How to Stop Unwanted Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Thoughts
How Can I Stop Unwanted Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Thoughts?
let me begin by telling you that you are asking the wrong type of question in order to deal with ocd which is your objective right now you don’t have to ask that question for one reason the answer to this question is that you cannot stop the unwanted thoughts and here is why the way your mind works and the way your brain works makes it impossible to choose the type of thought that comes into your mind most of the time for three reasons
The First Reason:
It is that thoughts and ideas in the mind are connected to each other in such an intermeshed network that any thought can lead to another unwanted one even if you do not expect it you can start by thinking about something and then few seconds later you find yourself thinking about a totally different thing because thoughts are interconnected one thought leads to another and another leads to another up until you end up with something that you’ve never expected so you cannot really control what type of thought floats into your brain
The Second Reason:
you can’t really control your thoughts or stop unwanted thoughts is that there are external triggers while walking in the street or while driving your car you can see something that reminds you of something you can smell something that reminds you of another thing you can hear a sound that reminds you of a different thought so the external triggers shapes our thoughts to a great extent and this is why choosing what comes to our mind is almost impossible
The Third Reason:
why you can’t prevent an unwanted thought from coming into your mind is that according to research whenever you push a thought it comes back stronger just try right now not to think about the purple elephant and you will find that you are thinking about a purple elephant research has found that the more you push a thought away the more your mind resists by pushing back and bringing the thought to your conscious awareness so the quick conclusion we can make in here is that we cannot stop unwanted thought from coming to our mind however we still want to stop the ocd so what we can do we can actually choose how we respond to the thoughts and this is what really kills the OCD.
How to stop OCD and unwanted thoughts?
If you want to stop OCD from ruining your life then you need to learn how to stop responding to the thoughts when they get to your mind and this leads us to a very important thought that comes to the mind of a person who has OCD what if i didn’t respond to that thought i will remain feeling frustrated i will still experience the stress i will feel really bad and this bad feeling is going to last forever no this is actually totally wrong the bad feelings are not going to last forever and this is the good news yes you are going to feel really distressed when you stop responding to a thought yes you are going to feel really bad yes you will feel like you want to die i totally understand how OCD feels like but when you stop responding to the thought maybe after hours maybe after a day maybe after few days the thought will disappear and will become unimportant you will still see the thought in your mind but you will stop caring about it so the key here is resisting the thought up until it becomes unimportant and this happens with every thought the reason you might be failing to believe in this is that you may have not tried it before at all you were always responding to the thoughts you never got them and this is why you were reinforcing the cycle of the ocd but in order to break the cycle completely you have to stop responding to the thought and resist the feelings yes the feelings are going to be intolerable i totally understand but just understand those feelings are never going to last and if you manage to wait for a couple of days or maybe a few more days the thoughts are going to stop being effective at all yes the same thought is going to be in your mind but it will lose its effect completely and you will no longer feel the urge to do some kind of an action or to get involved into a compulsion if you just manage to do this to one single thought if you manage to resist one single thought up until it becomes less effective you will realize at this moment that OCD can be treated and that you can get over OCD by resisting those thoughts and not responding to them.
Conclusion
in summary you cannot prevent a certain type of thought from coming into your mind but you can stop responding to the thought and so weakening the thought over time this is exactly how to get rid of OCD.
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