Danielle Jhiani, a certified life coach, explains why people develop multiple OCD subsets and how exposure therapy and accepting uncertainty can stop new ones from forming. Compulsions are maladaptive coping; consistent practice rewires your brain's anxiety response.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm a certified life coach, an anxiety, attachment and OCD specialist, helping people live happy lives and happy, healthy relationships free of anxiety avoidance and ocd. If you have multiple OCD subsets or you find yourself getting anxious in a lot of different situations, this video is for you. The reason why you're getting a lot of anxiety or you have multiple OCD subsets is because you have a propensity towards having anxiety. Probably genetically, you probably have a parent with anxiety, or maybe you've experienced lot of traumatic events in your life and you've never learned how to respond to these things in a healthy way so that anxiety response reduces and it doesn't get worse. Because if we don't learn how to respond, our responses are actually quite unhealthy and they're making the anxiety worse or they're making it so it's likely that we get more anxious in different situations or even develop other OCD subsets. If you have ocd, the compulsions are coping mechanisms. They're things that we don't realize that we're doing that are making it worse. Our brain is telling us to seek safety, to seek reassurance. The brain is automatically ruminating and analyzing and trying to figure things out. Maybe there's other behavioral compulsions that you have. These are all things that your brain has told you to do to help you feel better. But what you don't know is those are the things that are actually making it worse. And once you learn what's making it worse, once you learn what to do that actually makes it better, Everything changes. Anxiety fades, OCD fades, all of your subsets fade, or you're likely not to get another subset that comes up. I have had other subsets that have tried to come up for me in the past, but. But I recognize them. I've been able to respond in a way where it doesn't stay or stick. Our responses and behaviors are always teaching our brain what to do, what to continue to do, or what to stop doing. And we're used to trusting our brain. We're used to trusting when it wants to eat, when it tells us to sleep, when it tells us to react, when it gives us emotions. But the brain is not as reliable as you think. We often have to learn how to. How to think and behave differently. If you think about somebody who overeats, who's overweight, they are acting based on urges or thoughts that their brain is giving them to eat certain things. But our brain seeks pleasure and it wants to avoid discomfort. And this is a huge problem in a lot of areas of life. Ocd, overeating, any sort of addiction, pretty much any issue in life is something that we can take care of with our way of thinking and our behavioral coping mechanisms. So how do you respond differently so that you stop the doubts, the anxiety, the fears and the ocd? What you need to do is you need to start recognizing when either fear, anxiety or even really low level discomfort shows up and start moving towards that thing. There's specific techniques that I teach people how to do this. If you get a thought that causes discomfort about going somewhere, go there anyway. Because the more you avoid, the more uncomfortable it gets. If you can catch it quicker and go there anyway, the fear and the discomfort actually fades quicker and it doesn't develop into stronger anxiety and discomfort. If the anxiety and discomfort is already there and you go anyway and you go consistently and over time you will build comfort. Just like going to a new job. We all are uncomfortable on that first day because it's new, but the more we go, the more comfortable we get. And this is exactly how exposure works. You also have to learn to recognize these negative, uncomfortable, fear based thoughts and start to accept uncertainty. And the way that we do that is when the brain goes, there's something wrong here. You're going to respond with, yeah, maybe there is, but I'm not going to give this negative thought attention because 99.9% of the time there's really nothing wrong. There's really no danger. Your brain is overreacting about something. So when you stop listening to those negative thoughts and fears and you go live your life anyway, your brain stops giving you the these negative thoughts and fears. Because you're teaching your brain that it doesn't need to warn you, it doesn't need to protect you, it doesn't need to keep giving you these thoughts and you're not going to act on them anyway. And then it stops giving you those thoughts and you stop being anxious in general, more and more over time. It takes a lot of consistent practice and for most people it takes getting professional help to learn all of the techniques. These are just some beginner techniques, but can you to learn what's going on, how you're responding that's making it worse, and then how to respond differently. And as you're really, really consistent with this and you have support in doing it, you will notice your life growing and improving and the anxiety lessening more and more over time. Thoughts are just thoughts. They typically don't mean anything. We all get all kinds of thoughts every single day and we have to learn how to respond in a healthy way that allows us to be happy and confident and free in life. If you want to learn more specific techniques and get better, eliminate anxiety, doubt, fear, OCD from your life for good, visit the link in the description below. Check out our recovery programs. I promise you you can get better and you can live the life that you dream of. We'll talk to you soon.
