Danielle Thornton, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains why analyzing and seeking answers is a compulsive behavior that feeds OCD. She shares her own experience ruminating about headache causes and teaches exposure and response prevention: allow the uncertainty and stop the analyzing response.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has personally recovered from multiple subsets of ocd, and I help others do the same. Today I want to talk about analyzing or trying to figure things out. So this is so, so common. It kind of falls under that rumination umbrella, right? Rumination is just overthinking. Either we're analyzing, trying to figure things out. Maybe we're in the past, maybe we're in the future in our heads. But this is a big problem. And we often think that the amount of time that we spend doing this is normal. We don't even realize how often we do it sometimes. But it's really important to identify your compulsions and bring them to zero. That's when you're going to get to the recovery stage. And this. The lower that that compulsion gets, the better you're going to feel. So we do this a lot, and I didn't realize how much I did it and how abnormal of an amount of time that I did it until I learned about OCD and started going through the recovery process. Anytime you are analyzing or trying to figure something out, you're probably doing a compulsion. Again, if it, if it's in response to thought or situation that causes discomfort, that is something you do. It's interesting because even after getting to the recovery stage for ocd, I've continued to notice how these OCD tendencies and patterns still show up in little ways. So, for example, about six months ago, I realized every time I had a headache, I would analyze, why did I have a headache? Was it because I ate something different? Was it because of a supplement that I missed or skipped? Or maybe a new supplement that I was taking? And I've learned to recognize these OCD patterns. I don't think this was ocd. It didn't cause me discomfort in any way. But I just noticed that I would analyze this a lot. I never found the answer, and I just recognized it as one of those tendencies, and I stopped doing it. And the less I think, the better I feel. Again, it wasn't necessarily ocd. There wasn't consequences. If you're analyzing or ruminating about your OCD themes, there's going to be more consequences, there's going to be more discomfort. Again, you're taking yourself out of the present moment and you're in here all the time. So the way that you're living life probably isn't very effective, which is one of the reasons why we have to get out of our heads and into the present moment. So when it is ocd, you're going to have a lot more consequences when it's not and you just notice that you're analyzing something a lot. Again, there wasn't a lot of consequences other than I was just in my head and again feeding the pattern. Not ocd, but feeding the pattern of analyzing. And the more I do it in general, the more I'm feeding that pattern in the brain and my brain's more likely to want to do it or go there automatically, which is what I'm trying to keep in check. So I want you to start to recognize when you analyze things, I want you to, whether it's your OCD theme or not, recognize when you're analyzing, choose to stop and choose to practice exposure and response prevention. So stopping the analyzing or the ruminating is the response prevention. The exposure is to just say, I don't know, I'm never going to figure it out. I'm going to stop trying and allow that uncertainty and it may be uncomfortable. You allow the discomfort that's also exposure and eventually it will fade. If it's not uncomfortable, that's okay too. You just allow yourself not to know. And the more you stop this pattern, OCD or not, the more you're retraining your brain out of of the OCD pattern. And it's going to help you a lot. I don't think that much anymore and it's actually very peaceful. I'm in the present moment and I don't experience anxiety. It's very, very rare. Again, some anxiety, depending on the situation is very normal, but I don't have spikes of anxiety anymore. I hope this was helpful. Make sure that you like this video. Comment subscribe subscribe Turn on your notifications if you want notifications of all of my upcoming videos. It's going to help me continue to provide information like this. And if you want help getting to that recovery stage and learning how to stay there, go to www.myocdcoach.com and check out my recovery programs. I have programs for all financial levels, all designed to get you to the recovery stage. Just different levels of support and you can get there. It doesn't matter how long you've had it, how bad it is, you can get there too. We'll talk to you really soon.
