How To Stop Obsessing (Podcast Episode 348)

Anxiety disorders and OCD will create obsessions. These are the things you get fixated on, you're worried about all the time, and you cannot seem to get them out of your mind. People often ask me how they can stop obsessing over the thing they're currently worried about or afraid of. So, this week on The Anxious Truth, we're going to talk about that. Now, before we get into that, just a quick reminder that The Anxious Truth is more than just this YouTube video or this podcast episode. There are a ton more resources on my website at the anxiousruth.com, so I urge you to go over there and check all of that out. And if you'd like to talk about what you hear on this episode of The Anxious Truth, I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space, which I co-host with my Disordered co-host Josh Fletcher. You can find out more about that community space and about the Disordered podcast at disordered.fm, so check that out, too. So, let's get into this. Everybody wants to know how to stop obsessing over whatever it is they are fixated on and can't get away from. But, the fact of the matter is, you can't just decide to stop obsessing. We We have to operate on a different level, and we're going to get to that. In our context, which is OCD and anxiety disorders, obsessions are more than just worries or concerns or things to keep an eye on, they are seen as very real threats, dangerous things, things that create incredible amounts of discomfort or fear or uncertainty or feelings of vulnerability or identity threat. They are powerful. The thing you're currently obsessed with or fixated on feels very urgent and important and vital to your well-being or the health and safety of you or your loved ones. So, I suspect that even calling it an obsession feels mildly disrespectful or like it's not taking it seriously because your obsession is really important, right? Now, in OCD and anxiety disorders, an obsession is not something we can just choose to turn off because if you could just turn off the obsession or the fixation, you would have done that already, I'm sure. What do people with OCD and anxiety disorders tend to get obsessed with or fixated on? Well, the list is almost endless, but some of the more common ones include obsession with bodily functions or somatic experiences or sensations, obsession with moral perfection, obsession with being a good person, obsession with love and attachment and relationships, especially when it comes to romantic or intimate relationships or your your relationship with your children, for instance. People often become obsessed with harm or self-harm. You can be obsessed with your safety or the safety of the people that you love. You can become obsessed or fixated on the state of the world and threats like war or disease or social upheaval. You can be obsessed with ensuring that you are everything that you hope to or aspire to be, a good person, a caretaker, a problem-solver, a provider, a protector, a good parent, a good spouse, a good friend, a good employee. These are just a few of the common obsessions that can get really sticky in the context of OCD or an anxiety disorder. And that stickiness makes a real mess of things for people who struggle with this. Notice that OCD and anxiety never latch on to things that are casual or irrelevant. They only latch on to things that are really important to you. In fact, I would say that they latch on to topics that are important to all human beings in one way or another. We all agree that we care about the safety of our loved ones or our own safety or our health or the state of the world or being good people or our relationships. We all care about those things. But in anxiety and OCD disorders, the difference is that the worry or the concern, valid though it may be because these are in fact important topics on a kind of universal level, the obsession comes with such an intense experience of worry or fear or anxiety or a sense of uncertainty or vulnerability that we get tricked into thinking that fixating and trying to actually solve or figure out an obsession is a good move. So, while the average non-anxious person may in fact be concerned about the very things that you find yourself obsessed fixated with, they can understand that yes, they are worried about a thing that all human beings worry about. Maybe they can make some plans that are actionable to deal with that or contingencies that they'll keep in the back of their mind. They will note that they are worried or uncomfortable or even afraid and they will tend to move on because they understand that there's not much more they can do than that. But if you're struggling with an anxiety disorder or with OCD, that experience of the obsession, the fixation, and the big emotional wallop that come with that will tell you that it's you're not supposed to let that go. You're supposed to stay fixated on it and you're supposed to take some sort of action in response to the discomfort that you feel. So, if you want to know how to stop obsessing over whatever it is has your attention right now, you're almost asking an impossible question. You're actually asking how to operate directly on the worry, the obsession, the fixation, and we just can't do that. Remember, you cannot turn off your feelings, you cannot turn off your thoughts, and you certainly cannot micromanage the function of your body, especially when it comes to responding in normal designed ways to scary thoughts or scary concerns or worries. Bodies and minds are going to do what they're going to do and we have to learn to live with that. So, when we combine the uncontrollable nature of thoughts, emotions, and bodily functions with the relative importance of the things we become obsessed with or fixated on, what we're looking at is an equation that makes it damn near impossible to simply turn off an obsession. I'm guessing you've tried to turn off your obsession or your fixation in a million different ways. Has that worked for you or worked for any more than maybe a couple hours or a couple of days at best? People who struggle with anxiety and OCD will try a million different ways to do that, replacing negative thoughts with happy thoughts, trying to conjure up positive or happy memories, trying to vibrate higher, choosing gratitude, biohacking, changing diet, adding supplements, trying to use logic or reason to prove the obsession wrong or convince themselves that everything's going to be okay and that they actually have a handle on everything. You may be in a constant battle in your own head trying to argue with yourself that it makes no sense to obsess the way you are, yet you can't stop it. Again, this list is almost endless, but I'm guessing that if you're watching this video or listen to this podcast today, you recognize at least a few of those. Really, we want to learn how to stop compulsing. We cannot operate on the obsession itself, we have to operate on the compulsion that drives and fuels that obsession, keeps it alive. A compulsion is what we try to do to feel safer, less anxious, more secure, less vulnerable, more sure when we are triggered into that obsessional or fixated state. Think of compulsion as sort of the automatic knee-jerk, I can't handle this feeling response that you have whenever your obsession rises to the top and you get triggered into a state that you think you can't handle or that indicates that there's a real problem that you have to fix or solve. Now, compulsions could be behavioral, things that you can do that you and others can see you doing or they could be mental in nature, invisible things that happen in your head silently and nobody but you can know they're going on. And just as the list of obsessions in anxiety and OCD are almost endless, so is the list of compulsions. Some common behavioral compulsions might include repeating tasks or cleaning excessively or asking over and over the same questions trying to attain reassurance and soothing or even validation of identity confirmation. You could be behaviorally checking and monitoring your own body or the weather or world events or the safety or whereabouts of your loved ones or checking the expression on people's faces around you to making sure that they still love you and you haven't offended them or done something wrong. You might repeat routine tasks or motions. You might build very complicated rituals around very simple tasks like hygiene tasks or getting in your car or packing your bag at the end of the day to go back home from work. Then there are the mental compulsions, which are kind of more insidious because they're silent. No one can see you doing them. Only you know they're happening and they tend not to be so visible except in the negative impact they cause in your functioning. Things like counting special patterns in your head, repeating song lyrics or words or phrases or prayers or reviewing your emotions for correctness or scanning your memory for gaps or testing your memory to make sure that you're not losing it. You could be trying to force good emotions or immediately access on demand good memories and then force positive emotions as a result of that. And then of course there are the old standbys, which is actively engaging in worry and rumination in an attempt to sort of pre-solve a problem you think is coming down the pike or know the unknowable or confirm that you really are on top of things and you're taking care of what needs to be taken care of. Again, we can go on and on with this. The list is damn near endless. Instead of asking how do I stop obsessing over we have to look at those compulsions. The compulsions are the actions we take to try to feel immediately better when we're in a triggered moment and we have to keep doing them because that soothing or that relief never lasts. So you wind up in an endless cycle and every time you engage in a compulsion, you are confirming to your brain that obsessing and fixating is in fact the right thing to do and the cycle never stops. In a nutshell, compulsions are the things that you do to try to save yourself from your obsession. Except it's nonsense because the obsession isn't as urgent or dire or immediate or actionable as your brain will suggest it is. So there's actually no saving to be done. It just feels like you're saving yourself because you experience some sort of emotional relief in the moment that you compuls. Compulsions are an attempt to save yourself from your obsessions. Keep that in mind. So in the end you don't have to ask, "How do I stop obsessing over spiritual contamination or accidental infidelity or cancer or heart attacks?" You only have to work on not saving yourself from those things, which I know sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Now, operating on the compulsions is much easier than operating directly on the obsessions, but it's still really hard to do. As anybody who's ever undergone any sort of anxiety disorder or OCD treatment understands, exposure and response prevention because all exposure has a response prevention component is really difficult to do. When you are triggered by something that tells you that you are in immediate danger or you've got to pay attention to this thing or something is wrong, but I just don't know what it is and I have to figure it out. I have to get out of here. I have to be saved. I have to protect my identity or my morality or my faith or my loved ones or my relationship, there is a threat afoot and you don't take the saving action, which is what ERP work is all about, you get hit with a massive rush of adrenaline and cortisol and fear and discomfort and you are absolutely convinced that you are making an egregious mistake from which there is no recovery. Resisting a compulsion or not ritualizing a task that's been ritualized or not performing a safety or avoidance or escape behavior feels like making an incredible mistake and the intensity of the feeling that you're going to get will accidentally confirm that for you, and air quotes. Spoiler alert, it doesn't confirm anything. It only confirms that you're afraid and everybody is allowed to be afraid, but you try to learn that you can handle that without trying to fix it. That's where the secret sauce is here. So, you haven't messed up. When you operate on the compulsion directly or the ritual directly or the escape avoidance safety behavior directly and you learn to not engage in those things, even though it feels like the right thing to do that and it makes you feel a little bit worse when you don't save yourself from the obsessive or fixated threat, you're not making a mistake. And when we learn to repeat that and have that experience again and again and again, what you're actually doing is sending a signal back down the chain to your brain that it can understand. Just yelling at it that stop obsessing, stop fixating, why can't I stop this, this is wrong, think happy thoughts isn't working for you because your brain can't hear that. But what it can hear is an experience. It can hear you not save yourself when it barks instructions to save yourself. And over time, what you wind up getting is a change in the fixation and the obsession accidentally or on the back end, it's a happy secondary impact. When we stop compulsing, which is very hard work because it feels like a huge mistake and it goes against what some people will just call a survival instinct, fair enough, I can sort of deal with that interpretation, we intentionally choose discomfort and feelings of danger or threat. And when we can bravely and self-compassionately do that again and again in a systematic way, often with professional help, which can be hugely helpful if you can access that, and I know not everybody can, you're actually teaching your brain through experience, which is a way that it can learn that oh, the threat always passes. Yes, it might come back in an hour or 2 hours or 5 minutes, but over time, that threat will appear less and less and less. Your brain will learn through those very brave, self-compassionate uh experiences that the obsession has been off base. You start to learn discernment again. It's not like your relationship or the health of your children isn't important, we would all certainly agree that they are. Your own safety is important. World peace and you know, getting away from things like war and global conflicts is important, we all agree with that. But what you're learning when you work on the compulsions is that the obsession and fixation at that level that drives a seemingly correct but actually pointless action like a compulsion is not the right way to address those things that we all agree are important. For somebody with OCD for instance, it would seem like the right thing to do to wipe the kitchen counter again or to mentally run through a counting sequence or to check facial expressions to make sure that their husband or wife isn't actually going to leave them even though there's no evidence for that. It would seem like that's the right move the obsession or the fixation, but the rest of us would look from the outside in and say, "That's theater. That's actually doing nothing." The person who keeps having panic attacks that insist that they must call a safe person, run home, and put ice packs on their wrists doesn't get any sympathy in many instances because the people around them understand that this doesn't kill you. You're really uncomfortable, but there's nothing to freak out over. You're just afraid and it's going to pass. We have to learn that the response, the compulsion if you will, which is what we call it in OCD, but I think it's a reasonable it even in other related anxiety disorders. When we can start to get rid of the compulsion, our brains will learn over time that the level of worry or the level of trigger or the level of fixation or obsession with this somewhat valid concern, especially in GAD, people with generalized anxiety disorders, well, and and health anxiety will argue all the time, but my worry, my fixation is real, so I I have to respond to it. Yeah, it may very well be a real issue, but we need to operate on the compulsion anyway so that we can learn that the strategy that we have insisted must be correct to deal with that discomfort isn't correct at all and it's causing more problems than it solves. What does that actually look like in practice? Well, I can't tell you exactly for your situation because I don't actually know you. In a podcast episode or a YouTube video, I couldn't possibly give you step-by-step instructions on exactly how to resist your compulsions or even how to identify them. That That is the part where professional help and additional psychoeducation and understanding is certainly helpful. But what does that look like from a 50,000-ft view? It looks like over time with repetition, the intensity of the experience that you have when your obsession or fixation is triggered tends to begin to drop. It The impact emotionally, the fear, the discomfort, the uncertainty, the feelings of vulnerability or mistake or failure or whatever it is that drive you tend to get a little bit less intense over time and the impact shortens. Instead of taking you out of the game for a full four days, it starts to take you out of the game for maybe a day or two. And then maybe a few hours or maybe just the afternoon. And then the obsessions begin to pop up with far less intensity. And over time, those kind of triggered moments become fewer and farther between. And when they do come up, you can pass through the peak of that more rapidly and without as much functional impact. Does that mean you will never have an obsessional thought or a anxious fear or something that triggers you into a panic or high anxiety state? No, we can't promise that and that's not how that works. But, it means that when it does happen, which it can to anybody, you aren't buried for days or weeks end and on end by that. You're not clinging to a strategy that was never working and making things worse for you. What we learn here is discernment. Oh, I see what's happening. That obsession popped up again. Yeah, this is really important. But, the compulsing about it, the trying to solve my discomfort isn't working and it's going to prolong this experience. So, what I really have to do is just let that discomfort be there and watch it wax and wane on its own. I can handle this. I'm okay. It's safe for me to be afraid or unsure and not fix it, especially if there's nothing I can actually do to fix it. Remember, one of the key principles that we're relying on here is that life and the emotions and thoughts that come with it is an experience to have, not a problem to solve. I believe Alan Watts was the person who said life is an experience, not a problem. But, I think we can sort of bring that down to a more granular level and say your thoughts are not always things to solve, nor are your emotions. They are primarily experiences to have. So, when we operate on the compulsion and we just start having the experience of difficult thoughts or emotions, we learn over time that, "Okay, I can handle those experiences and I don't have to go into 3 days of protracted saving, avoiding, escaping, or ritualizing to feel better because that wasn't actually doing anything anyway, except falsely convincing me that I had done something good." So, to start to wrap this up, the answer to the question, "How do I stop obsessing over?" is you don't. First, you have to see what compulsions or how you are responding to those obsessions or fixations to make yourself feel better in the moment and work on systematically, self-compassionately, with patience and understanding eliminating those compulsions bit by bit, working through those really scary, difficult, vulnerable feeling moment vulnerable feeling moments and allowing your brain to learn from that. Why? Because we know from decades and decades and decades of evidence here that this works quite well. The beauty here is that you're leveraging the transient nature of every human experience. The you have never been stuck in happiness, nor will you be stuck in fear unless you give in to the compulsions that tend to perpetuate the fear. So, you can't just stop obsessing. I wish I had a special tip or trick on how to do that, but really what we want to do is start working on the compulsions, the things we do to try try to feel better about our fixations and our obsessions. That's actually the path out of that. And as always, feeling better tends to be the happy secondary outcome, not the primary goal. Sucks that it works that way, but that is how it works. So, that's the answer to how do I stop obsessing over. That's episode 348 of The Anxious Truth, I guess, in the books. I will remind you that as always, I don't know you personally and while I'm a therapist, I'm not your therapist, so you have to take what I say with a bit of a grain of salt because these are big broad concepts that then have to be applied individually in your in your own specific life, your own unique circumstance. So, please keep that in mind. I cannot give you specific prescriptive words here, so don't take them that way. And I think the other thing to keep in mind is these are often counterintuitive. These principles don't make common sense because when you're scared, all you want to do is fix that and get away from that. Totally understandable, not blaming you for that. So, if it takes you a while to really put your brain around this and come to the conclusion that like yeah, trying to fix this isn't working, so maybe I have to at least try that. Be patient with yourself. Everybody kind of puts their brain around this and embraces this sort of path on their own time for their own reasons. So, you're going to have to be kind to yourself and get there when you get there. If you've been trying this method, if you will, although it's not a method, if you've been trying this approach to accept, to face, to float, to willfully tolerate, to not compuls, and let it end, and you find that you just can't seem to believe that you're safe when you do that. Again, be nice. You will get to that point when you get to that point. This takes some time and it's not easy work to do even though the principles tend to be relatively simplistic when you really get down to it. I will admit that. So, hopefully this has helped in some way. I will ask if you're watching on YouTube, uh most of the people who watch my YouTube videos are actually not subscribed to the channel. So, if you can hit the subscribe button or even hit the notification bell so you know when I upload new content, it may mean nothing to you, but it tells YouTube that you actually want me to make this type of video even if you only watch once in a while. I would really appreciate it cuz otherwise people like me are swimming upstream against the algorithm. And of course, just a reminder, if you want to talk about what you heard today on this episode of the podcast, go to disorder.fm, check out that podcast, comes out every Friday. Uh also, you can interact with me on the disorder community space where Josh Fletcher and I are hanging out most days. You can find that at disorder.fm and check out all the other resources on my website at the anxious truth.com, which is chock-full of stuff, most of which is free, and even the stuff that does carry a cost is pretty cheap. I don't have any $5,000 masterminds and never will. Anyway, thanks for hanging out. If you made it to the end of the episode, hopefully you got something out of it. I appreciate your time, your attention. Hopefully I've been helpful for you. I'll be back in 2 weeks with another episode on something. Actually, I think I know what we're talking about next time and it should be pretty interesting. Until then, every Friday Disordered comes out, so you can check out that podcast if you want something weekly. Thanks for hanging out. I will see you in the next one.