OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a mental disorder caused by anxiety and negative thoughts which our mind tries to relieve and discharge through compulsive behaviors like washing your hands thirty times whenever you go to the bathroom, switching lights on and off for five times, checking ten times if the gas is closed, nail biting, hair pulling, skin scratching and so on. An OCD disorder is definitely not a good friend.

Note: even if OCD disorders are the fourth mental disorder in the USA it doesn’t meant that you are somehow crazy, mental refers to the fact that OCD have birth in our mind. So, to summarize what is an OCD disorder: anxiety, stress and obsessions (persisting negative thoughts) create a compulsive behavior aimed at reducing the level of stress and anxiety and getting rid of those obsessions. The problem is that most of the times the somehow automatic answer of our mind to OCD disorders reinforces and increases anxiety instead of reducing it.

You’re anxious and to release this anxiety you wash your hands thirty times which in turn makes you even more stressed. That’s why for a while you feel better but later anxiety and obsession begin hurting again, so you run to wash your hands again, and again, and again.

So we can say, for the sake of simplicity, that you are stressed and try to release this stress through a compulsory act which you don’t like but you can’t resist doing, which in turn stresses you even more. Let’s see how you can handle it. Remember that if you suffer from OCD or any anxiety disorder you must check with your doctor, this article on what is OCD and how to deal with them is for informational purposes only, ok?

If you are stressed and reduce your level of stress then the need to perform any OCD disorder gets reduced too. Finding a different way to express your remaining anxiety then will make the OCD pretty much unuseful. Follow me and you’ll see how to do it. As an example I’ll use a woman which has developed a compulsive scratching disorder where any time she feels stressed she begins to scratch his legs and arms until they bleed. At times she seems to have run through a field of brambles.

Let’s say that she has developed this habit of scratching herself because she had to quit her loved job to help her mother who is not anymore able to take care of herself due to a stroke. She loved her job and misses it a lot with the relationships she had there and time spent with friends. Now she has to stay at home almost all day and feels very stressed. These bottled up emotions plus recurring thoughts about how beautiful her job was in comparison with her life now led to an effort to release all those feelings through scratching her arms and legs until bleeding occurs. Also she feels guilty because she loves her mother and doesn’t like these recurring negative thoughts about her life to interfere and she gets stressed even more.

She’s stressed to be stressed, so to say.

It all started as just a kind of nervous itch we have all experienced in our life one time or  another, we scratch ourselves and feel better. Only that she went further: being a lot stressed she scratched more and things went even better when she begun bleeding because it caused a release of endorphins which really made her feel good. This habit or automatic response to stress has been established.

She doesn’t like to see her arms and legs like a battlefield so she gets stressed even more, which in turn gets her back to scratching, and so on and on. There is no way out.

Many times an OCD disorder is a habit established by our mind to release tension just like smoking or devouring chips and ice creams. Someone is stressed, biting his nails he feels the tension released and after a couple of times whenever he feels tension increasing the hand goes automatically to the mouth. The good news is that automatic behaviors like this can be unlearned as  well as learned. At the end it’s just conditioning.

The OCD disorder doesn’t come out of the blue, it has been learned and reinforced so it can be forgotten and reduced, or controlled. What is needed is just to deal with stress differently. Let’s see a couple of way to do it.

How to deal with OCD disorders.

• Accept that you are stressed or anxious and that there are obsessions hitting you. Well, this is pretty self explanatory, if you don’t accept that there is a problem then no one can help you.

• Accept that you developed an OCD disorder as a way to reduce stress, obsessions and those bottled up emotions you feel inside.

• Accept that if you were once in the past able to live without an OCD disorder then you can also live in your future without it. If once it wasn’t there then also in the future it could not be here. It’s just a matter of doing things differently.

Now take a piece of paper and write down what happened before you begun to develop your OCD disorder, come on I’m sure you know why you got it. Detail what happened and all those obsessions that are hitting you.

Can you accept them? As in the example above can you accept that sometimes life doesn’t take the road we want and we are faced with hard times instead? And that there are no reasons for that but that sometimes life simply sucks even if you are the best person in the world? Can you? Can you accept that if your mother got sick and you have to left your loved job is not her fault and neither yours? Can you see that the reason why you scratch yourself so often and so hard is simply that you loved that job and now you miss it so much?

This is the first step to handle an OCD disorder, identifying what was the motivating factor and why and when it has been developed.

Second, is there anything you can do to feel less pain? Like reducing this anxiety and those obsessions like working part time or from home? Maybe setting up a website about this job and talking about it? Or in the case you lost a loved one is there anything you can do to feel better and nearer to him or her? To maintain his or her memory? Is there anything related which you can do? Are there times when you don’t obey to your OCD disorder? What do you do when you don’t feel the need to scratch? Any preferred activity which makes you feel good? No one can scratch himself for 24 hours a day so what are you doing when you don’t feel the need to scratch? Can you do something to miss things less?

The second step to deal with an OCD disorder is finding if there are ways to feel less pain.

Third you can learn new hobbies which make you to focus both your mind and your body in what you are doing. Hobbies like gardening, knitting, creating baits for fly fishing, painting, playing darts, fishing and so on. Occupying yourself in these activities as much as you can will begin to shift your attention from harming yourself to doing something you like keeping both your hands and you mind busy. Actually keeping both your hands and your mind busy is the best and easiest way to reduce stress. If you get busy or tired by physical activity you don’t have time to feel stressed or anxious, unless it works just for me.

Third step to handle OCD disorders, stress, anxiety and obsessions is committing  yourself to those activities which keep both your mind and your body busy.

Forth comes using your body to relax your mind. One of the secrets of self improvement is that the mind influences the body and the body influences the mind. When you are stressed you usually have very short and shallow breaths and you body is pretty tense, after you take some, around ten, deep belly breaths your mind gets calmer and your body relaxes. Taking some short breaths makes your mind more tense and your body too. Try it if you don’t believe me. Mind and body influence each other.

So, if you want a relaxed mind you can have it through a relaxed body. The best way to relax your body is by using it so it gets tired, releases tension and makes your mind clear. That’s why the first two steps in stress management are belly breathing and physical activity. Now you can enjoy any kind of physical activity but to be effective it must be an activity which moves your body and at least for half an hour so running, cycling, bodybuilding, aerobics, Tai Chi, Tennis, Boxe, Karate, Basket, Soccer, gardening and so on are good; Yoga for example is not because it doesn’t make your muscles to work well for our goals. Your body must move but if you perform static positions it doesn’t. Yoga is a wonderful activity but not to squeeze stress out as we need. Half  an hour a day is good, half an hour in the morning and another half in the evening before dinner is better; you get a good start for the day and you release tensions before going to bed. The goal is to use our body to squeeze tension out so that being tired we just want to relax. No need to discharge tension in other ways.

Fourth step for OCD disorders is moving your body at least half an hour per day.

The fifth point is using your breathe wisely. Let me tell you a real secret: if you do deep belly breathing you can’t be stressed. You can’t be tensed both in your body and your mind if you do deep breathing. Try to tense all your muscles now and breathe deeply.

Impossible right? Ok, I could have said in the beginning of this long article and kept it short but you wouldn’t have believed me, now I have more chances to be. I have an article about an Easy Deep Breathing Technique which you could find interesting and useful. Believe me you can’t be stressed and anxious if you breathe deeply, especially if you think “Calm” when you breathe in and “Relax” when you breathe out. Keep in mind that deep breathing at the beginning can made you to feel a bit strange so do it at little steps. After you’re comfortable it will become second nature so you’ll feel always less stressed, that’s the magic of deep belly breathing.

Fifth step to handle OCD disorders is to breathe deeply and calmly.

Well, time for a short recap right?

Strategies to deal with OCD disorders:

• Identify the motivating factor and accept it

Some Positive Affirmations for OCD disorders:

• Whenever I feel tension rising I immediately and automatically take ten deep relaxing breaths.

This approach to what is an OCD and how to deal with those OCD disorders comes out from a strong belief I have, that is if someone is able to think then it’s possible to find a way to change everything. The mind rules the body so the mind can change itself and the body. Every human being has the power inside to change what needs to be changed, it’s just necessary to find the correct way to do it. If we have an awareness we can change because we are always stronger and more powerful than we think, and also than others think. We just need to find the right key to unlock our powers, Hypnosis in my opinion is the strongest and simplest tool we have for this but if you find another one it’s fine too.

Forget what others say and forget what you think; you have the power, the strength and the ability to transform your life as you want to. Quit self punishing yourself and do something positive instead. You are as strong as you want to be; the fact that up to now you haven’t used all your powers simply means that from now on you have more power to use.

And now, beside sharing this long article with your friends, I would like to know what you think.