OCD Feeds on Urgency - Here’s How to Break the Cycle

Music. Hello and welcome to the OCD and Anxiety Podcast where we explore how to have a more positive relationship with anxiety disorders taking back control so that you can start living the life you choose and not the one chosen by your fears.

Hello and welcome to episode 493 i hope that you're doing very well today and before we dive in just a quick reminder if you're looking for one-to-one support i offer a free 30-minute discovery call where we can talk through where you're feeling stuck and whether coaching might be a good fit. There's a link in the show notes if that's something that you'd like to explore.

Now on to today's episode. One of the sneakiest things OCD does is that it creates a sense of urgency, that immediate anxious feeling that you have to figure something out, avoid something or act right now. Unfortunately when we listen to this this is when we get stuck in the OCD cycle And I'm going to be talking today about a three-second pause, which is a technique that you can use to help you to kind of break free of the OCD cycle and actually come a bit more back into the present moment.

If you find this podcast helpful and you would like to get more content, well, you can head over to YouTube. There I'm posting meditations as well as the weekly videos. So if you're interested in that, you can search for Robert James Coaching and you will find it. Also, if you would like to leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, that would be amazing. So many thanks and off we go.

Urgency is OCD's emotional trap when we really experience an obsession there's this horrible sense of urgency and this is something that everybody with OCD recognizes when you feel that sense of urgency to start getting at more certainty to start figuring something out to want to get that reassurance about things it can feel almost like you know we're a kind of slave to it like that we have to do that and if we don't get that kind of release of pressure that the urgency is creating then our

anxiety is going to build and build and build until it's going to kind of explode and we're going to feel absolutely awful but the problem is with with this kind of take is that although to a certain extent you know what i've just talked about there is a pattern that I think has happened to most people with OCD otherwise probably you wouldn't be experiencing OCD you know we are able to interrupt this cycle we don't always have to respond to to that urgency with performing the compulsion in order

to kind of feel better in the short term but to change things it really does involve doing things quite a bit differently taking a bit of a different perspective on things and recognizing a little bit of what happens in the body when we find ourselves getting triggered by an obsession.

So typically the first thing that happens when you get an intrusive thought or you see something that you really didn't want to see or you feel very uncomfortable for how many hundreds of millions of different permutations there could be out there for different types of OCD.

Typically what happens is you feel very very sick in the stomach perhaps or tight in the chest you know and straight away you want to feel a bit better because now you're feeling this horrendous anxiety you want it gone and that's why we perform compulsions and unfortunately most of the time people perform that compulsion before they've even given themselves an opportunity to be able to kind of get used to the difficult emotions that they're experiencing

that sense of of urgency is a trap because it tells us you better figure it out right now you better get that certainty right now because if you don't something truly awful is going to happen and you're going to really regret it. And so often we listen to that urgency and we just perform that compulsion. And when we do, well, temporarily, because you did the compulsion, you got that reassurance, you've given yourself a little bit more certainty in the short term.

Well, your body begins to calm down a little bit. The anxiety reduces just enough for you to feel a little bit better. But unfortunately, because we did that, because we had to perform a compulsion in order to feel better, All we've actually done is we've reinforced the OCD and anxiety kind of loop.

We've sent a message to our subconscious that the next time we find ourselves in a situation where we're kind of unsure about something, where we're really triggered and we're feeling the sense of urgency, well, the only thing that's going to make us feel better is actually to perform a compulsion.

You know and this isn't true actually we can do other things but you know if we just do that compulsion all the time well that's the thing that we're probably probably going to keep doing because that's the thing that we've taught ourselves is the only thing that's actually going to calm us down so this three second rule is all about proving to ourselves that this isn't quite true so it kind of works like this the next time that you find yourself really triggered

when And that sense of urgency is really bubbling up and you're finding yourself really wanting to perform that compulsion. Like it's the most important thing for you in that moment to just get that reassurance to feel better.

The idea is just to pause for three seconds. If you can pause for just three seconds and instead, you know, just do something completely different. Maybe you're just going to feel your body for three seconds. Perhaps take a deep breath in. In fact, taking a deep breath in is often a really good idea because when we take a deep breath all the way down into the belly, ideally breathing in through the nose, it helps to just calm the body a little bit.

A little bit it kind of brings a bit more of a kind of a sense of the parasympathetic nervous.

System kind of coming online a little bit more when we're taking short sharp breaths that tends to activate the sympathetic nervous system which is our fight or flight system by taking one deep breath in you're actually activating a little bit the parasympathetic system you know the more that we actually breathe in that way you know a few times throughout the day perhaps checking in with yourself and just taking you know two or three very deep breaths in

general that can be a really beneficial thing to do but in this three second pause taking that deep breath or that gives you something to focus on during this time you might even want to extend it to a five or six second pause and the idea here is just to do something different rather than just like kind of giving into the obsession and performing that that compulsion now you're interrupting the cycle you're choosing to pause you're choosing to take a deep breath you're choosing to

focus your attention onto your body feel a little bit the trigger that you're experiencing if after you've done that you still want to perform the compulsion well fair enough but at least now you postponed for a short time you took a deep breath you checked in with your body and you know that actually interrupts that cycle it kind of calms the urgency down a little bit and like i say you You know. It may be that you still want to perform that compulsion. If you really want to, then you can.

But it may also be that just pausing for those three seconds provides you enough head space and enough body space that actually now you're able to see the obsession a little bit more objectively.

Perhaps you're able to postpone doing anything with it for a few minutes or, you know, for 30 minutes or however long you want. and instead you're going to think about acceptance commitment therapy. You're going to think about well, what do I actually value right now? What do I really want to focus my attention on to? Can I get busy with something else altogether for the next hour? And then if I really want to, I can come back to this thing then.

But if you don't at least take that three-second pause, take a deep breath in and then really reflect on, do I really want to do this compulsion?

Then it's likely that the urgency is going to take over and you're just going to perform that compulsion anyway and you know spin spin around in that OCD cycle finding yourself more and more stuck there so yeah this is a really helpful tip this is something that I apply quite often in my own life so you know as with everything if you can give it a go see if it see if it works for you like I say if you want to extend that to a 10 second pause or a 30 second pause you

know there's flexibility there it doesn't matter exactly how you practice it just experiment with it and see if it's something that works for you so many thanks guys i really hope that you enjoyed that please remember i do offer a free discovery call to get that you can head over to my website. Robertjamescoaching.com there's a link in the show notes and i will see you next time. Music.