Mindfulness Therapy

Mindfulness is a very unusual therapy because it doesn’t try to reduce the anxiety you experience. So, why should an OCD sufferer learn about it if it’s not going to help them?

The nuanced answer is that while it doesn’t aim to reduce the anxiety directly, it does in fact reduce it indirectly. Before I go into more detail, I first want to explain what mindfulness is.

Mindfulness means experiencing your current thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as they are — without trying to fix them or push them away. For someone new to it — especially someone dealing with anxiety — this can sound counterintuitive. “You want me to experience the anxiety? But I came here to get rid of it.” That reaction is completely understandable. Most approaches to anxiety focus on reducing or avoiding it.

Mindfulness takes a different route: it helps you change your relationship with anxiety, rather than trying to reduce or eliminate it. This is the official understanding of mindfulness, that it doesn’t try to reduce or eliminate the anxiety directly. But as mentioned above, it does indirectly reduce it, even though that’s not its aim.

So, how does mindfulness reduce anxiety indirectly? It does this in four ways.

Way 1

The first way is getting you to experience the anxiety without adding to it. Let me explain this method, as it’s a bit subtle.

Typically, when a person gets anxiety from an OCD thought, they end up experiencing two types of anxiety. The first type is the anxiety generated from the OCD thought itself. The second type is catastrophising about the anxiety from the OCD thought. For example, if the OCD anxiety ordinarily lasts around five minutes, they may worry this time it might last for one hour. This extra worry adds more anxiety. You could say it adds fuel to an already burning fire.

So how does mindfulness help in this situation? Well, with mindfulness, as you are prepared to experience the anxiety from the OCD thought, it doesn’t really matter how long it lasts for, so the second type of anxiety (i.e. catastrophising) is reduced or eliminated.

Way 2

The second way mindfulness reduces anxiety indirectly is by offering tools that make it more bearable. One of the most helpful tools in this regard is grounding: a set of techniques that gently shift your attention toward something steady and neutral in your surroundings. Grounding doesn’t try to block anxiety or make it disappear. Instead, it gives your mind a safe place to rest while the anxiety runs its course.

Examples of Grounding Techniques

• Breath awareness: Take a slow breath in through your nose, hold for a moment, and exhale gently through your mouth. Notice the rhythm, the temperature of the air, and the movement of your chest. You’re not trying to breathe in a special way — just observing what’s already happening. This simple act can help settle your attention and create a sense of calm.
• Five senses check-in: Pause and name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. This technique helps shift your focus from internal distress to external reality. It’s especially useful when your thoughts feel chaotic or overwhelming. The structure gives your mind something concrete to work with.
• Object anchoring: Hold a small object — like a stone, coin, or key — and notice its texture, weight, and temperature. Let your fingers explore it slowly. This tactile focus can interrupt spiralling thoughts and bring you back to your body. It’s a quiet way to stay grounded without needing to speak or move.
• Sound observation: Sit quietly and listen for sounds around you: distant traffic, birds, a ticking clock, or even silence. Try not to label or judge the sounds — just notice them as they come and go. This practice helps you stay present without needing to “do” anything. It’s especially helpful when anxiety makes you feel disconnected.

These techniques don’t eliminate anxiety, and they’re not meant to. Instead, they act as positive diversions — gentle ways to shift your attention without denying what you’re feeling. By giving your mind something steady to engage with, they make the anxiety more tolerable and less consuming.

The above two ways of indirectly reducing anxiety forms part of standard mindfulness practice. Although mindfulness practitioners would state the aim is not to reduce anxiety, but the reduction occurs as a positive side effect.

The next two ways of indirectly reducing anxiety don’t form part of standard mindfulness practice. It is my attempt to integrate mindfulness with behavioural therapy and psychoanalytic therapy (also known as psychoanalysis).

Before I explain those third and fourth ways, I just want to remind you that with OCD, the subconscious mind is tricking the brain into generating anxiety.

Way 3

For the third way, when you experience the anxiety, the brain gradually learns that the ‘danger’ is false — but this learning usually takes place after facing the same anxiety a number of times. In other words, it’s not a one-time fix. Each time you allow the anxiety to rise and fall without resistance, the brain gets a little more confident that the threat isn’t real. Eventually, it stops generating anxiety for that particular OCD thought, because it has learnt the danger is not real.

This third way is where mindfulness and behavioural therapy meet: both involve facing the anxiety rather than avoiding it.

Way 4

The fourth way mindfulness helps is by signalling to the subconscious mind that its message is being acknowledged. OCD almost universally functions as a warning system, pointing to unresolved issues such as stress or trauma that require attention. When the anxiety is experienced without resistance, the subconscious often registers that it’s been heard — and in response, the frequency and intensity of OCD anxiety could begin to ease.

This fourth way is where mindfulness and psychoanalytic therapy meet. While mindfulness doesn’t use the language of the subconscious, its practice can still have a calming effect on it.

When and How to Do Mindfulness

If the first time you try mindfulness is during an OCD episode, it probably won’t help much — your anxiety may be too high. Instead, it’s best to practice mindfulness at a calmer time of day, when OCD thoughts haven’t surfaced yet or the anxiety is relatively low. By doing this daily, you begin to build familiarity with the practice, and once you’ve gained some experience with mindfulness, you can start applying it during OCD episodes — even if the anxiety is strong.

Practicing mindfulness regularly when not experiencing an OCD episode is essentially what meditation is. Put simply, meditation means formally pausing for a short period to notice your thoughts and feelings without judgment. You don’t need to sit in uncomfortable positions or do anything special — it can be as simple as focusing on your breath while sitting in a chair. At first, it may feel unfamiliar, but with regular practice, meditation can calm you down significantly, and the benefits often start to show after a week or two.

Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat Zinn notes in his book Full Catastrophe Living  that we often live more like “human doings” than human beings — constantly rushing, worrying, or catastrophising. Meditation offers a way to step out of that cycle, to stop for a moment and simply be.

Even short daily meditations of 10–15 minutes can begin to shift this pattern, turning self care into a calming habit that supports mental health. The key is consistency: meditation has the greatest impact when practiced every day. The benefits build gradually, and each small daily practice contributes to long term wellbeing.

Some people worry that meditation might feel boring at first. And in the beginning, it can feel that way. But boredom doesn’t mean it lacks value. Doing the dishes isn’t exciting either, yet if you don’t do them the consequences are unpleasant. Meditation works the same way: even if it feels uneventful at first, the long term benefits are deeply positive.

It’s also common for anxiety to feel stronger when you first begin meditating. This happens because many people have spent months or years suppressing their thoughts and feelings, and when the mind is finally given space, those emotions can surface more intensely. The important thing to remember is that this stage is temporary — it’s the mind releasing what has been held back. With gentle, daily practice, the intensity settles, and meditation becomes a source of calm rather than discomfort.

There are many videos on YouTube that show how to meditate. Some of them are only 10 to 15 minutes long, so you should have time to fit them into your schedule. Below is a link to a good meditation video, which only lasts 15 minutes and is based on the work of Jon Kabat Zinn.

https://youtu.be/8v45WSuAeYI?si=ytn6n2g8AVgtlom9

On a separate but related note, below is a link to a really good video about OCD and mindfulness on YouTube, I strongly recommend you watch it, it’s also around 15 minutes:

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

The video is inspiring, as the person in it used to have bad OCD, but now only experiences OCD episodes from time to time. The video also makes the key point that while the aim of mindfulness is not to reduce the anxiety you experience, that’s exactly what it does.

Should Mindfulness Be Your Main Therapy for OCD?

Mindfulness can be a helpful support, but it should not be your main therapy for OCD. There are two key reasons for this.

The first is that mindfulness doesn’t require you to formally face your fear. That is, if you have contamination fears when you go outside of your home, theoretically you could avoid that anxiety by not leaving your home. Mindfulness doesn’t encourage you to leave your home.

But staying at home all the time can shrink your world and make life feel dull, disconnected, and unfulfilling. So, in this situation, it is best to implement behavioural therapy (i.e. the ‘B’ part of CBT), which formally requires you to go outside a number of times, and when you do this, your brain learns that the danger is false, and it eventually stops generating anxiety.

You could use mindfulness to make the anxiety more tolerable when you do formally go outside, but behavioural therapy is what will eventually eliminate the fear of going outside.

The second reason why mindfulness should not be your main therapy for OCD is that it only deals with the symptom and not the root cause. That is, OCD is a symptom of an underlying issue, typically trauma or stress. If you want the OCD to properly stop, you need to fix that underlying issue.

Mindfulness completely ignores the underlying issue, and instead tries to make the anxiety more tolerable. To give an analogy, say a person was getting headaches due to an ear infection, mindfulness would try to make the headaches easier to manage, but completely ignore the ear infection. Thus, even if the headaches went away in the short run, they will always make a comeback in the future, as the root cause has not been dealt with. It is the same with OCD.

Therefore, mindfulness should only be the assistant to the main therapy, which is either CBT or Psychoanalysis.

Is Mindfulness Only for Mental Illness?

In the past, mindfulness was mostly associated with treating mental illness. These days, however, it has moved into the mainstream. In the corporate world especially, mindfulness is often promoted as a practical solution for reducing stress

The example below reflects my personal view of how mindfulness works in that context. Once again, it may not align with the official understanding of mindfulness.

For instance, imagine you're working on a stressful task at your job — let’s say it generates a stress level of five out of ten. That level of stress is manageable on its own. But then your mind starts reacting to the anxiety itself: “This stress is bad — I shouldn’t be feeling this way.” That judgment adds pressure, making the anxiety feel more intense.

On top of that, another layer of catastrophising might creep in: “If I mess this up, I won’t get a good bonus.” Now you're not just dealing with the task — you're also dealing with fear about the feeling and imagined consequences. Together, these two reactions can push your stress from five to seven out of ten.

If you were practicing mindfulness in that moment, the stress could reduce in a couple of ways. First, by simply accepting the original stress without resistance, your anxiety might drop to three out of ten—because you're no longer fighting it. Second, by letting go of the bonus-related worry, that added stress might dissolve entirely, leaving you with just the manageable pressure of the task itself.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which builds on mindfulness principles) even has specific terms for these two types of stressors—we’ll explore those in the next section.

In closing, I just want to mention that in some circles, Mindfulness is sold as a miracle cure-all — a promise it never actually makes. It doesn’t cure mental illness.

Nor does it aim to reduce distress. Its purpose is awareness, not comfort. And yet, by doing so, it quietly facilitates the very thing it claims not to offer: some relief from the distress of OCD anxiety, as well as everyday stress.

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