Endure Chapter 2: Control

Endor Chapter 2 hey, I'm Ben Greenfield and I want to welcome you to this weekly release of the chapters from my new book Indoor, which you can find now@getindoor.com Today's chapter is all about control and OCD, so I hope you enjoy it. And Here we go. Chapter 2 Control I'm gonna come right out and admit it. I think I have ocd. And no, no no, I haven't actually been officially diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so nothing that dramatic. But I'm pretty sure I certainly have grown significantly in the past several years in certain OCD like tendencies which I've found seems to be quite common amongst my peers as we age and develop distinct habits, rituals and routines that while lending stability, control and productiveness to one's life, can reach a certain point to where those same habits.

Rote and non negotiable, often to the detriment of social life, family life, personal progression, exploration, creativity and learning, experiencing new things in a free, fun flowing manner, and simply being instead of doing. For example, when I step back and analyze my own daily routine, I've noticed the development of several OCD like tendencies including feeling less than myself unless I fully complete a morning self care and spiritual routine that includes strategies like meditation, journaling, face washing, oil pulling, tongue scraping, scraping, supplements, foam rolling, stretching, breathwork and the like. Should I miss any component of this established morning routine which seems to have grown more and more elaborate over the years, I simply feel a bit off the rest of the day with a nagging worry at the back of my mind that I didn't stick to my morning routine or didn't do everything I could have done to optimize my body and brain for the day. Are these types of morning or evening rituals bad? Well, absolutely not. I actually don't know any successful, productive people who don't have some kind of relatively structured and occasionally elaborate and routine in both the morning and the evening. But when that routine dictates zero allowance for more free flowing activities such as random fun family breakfast outings or occasionally sleeping in to snuggle in bed with my wife, or that routine interferes with work obligations by causing me to show up late for a call or be inadequately prepared for a meeting or writing session because I was checking all my morning boxes, it does become obsessive, problematic and selfish or extreme rigidity with workouts and exercising to the extent that if I don't finish the exact workout I've planned for the day for the exact amount of time I've scheduled for that workout with the exact exercises I've planned on. I become annoyed and anxious if a social event my wife has planned on or an outing with the kids suddenly at the last minute interferes with, say, a workout. It significantly rubs me the wrong way, even if it's something as simple as cutting a stretching session five minutes short or going on a family hike instead of doing my planned kettlebell or weight training work. Also become anxious if I look at my wearable tracking results and see I haven't reached my allotted 15,000 step count for the day, and even sometimes go on random walks that tear me away from social events just so I can catch up on my step count. I'll sometimes find myself checking my continuous blood glucose monitor, sleep tracker or activity tracker nearly as often. Some people check their social media accounts, meaning more than once per hour, which I don't think is a healthy and productive use of time. Again, these are the same types of physical disciplines that have kept me extremely fit and healthy, but increasingly seem to threaten threaten my very sanity should they ever be altered by something outside my control or some annoying obligation that's actually more important than adhering to my planned body care routine. Of course, this should all be viewed in light of the fact that these habits developed when I was a pro athlete, but now that I'm not a pro athlete anymore seem to have stuck around at near full amounts or intense control of food and meal composition and timing, including painstaking analysis of packaged food labels to ensure not even the slightest semblance of anything I perceive as unhealthy to be present even in the most minuscule amounts or refusal to eat a meal until the exact amount of time has arrived I have planned on eating that meal like, you know, ensuring an intermittent fast lasts at least 12 hours and refusing to eat even if I'm hungry because it's been only say 11.5 hours, or refusing to go on a lunch meeting at 12:30 because I hadn't planned on eating lunch until 1pm Putting off family meals or dinners until the exact time they fit into my own personal schedule Resistance to allowing others to cook for me unless I know the exact list of ingredients they're putting into a meal. Hence some amount of low level anxiety at restaurants or a near obsession with tracking parameters like my blood glucose or my ketones to ensure I'm consistently staying within my targeted range or sacrificing anything to ensure my circadian rhythm and sleep wake times are optimized, including not going outside to stargaze with my kids if it's too close to the beginning of my bedtime rituals, or refusing to splurge on a late night dinner date with my wife if it doesn't allow me to adhere to my normal evening sleep time, or avoiding social events that may put me in a scenario in which I'm out past my bedtime refusing to sleep in a bed unless it has exactly, you know, three pillows, one for my head, one for on top of my head and one for between my legs, or becoming anxious and borderline insomniac if I'm ever unable to go to bed without my sleeping mask and my foam earplugs and my lavender essential oil and my blue light blockers, etc. Etc. Etc. Most notably an ever increasing lack of fun free flowing play which has instead been replaced by strict scheduling order, checklists, habits, rituals, disciplines, and a distinct and significant lack of spontaneity that also often serves as work or habit based escapism that distances me from the needs of my loved ones. Well, those are just a few examples I've identified from my own life, but I hope you get the idea. So have you ever struggled with the same issues? If so, do you, like me, wonder how these kinds of extreme control issues gradually develop? Which ingrained habits, tendencies or inherent genetic predispositions this all stems from? And most importantly, is there a solution? Well, after all, I've known for a fact that I'm not the only health enthusiast that deals with OCD like tendencies. I'm not the only person in general. I have many friends and acquaintances who are biohackers or nutritionals or personal trainers or exercise enthusiasts or other hard charging high achievers and the like who all seem to face similar uphill battles of control. And of course that's just the tiny subset of people in my world and doesn't include the executive who's a monster at the office if everyone is not arranged perfectly, the mother who can't sleep at night due to extreme control over her household, or the grown man or woman with few friends in life because they insist upon controlling every social scenario they create or find themselves in. So I think it's high time, particularly now, I put all the cards on the table and talk openly about my own issues, the underlying causes and the solutions I've personally found so that I can hopefully help you out just a bit with any OCD or control issues you might have. So what is ocd and what causes it? Well, we all have our own little quirks, habits and behaviors that we know might be better off if we didn't have them. Or, you know, we might at least be better off by being more flexible with them. And surely many of us could use more self control and order in our lives. But when habits and thoughts spin out of control, becoming so intense and intrusive that they seem to take over against our will, or what we know would be a more sane and normal approach to routine, they can turn us into all consuming, ritualistic beings, irrationally and often selfishly performing to rid us of an overwhelming sense of fear, dread and anxiety. This signifies that we may be on a slow slide towards excessive control tendencies or mild ocd. While the National Institute of Mental Health defines OCD as a common, chronic and long lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable reoccurring thoughts or obsessions or behaviors called compulsions that he or she feels the need to repeat over and over again. People with OCD can have symptoms of obsessions, compulsions or both, and these symptoms can interfere with all aspects of life such as work, school and personal relationships. Obsessions are defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as repeated thoughts, urges or mental images that cause anxiety and can include fear of germs or contamination, unwanted, forbidden or taboo thoughts involving sex, religion or harm, aggressive thoughts towards others or self, or having things symmetrical or in a perfect order. Compulsions meanwhile, are defined as repetitive behaviors that a person with OCD feels the urge to do in response to that obsessive thought, including excessive cleaning or say hand washing, ordering and arranging things in a particular and precise way, repeatedly checking on things, such as repeatedly checking to see if the door is locked or the oven is off, compulsive counting, counting things for no reason, or not being able to finish activities until you've counted to a certain number. Other common characteristics of OCD like tendencies include uncontrolled eating or drinking, nail biting, compulsive shopping and gambling, substance abuse, impulsive sexual behaviors and excessive ruminating about relationships, self image and self esteem. Now there's one important caveat. People often tend to confuse OCD with a far less disabling issue named Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder or ocpd. It's actually a bit more accurate to describe my own OCD like tendencies and the tendency of many people who suspect they may have OCD as that obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder and not true ocd. And so what sets those two apart? Well basically, when obsessions and compulsions are significant enough to cause significant functional impairments, it's usually OCD in contrast, in ocpd, obsessions and compulsions are more likely to be slight personality quirks or idiosyncrasities. For example, a person with OCPD may hang on to some object because they believe they might need it someday, but a person with OCD may, in a sort of hoarding compulsion, fill every square foot of their house with with worthless trash that they know they'll never need. People with OCPD tend to have trouble seeing the forest for the trees and are typically list makers who get so hung up on minute details that they don't see the big picture. In a classic case of the best being the enemy of the good, their quest for perfection often interferes with their getting things done. People with OCPD tend to mess up things that are good enough in their quest to make everything perfect in every detail. They're relatively set in their ways and habits, inflexible and unwilling to compromise. In the view of someone with ocpd, if a job is to be done right, it must be done exactly their way. Because of this, they tend to be checklist driven micromanagers who are unwilling to delegate. Interestingly, this personality type is twice as common in males than in females. However, I imagine this may be much to the chagrin of a dyedon wool psychiatrist or personality disorder specialist. But for the purposes of simplicity and clarity for the remainder of this chapter, I'm just going to use the term OCD as a catch all phrase to describe both OCD and ocpd. Hopefully that's okay with you. So with that quick clarification, let's move on. What causes OCD in the first place? Well, researchers have offered a variety of explanations. For example, there's a link between OCD and unbalanced levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that relays messages between neurons. There are also significant genetic factors at play. For example, if you listen to my intriguing podcast with Dr. Mansoor Mohammed of the DNA Company, which I'll link to on the resources page for this chapter over at IndoorBook.com forward/ Chapter 2, you'll hear Mansour talking about my own serotonin pathways and interestingly, those are my twin boys, specifically those related to the comt and five httlpr. That's a mouthful. Genotypes which result in decreased expression of serotonin transporters and dysregulated serotonin secretion and reuptake, resulting in a strong tendency towards reward and pleasure seeking behavior, a propensity to addictive binging or manic behaviors, a propensity to endlessly ruminate on worries and tasks, and proneness to, you guessed it, OCD like tendencies. This neurotransmitter and genetic hard wiring, while allowing one to be a highly productive and organized individual, can also cause a bit of a glitch in a section of the brain called the caudate nucleus, basically causing the frontal lobe of the brain to become somewhat overactive. This allows the brain to become flooded and often over overwhelmed with many thoughts, impulses, anxieties and worries that enter their mind. Now incidentally, one of the most meaningful tips that Dr. Muhammad gave to me during that podcast was to ensure that I write down any to do's tasks or notes that enter my brain as soon as possible after I think of them, because otherwise my brain will grab onto those thoughts like a bulldog and cause me to become hyper focused and anxious that I might forget or lose track of them. But while genetics and nature can certainly play a role in ocd, there's also environmental factors and nurturing factors, factors that can contribute. For example, in the past couple decades, as a former bodybuilder, then a serious ironman triathlete, then a professional Spartan competitor, all while acting as a family man, CEO and founder of a variety of businesses in the health, nutrition and fitness sector, I've had to set up robust planning and organizing mechanisms in my own environment that have required me to become a creature of habit who relies upon a strict, nearly obsessive schedule to simply keep track of and accomplish everything I need to do in any given given week. Throw hefty bouts of speaking, biohacking and immersive journalism into the mix. And I've also got tons of toys to try, books and research papers to read, books to write, and habits to pile on already existing habits, resulting in many, many things to do each day that tend to, especially after years and years, stack on each other to create an incredibly complex existence that necessitates even more OCD and control. As you can imagine, that becomes a bit of a vicious cycle. In addition, childhood experiences can play a role in the development of or tendencies towards ocd. Many people with control issues or OCD grew up in households headed by either a very rigid father or dominating mother, which can result in low self esteem and the subsequent development of controlling compulsions. These type of folks early in life were often given the impression by their parents that they needed to be perfect and hence develop a tendency to try to control their social environment. They build up their own safe little perfect world that they can easily control and as a result, family, friends and and social obligations are often pushed outside this world due to the relatively spontaneous nature of such relationships. In my own case, I was both raised in a very rigid and controlling home and was also often given the impression that much of my personal value was determined by how perfect I was or how perfect I appeared to be to the outside world. Now, ultimately, I'm not really a label guy. I'll admit that I often have a bit of a visceral reaction when I hear people blame their personal issues on past trauma, or the way their mother and father raised them, or biochemical imbalances and the like. I often feel as though those labels and reasons for personal faults can take too much precedence and can be used as a crutch to shame others or blame experiences for what is truly a personality or character fault that someone simply needs to turn over to God, repent of, and then do the hard work to fix. Yet at the same time, I think we all have inherent tendencies towards certain sins and faults, and in my own case, the genetic, environmental and deeply rooted blessing of being a creature of habit, rituals, routines, order and systems has gradually become a curse of being a creature void of creative spontaneous flow. The question is, what does one do about these tendencies? And so now I'll share with you what I have been finding helpful over the past several months as I've identified control issues in my own life and set about to fix them. Now, before I explain three strategies I've personally found most helpful to release control and OCD tendencies, I must first emphasize I'm not encouraging or endorsing a chaotic, unscheduled, freewheeling existence with no scheduling, control, organization or routines. Allow me to repeat and re emphasize what I said to you earlier in this chapter. Things become problematic when habits and thoughts spin out of control, becoming so intense and intrusive that they seem to take over against our will or what we know would be a more sane and normal approach to routine. Because they can turn us into all consuming, ritualistic beings irrationally or often selfishly performing to rid us of an overwhelming sense of fear, dread and anxiety. So don't be ashamed or embarrassed if you're somewhat controlling and orderly as a type A individual. The world needs those type of people, especially due to the great deal of stability they can lend a society just as much as the world needs creative, free flowing artists like my wife for healthy doses of joy, inspiration and spontaneity, but do indeed guard against control and identify when it or OCD like tendencies that accompany it threaten to produce excessive anxiety, selfish habits, social isolation, or lack of creative free play. Now next, I've had quite a few people ask me whether plant medicines or so called psychedelics may help break the type of OCD or control loops upon which the ego can become hardwired and reliant. So I'd be remiss not to briefly address that. That long story short is that I certainly think there could be some efficacy to these type of compounds for say, dissolving the ego and releasing significant amounts of control. But if you find yourself relying upon substances to reboot your system over and over again, it is, in my opinion, indicative of the need to fix the issue with a more permanent solution such as those I'll present shortly. I highly suspect that the thoughtful integration process that should occur after any plant medicine or psychedelics treatment, along with a deeper knowing of and belief in God, is responsible for any results from such an experience that will actually say stick. That being said, the first major realization that has helped me personally is to recognize and acknowledge that the creator of this universe is a God of both order and spontaneity. First Corinthians 14:33 says, For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace. For example, God's created universes orderly. It was created in a sequenced six state time span with sun, moon and stars to regulate time, seasons and the circadian rhythms of Earth's inhabitants and heavenly bodies that operate with clock like precision and predictability. Your body is another example of God's orderliness. Biological mechanisms such as the complex cardiovascular system that snakes miles throughout your body, a supercomputer brain that fires thousands of neurotransmitters per second to regulate breath, heart rate, pain, temperature, respiration, thought and more symmetrical patterns like PI and the golden ratio that are symbolized in elements of nature like fingertips and leaves, and millions of other chemical and physical reactions occur nearly every second of the day. If one of those factors falls out of order, creation slowly begins to crumble. God also created and scheduled orderly and sequential time variations as a way for Earth to mark changes including the rising and setting of the sun, the perfectly timed rotation of the earth upon its atmosphere axis, the waxing and waning of the moon, and many others. Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:17 tell us that everything in the universe was created by God to be good and perfect, and for millennia it has remained in working order based on these built in laws of time. Throughout the Old Testament, God continues to lay down order with specific laws, customs and rituals like Passover sacrifices and anointings, days of atonement, symbolic clothing, and list of rules like like the Ten Commandments. God's church has continued to reflect this order with practices such as celebrations of religious holidays, dedicated prayer times, a liturgical calendar, and weekly taking of the sacraments. Yet while God is a God of order, and while Paul tells the Corinthians, let all things be done decently and in order, God is also a fierce, wild and spontaneous God. And Paul also tells the Corinthians, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. In chapter 19 of Fit Soul, I cited an intriguing essay that describes a fitting description of God fierceness, wildness, dangerous and spontaneity. It goes part of it like this God is dangerous, wild and unpredictable. He's dynamite and a kidnapper. That's the God of Abraham. The God of Abraham doesn't pen Hallmark cards. He is not a corporate risk manager. He's not a cruise director aiming to make our trip as pleasant and comfortable as possible, easier to overturn tables and create people who can run alongside him. If you have run with the footmen and they have wearied you, then how can you contend with horses? Says Jeremiah 12:5. He wants people like horses, people whose necks are clothed with thunder, mock at fear, and don't stop at the sound of the trumpet. It's not about power. It's about character and tension and trinity. Throughout history, the same God who freely paints splatters of yellow, orange and red across a sunset and sunrise, fashions and forms the funkiness of the hippopotamus, the platypus and the giraffe, and coordinates miracles that can often defy the laws of the orders of nature, like talking donkeys and burning bushes and floating axes in the Bible has also inspired great works of poetry, art, fiction, architecture, and many other creative forms of human expression. God is a creator who takes joy in our human creations. And creation, of course, often requires a great deal of creativity and release of that tiny, predictable control. The trick is to use wisdom, discernment, prayer and understanding to know how to weave into your own life both order and spontaneity. Think about it this way. Water is free flowing, playful and unpredictable, yet a series of and intricately ordered and well arranged hydrogen and oxygen molecules are what actually comprise the massive waters that boundlessly lap across our planet Earth. A dark and wild forest is broad, sweeping, unconstrained and borderless, yet upon closer inspection, can be comprised of row upon row of ordered trees consisting of atoms, electrons and protons that operate according to specific laws of chemistry and physics. Earth itself, if a person attempted to walk at circumference, would appear to be a creative, variable and oft erratic conglomerate of random deserts, lakes, rivers, oceans, mountains and valleys. Yet if that same person were suddenly swept into space to peer at Earth from above, it would appear to be a tidy and symmetrical orb rotating at a perfectly predictable rate. So aim to create your own life. Similarly, create calendar systems, habits, rituals, routines and organizations, but use these structures as the foundation for a life that is creative, flowing and playful. Work hard and play hard. Research scientific papers, run on a treadmill for a set time and speak systematically. But also read fiction, dance, sing. Go out to the garage to do your end of the day planned 30 minute bike ride. But simply smile, dismount and don't let smoke come out your ears. If your spouse pops their head off the garage door at the 26 minute mark of your bike ride to announce that dinner's ready and don't chew too much off at once, I recommend you begin with a Sunday. Take that single Sabbath day of the week and schedule. Perhaps aside from visiting church at the proper time or setting a time to have a dinner party or something like that, absolutely nothing. Try it just once. See how it feels. Personally, I'd categorize it as glorious.

Second, Trust in God and turn your anxious thoughts over to Him. I talk plenty about trust in chapter four of my book Fit Soul. But allow me to expound upon what I wrote there just a bit more. See Philippians 4:4:9 tells us two Rejoice in the Lord always. And again I say, rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing but in everything. By prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are are of good report. If there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things, those things which ye have both learned and received, and heard and seen in me do, and the God of peace shall be with you. Verses 4 and 5 of that passage build upon what I noted earlier regarding a healthy mix of both joy and spontaneity, along with control and order. Those verses tell us to rejoice in the Lord always, but also to let our moderation be known to all all men, because the Lord is at hand. If you've trusted in God and allowed His Holy Spirit to fill you with the peace that comes through salvation in Christ. You enable yourself to both live a life with self control and playfully rejoice all the time. In verse six we're told to be careful for nothing. This translates literally to be anxious for nothing. We are then instructed to submit our request to God with a grateful heart and then to allow God to guard our hearts and minds. Verse 7 tells us that the result of that gratefulness will be both peace and protection, which are of course the opposite of anxiety. Verse 8 then tells us to dwell upon things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. I can think of no better way to do this than to steep ourselves daily in the Bible through hearing, reading, memorizing, singing, praying and meditation. All of which I teach in great detail how to do in chapter 11 of my book Philosopher Soul. As you crack open the Bible daily, you may also find a website that I'll link to on the resources page for this chapter, which includes specific Bible verses about anxiety and OCD, and I'll put all of those@getindoor.com Chapter 2. Finally, verse 9 tells us that when we do all these things, God will give us and here's that word once again. Peace. In summary, have self control and engage in moderation. Then rejoice in all things, be constantly grateful, pray to and trust God to give you wisdom and discernment over what is a useful habit and what is not, and read the Bible daily. Finally, I recently read a fantastic book entitled brainlock. In it, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz lays out four key and scientifically proven steps to manage OCD and OCD like tendencies showing before and after pet scans of actual changes in the hard wiring of controlling brains. When the following steps are taken. First you relabel, which means you train yourself to identify what's real and what isn't, and refuse to be misled by intrusive, destructive thoughts and urges. This includes full presence and awareness to be able to recognize when a habit, routine or ritual has become selfish, harmful or distracting, then labeling it as an obsession or compulsion. One especially helpful component of relabeling includes bringing into play the the so called impartial spectator, a concept that Adam Smith used as a central feature of his book the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith defined the impartial spectator as the capacity to stand outside yourself and watch yourself in action, which is essentially the same mental action as the ancient Buddhist concept of mindful awareness or the modern psychological practice of trying to step outside yourself and view yourself as the leading character in a movie or book, then assessing how you would feel about that character if you if they were displaying the same harmful habits you are currently engaged in. Second, you Re attribute meaning that you understand that those thoughts and urges are merely mental noise and false signals being sent from your brain. Neurochemicals and neurotransmitters that may be biological blessings in some regards, but are ultimately holding you back from happiness. Obsessions and compulsions can simply be your brain doing funny things, and you must simply recognize that. Third, you refocus by learning to respond to those fault signals in a new and more constructive constructive way. Working around the fault signals by refocusing your attention on more constructive behavior that can serve as a replacement or modification to your existing harmful habit. For example, by adapting a 60 minute daily workout to instead be a 30 minute workout followed by 30 minutes of creative free play with your children, reading fiction or tinkering around on a piano. This step is where Dr. Schwartz has noted the most significant changes in brain chemistry to take place. The final and fourth step is to revalue or to place value on the positive change in habit or new replacement activity for that habit value on the joy and freedom that pours into your life as a result of release of control and recognition of the little or no value you actually found in the initial unwanted thought or urge. At this point, Dr. Schwartz describes that the automatic transmission in your brain officially begins to start working properly again. Biblical counselors John and Janie street, authors of the Biblical Counseling Guide for Women, have actually developed a Christian Method Based on Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's four steps I just described here are two of the foundational verses they utilize for the four steps they adapted from his do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Those are from Romans 12:2 and Ephesians 4:22 24, respectively. Based on those verses, the streets adapted Schwartz's Four Steps to Be the Repent so identify and confess all obsessive thoughts that control you as sinful habits because they assume you're able to thrive and live by rigid rules of thoughts and behaviors based on your works rather than by faith and Trust in God Similar to Schwartz's step, simply relabel the recurring thoughts and behaviors, even those you feel could be helpful but are ultimately manifested fruits of selfishness in your life as anxious and fearful tendencies, do not fear loss of control. Fear God only. Number three Replace. Substitute anxious thoughts with trust in a good and loving God who loves and provides for you. No matter whether you are perfect or fully in control, in any state of messiness and sinful tendencies, you don't control problems out of your life, only God does. And finally, refocus Focus upon the two greatest commandments, loving God and loving others. Release self focus and shift the focus instead to your Creator, to your friends, and to your family. Both books I just cited Brainlock and the Biblical Counseling Guide for Women and yes guys, you can read that book too will be helpful for anyone who has control issues or OCD like tendencies. Read them if you can for more detailed instructions and clarity related to the steps that I've just cited. So in summary, Paul says in Colossians 3, 9, 10, you've put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. So there is hope your old self can become a new self. You can release the shackles of control, fear and shame and replace them with the flowing rose of faith, trust, peace, love and joy. Science has even proven that the renewing of one's thoughts can create real, measurable and observable changes in the brain based on the same cellular mechanisms behind the biology of belief, which you can read about in, for example, Bruce Lipton's Biology of Belief and chapter 15 of Fit Soul, where you'll find a more complete understanding of those mechanisms. So in summary, recognize and acknowledge that the Creator of this universe is a God of both orders and spontaneity, and proceed to weave healthy doses of both order and spontaneity into your own life, especially if you're currently skewed towards the former, which is order. Trust God, rejoice in all things, be constantly grateful, pray to and trust God to give you wisdom and discernment over what is a useful habit and what is not. And read the Bible daily and then read Brainlock or at least follow the four steps from it I just described. Relabel, refocus, reattribute and revalute and or use the steps from the Biblical Counseling Guide for Women that I also mentioned, which is repent, relabel, replace and refocus. Now I pray that the thoughts I've just presented will help many others with ocd, ocpd, or any other control issues. So now it's your turn. Have you struggled with these same issues? What elements in your own life do you think you try too hard to control? What have you found to be helpful, or what do you plan to implement from this chapter to help you with those tendencies? For resources, references, links, and additional reading and listening material for this chapter, you can visit getindoor.com Chapter 2.