Anxiety and OCD are two disorders that share a few things in common. They both are worry disorders. They both experience the brain in hyper drive trying to protect you from whatever horror the brain has imagined. While worrying is a normal and often helpful endeavor, anxiety worry and OCD obsessing take worrying to new levels of self-inflicted suffering.
If there was one thought blurb that I thought spurred anxiety and OCD to a higher level of dysfunctional, it would be:
“Because I just had that last thought, and I’ve had it before, it must MEAN something! WHAT DOES IT MEAN!?! Oh no! I knew it, this fear is real and important, and is going to happen, and I need to heed the warning I feel.”
Our brain’s favorite question to ask is, “What does that mean?” Our brain is constantly trying to make sense of the experiences it absorbs. One might joke that our brain is the superstitious sort. It looks for patterns and tries to tell the future naturally. All brains have worried and disturbing thoughts. All brains can bring up horrible images and imagine terrible consequences. Brains are naturally built to focus on and store worry. The difference between and anxious and OCD brain and the community population is that the non anxious brains responds to ‘worry and fear in a less “superstitious” way, as follows:
“That last thought may or may not mean something. It may or may not happen. It may or may not be true. It’s just a thought, fear, worry, disturbing image. Move along. Nothing to see here.”
The better people with anxiety and obsessions get at noticing how easily they buy into their fears, the better they will get a dismissing the unhelpful assumption that the thought means something. If you can’t do that alone or it is hurting your relationship, seek relationship counseling or other professional counseling.
Another major difference between a community sample brain and an OCD brain is that the OCD brain is severely disturbed that the thought or image existed in the first place. A community brain would practice comforting self talk like the last quote block above. Let’s agree to accept the fact that worries and fears will always be part of life. Being happy has little to do with if worried thought or obsessions exist. Rather happiness has to do with realizing they do not have to go away for you to be happy. Their existence is not a threat. They exist to protect you. You do not need them to go away, you only need to decipher when to worry and when worrying is making it worse.
