Holiday Anxiety & How to Combat It I OCD

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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has recovered from multiple subsets of OCD and has been helping others do the same since 2018. Today, I want to talk about why your anxiety increases over the holidays, before, during, and after, and what you can do about it. So the first thing is, and you might have heard me say this before, OCD wants two things, certainty and perfection. And this is where the perfection really comes in with your brain needing perfection during the holidays. Now, OCD often creates this picture of what it wants things to look like. And the holidays are the perfect example of this. So right now here in the US we are coming up on Thanksgiving, which is tomorrow, and then soon to be Christmas and New Year's, which are in December and January. So there's a lot of pressure, a lot of build up to this. And OCD wants things to look a certain way. And so it's going to create this picture of what things should look like. And then when things don't look like that, we often get extremely disappointed. One of the other reasons why you might experience more anxiety is because you have certain expectations, right? This is the perfection coming in all over the place. You have certain expectations of what you want things to look like. Another reason others might have expectations of what things are supposed to look like, and then the media on top of that. So it might be coming from your expectations, your mom's expectations, friends, other family or the media can play a big part in this. But essentially I want to dumb it down to the fact that your brain is just wanting perfection. It creates a picture of what things should be like and creates a lot of anxiety if they don't look that way. Oftentimes leading up to the holiday, there's a lot of what if type thoughts. What if it doesn't go this way? What if this happens? What if that happens? Or sometimes it's just this thing is going to happen, not even the what if at the beginning. Additionally, stress plays a big part because when we start to get stressed out, we're starting to have a lot of negative thoughts and worries and overwhelm, which just creates room for more negative thoughts and more worries to come in. The holidays can be stressful if we let them, right? And there's a lot to do. There's family coming into town, there's things going on, maybe work, maybe being off work. So there's a lot that can be at play here. And really what makes things worse is all of the compulsions that you might be doing leading up to it. So what do we do so that OCD does not attach to the holidays so that it doesn't bother us? Because I used to be right where you are if you're struggling with this. The holidays were extremely stressful and extremely triggering for me. They're not anymore. They're actually quite enjoyable. So how do you get there? The first tip I have for you is to eliminate any expectations. Don't have any expectations whatsoever. What you're going to do is you're going to practice staying in the present moment. So it's not Thanksgiving yet. I'm going to stay in the present moment today and just be here with you on this video, focusing on, giving you the attention that you need instead of focusing on what's going to happen tomorrow, what I need to do, what, you know, I may or may not need to worry about in regards to my typical typical OCD subset, whatever yours is. Mindfulness and staying in the present moment is extremely, extremely important because rumination is essentially thinking about or worrying about the future, right? All of the stories and the negative things that could happen in the future, or thinking about the past. Typically sometimes we're focusing on the present moment and ruminating about that, but typically for either in the past or the future, and it's pointless. The past is gone, the future hasn't happened. Rumination is never effective. The other thing that you can do is reduce your stress, right? When you take away the expectations, that's going to reduce stress. But also practicing self care and self compassion during this time. So if you're a little more anxious, that's okay. Give yourself some grace and be compassionate with yourself during this time so that you're not adding more pressure and pain on top of what's already there. And also taking care of yourself. So if you need some downtime, if you need to set some boundaries and maybe you participate and you bring one dish instead of being the person that cooks everything, make sure that you are taking care of yourself and setting those boundaries so that you are reducing as much stress as you can. Now, a lot of that stress is coming from the negative thoughts. So when you learn what to do with negative thoughts that may cause depression or intrusive thoughts that come with anxiety and ocd, a lot of that stress is going to go away, but you're still going to have stress. So managing that and taking care of yourself the best you can is going to be really helpful. And now let's get into what really takes care of this, which is exposure and response Prevention. So managing your compulsions is key, I promise you. It's not the thoughts or the situations that is causing your OCD to act up. It's not the potential for a health issue. It's not the relationship or the person that you're focusing on. It's not the sensations that you're feeling in your body, the feelings that are or not there. It's not the thoughts about harm or your sexual orientation or those questions that are causing the problem. Whatever OCD subset that you're struggling with, that's not the problem. These thoughts and feelings are very, very normal. It's what we do with them. So the compulsions are what's causing your suffering, which is why it's really crucial that you learn what all of your compulsions are and you bring them all to zero. This has been a huge key to my coaching and my programs. It's helped people a lot because there's a lot of people out there that will teach you exposure, but they won't help you learn what your compulsions are and stop them. And you can do exposure all day. But if you're not getting your compulsions to zero, then you're still playing into the OCD cycle. So eliminating the compulsions, like ruminating, checking, you might be checking your feelings, you might be checking the doors, whatever you're checking. Right. There's a lot of OCD subsets out there, and you could be checking anything mentally or physically. Don't compare to other people, right? When we're comparing, we're usually noticing one moment in time in their life, and, and we're creating a lot of judgments around that which may or may not be true. And we don't know what their tomorrow looks like or their behind closed doors looks like. So it's completely ineffective and realistic most times. Don't avoid uncomfortable people, places and things. Okay? So the rumination, the checking, the avoidance, the comparing, these are some of the big compulsions. There's many others, but these are really important ones that you want to eliminate before the holidays come up. Because again, it's the compulsions and all of these compulsions that's ramping everything up leading up to the holiday. So it creates more discomfort and anxiety on that holiday because of all the compulsions that you're doing leading up to it. So compulsions need to be at zero to get to that recovery stage or close to. You're going to be feeling really good the less your compulsions get. But to get to that recovery stage, compulsions need to be at zero and that's when you're feeling good, like I do most of the time, which is great. And so eliminating compulsions is the response, prevention. So let's talk about exposure. Exposure is just as important. So facing those uncomfortable situations, even though somebody might trigger you, go be around that person. Even though you might get sick if you eat that turkey, go eat the turkey anyway. Leading up to the holiday, you're going to accept uncertainty about what it's going to be like. You're not going to try to create perfection. You may even try to do it imperfectly. That's a great exposure, too. You're going to allow the holiday, the situation leading up to it, during, after, whatever it is, to be imperfect. It's not going to be perfect. Most of the holidays, for most of us, are quite imperfect, with different personalities, different situations, different desires. Burning the turkey, right? Not getting what you want for Christmas, whatever that is, they're going to be imperfect. It's just the way that life is. And then allowing the uncertainty about the future, because again, certainty and perfection do not exist. And the more you chase these things, the worse your OCD is going to get. The more you completely accept imperfection and uncertainty, the better that you're going to feel. I know it sounds counterintuitive, and a lot of OCD treatment is counterintuitive, but it works. It works very well and it works every time. So I hope this was helpful. Feel free to rewatch this video when it gets closer to Christmas, to New Year's, or any holiday that you might have around the world that's different than those holidays here in the us it really doesn't matter what the holiday is. When you have ocd, they're likely going to ramp things up, unless they don't have to. By the way, if you know what to do with intrusive thoughts, if you understand OCD well and you understand exposure and response prevention well, they don't have to cause discomfort. There's a lot of things that used to cause me discomfort that don't anymore, including the holidays and hormones and all of those things. So once you learn the recovery skills, these things can become much more enjoyable than what they are now. They can become very enjoyable. And OCD does not have to bother you during these times. Just because you have OCD doesn't mean holidays are going to be triggering. They're not triggering for me anymore whatsoever. And they used to be very, very much so. So it takes time to learn what OCD is all about, learn the recovery skills into practice, because you're retraining your brain to react differently to fear based thoughts and discomfort. And I promise you it really does work. If you want additional help with this, you can always check out my website which is listed below for membership programs, coaching sessions, courses and I'm adding a lot more support for you and tools in the next years which I'm really excited about. But regardless, help is available. Recovery is possible. You just have to get the right information, the right tools, practice consistently and give it enough time. Recovery is a lifetime journey of continuing to practice. Because again, ERP is what everybody else without OCD or anxiety is already doing naturally. In fact, you actually do it all the time with other things in your life. It's just there's certain topics that our brains want to worry about and that might be different for me than it is for you. But it's all the same thing. It's all fear based and discomfort based. Running away from it makes it worse, giving it attention makes it worse. Leaning into it and then not giving it attention makes it better. It's actually quite simple and works really, really well. So I hope you all have really good holiday season and we will talk to you very.