Medication helps anxiety and OCD but rarely fixes them alone. Real improvement comes from learning to sit with fear-based thoughts instead of avoiding them, so your brain stops reinforcing the anxiety cycle.
People ask me if medication will help get rid of anxiety or OCD permanently, and the answer is typically no. Medication can be very helpful for a lot of people, but is it going to be the thing that fixes this for you? You need to learn what to do and how to respond to these fear based thoughts and situations, because what you're doing is avoiding and running away, which is making it worse. Your brain's anxiety response is reinforced and it gets worse when you respond with thank you for that thought, but I'm not going to let this scare me. I'm going to move towards it and build comfort. These different types of responses tell your brain that this is okay, I can handle this. You may not feel like you can right away, but you actually can. And this isn't something that it needs to continue to warn you about. And the less your brain brings up that topic.
