsions and rituals. The compulsions only works temporarily to relieve the anxiety, thereby keeping people in a loop of continually giving into doing their compulsions, which keeps their OCD going.
Hence, there is short term relief from doing the compulsion, but in the long term this means the individual relies on this time-consuming behaviour and never gets to learn that they will be ok without doing it.
As the cycle progresses, the initial intrusive thoughts and subsequent feelings (e.g. anxiety) tend to increase in severity, pushing the individual to increase the frequency or duration of the behaviours, ultimately worsening the cycle.
Beliefs about OCD
If you really want to understand OCD better, we can get into the nitty gritty about beliefs.
There are often beliefs that underly OCD, and this can link with the kinds of intrusive thoughts people have. This table by Ambramowitz (2006) is really helpful to understand the different kinds of beliefs people may hold.
This can then influence what kind of obsessions and compulsions a person may have.
For example, someone with a sense of excessive responsibility, may feel compelled to stop others getting hurt, and perhaps need to engage in excessive handwashing to stop the spread of germs and illness.
However, someone else may feel such a strong sense of perfectionism, that they need to order their possessions in such a way to ensure everything is perfect, as it feels too uncomfortable when it’s not.
What can I do to manage it?
- Try to resist the urges. For those with mild OCD, you might feel able to resist the urges or compulsions without the need for therapy. Where you can, try not to give in and do the behaviour. It may feel anxiety provoking or uncomfortable, but that feeling will always pass.
- Try not to worry about the intrusive thoughts. This may sound strange, but worrying about the thoughts is part of the OCD problem. We all get intrusive thoughts, but it’s believed that only those with OCD give much weight to their thoughts and worry about what it means to have these thoughts, whereas those without OCD are able to dismiss them. So, if you can, try to ignore these thoughts, or see them for just what they are: just thoughts.
- Seek professional therapy – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the most effective way to manage OCD. Your therapist will usually spend time first going through lots of information about OCD, and helping you to understand how to break free from OCD. Time will be spent thinking about life without OCD, and maybe some challenging of how we appraise the OCD thoughts, or a few experiments will be done to test the validity of the OCD beliefs. Then, when you’re ready, you can learn a technique called Exposure Response Prevention (ERP). In this strategy, you put yourself in the situation where the obsession is triggered, and not act on the compulsion as you usually would. For example, you would instead lock the door once, leave it, and then sit with the uncomfortable feelings this triggers, and wait for them to reduce. Tip: the anxiety always reduces. Whilst this may sound like a scary thing to do, you’ll only start this bit of therapy when you’re feeling ready.
- Medication. If you go to your GP, they may offer you an antidepressant medicine called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which can help ease the symptoms. This can be particularly effective in conjunction with the CBT.
What can Brighter Life Therapy do to help?
If you’d like to try CBT for OCD, do get in touch with us. Brighter Life Therapy provides fast access to CBT treatment, which you can read about here. If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to contact us using the enquiry form below:
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