Mindfulness Therapy

Mindfulness is a very unusual therapy, in that it doesn’t try to help you get better. You read the sentence correctly, the aim of mindfulness is not to help you recover. So, what’s the point of the therapy?

Well, although its direct aim is not to help you reduce anxiety, it does actually reduce anxiety indirectly, hence why it can be a useful tool for some OCD sufferers

To be clear, mindfulness should not be your main therapy for OCD treatment. It should only be the assistant to the main therapy, which is either CBT or Psychoanalysis

Mindfulness is about accepting what is happening to you in the moment, without trying to stop it, or judging it as a bad thing. This includes when you experience the anxiety from an OCD thought

It is hard being mindful when you get an OCD thought, as the anxiety can be quite high. Hence why you need to practice mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, so that when the OCD thought strikes, you will remember what to do.

There are many videos on YouTube that show how to do mindfulness meditation. Some of them are only 10 to 15 minutes long, so you should have time to fit them into your schedule

On a separate but related note, there is really good video about OCD and mindfulness on YouTube, I strongly recommend you watch it, its around 15 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6UUc3HkY4c

As the above video mentions, with mindfulness you don’t aim to get anywhere (i.e. your aim is not to recover from OCD). The reason is that if you try to reduce your anxiety but it doesn’t work, then you will become discouraged to keep trying

I know, it sounds a bit rubbish, why would do something whose aim is not to help you get better. But once you do mindfulness, it does actually reduce some of your anxiety.

Also, mindfulness is not just for mental illness. It can also be used for everyday stress. The example below is my opinion of how mindfulness helps with everyday stress, and may not agree with the official understanding of mindfulness. The example is that at work you may be working on stressful task, that generates a stress of five out of ten. While working on that task, your mind might start to catastrophise about the task, that is, if you do a bad job, you might not get a good bonus. So, the original stress of five out of ten, becomes seven of ten because of the extra stress of getting a good bonus

If you were mindful in the above situation, the stress will be reduced in a number of ways. The first is that by accepting the stress of the original task, your stress level should reduce (to maybe three out of ten) because you are not fighting it. The second thing is that if you ignore the extra stress of needing a good bonus, its stress may totally go way, so all you are left with is the stress of the original task

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which is based on Mindfulness) has special names for the above two stressors, and we will come to that in the next section

Mindfulness is perhaps the originator of the mind-body connection, but sells itself short by insisting that it is not trying to help you recover from illness (and everyday stress), even though ultimately that’s what it does

The next section is on alternative therapies - please click the below button