Repeated Rituals Help!!!
Hi guys!
I’d love to have some advice to help me stop doing certain things before bed in order to “feel safe” or to mask the what ifs that I continuously think.
At night I have to put my brightest and volume at a certain level on my phone and put on dnd mode in a way that feels just right to me or else in my head I someone would get sick. I know that is very irrational and I know it’s all in my head. As well, I have a habit of knocking or tapping things 3 times when it’s related to a specific sickness I’m afraid of Especially before I eat out at a restaurant I sort of do this to “cancel out” anything bad
Anyways, is there any suggestion on how to gradually stop this ? I’ll take any advice I could get right now.
@butterflyy3
I'm sorry it causes you so much stress especially when you start thinking of worse case scenarios. Thank you for opening up and being honest.
It takes time and practice, it's not an easy fix, but its about allowing yourself to maybe tap twice instead of three times, until you see, nothing bad happens, then you get it to knocking once and suddenly you are not doing it at all. Slowly restraining your mind to see you are safe. When I feel like this I listen to music to drown out the negativity. Sending you my best wishes 💜 💕
I just want you to know you’re not alone. I have similar bedtime rituals that I do to “cancel out harm”, even though I know logically it doesn’t make sense to check things as much as I do
I think you will have to slowly start performing the compulsions or rituals and the anxiety you can reduce it by doing meditation 😌😊👍
You are not alone at all. I’ve been dealing with OCD for a while daily and I’m trying to work on improving certain behaviors. For example, I get so scared that if I don’t wash my hands a certain way that I’ll get a disease and I’m working on resisting giving into those thoughts when they come. I’ve also been experiencing counting OCD rituals and when I clean my apartment, I wash my hands so much because I get paranoid that if I don’t wash my hands and eat a snack or something that I’ll get sick or develop a disease. I try to remind myself that these thoughts are just thoughts and that they’re not actual threats and that it’s just my mind trying to protect itself from anything that it deems to be dangerous. I try to keep in mind that these compulsions/rituals are just my mind trying to keep me safe and I try to look at it in a positive way even though it’s hard sometimes because I just wanna heal and not let it take over my life sometimes. You got this and both of us will heal 🙂