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 a really good video about OCD and mindfulness on YouTube, I strongly recommend you watch it, it’s 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 you do something whose aim isn’t to help you get better? But once you start practicing mindfulness, it actually does help. In particular, it helps reduce anxiety from the current set of OCD thoughts in two ways
The first way is that when you experience the anxiety, the brain learns that the ‘danger’ is false, and eventually will stop generating anxiety for that particular OCD thought
The second 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 subconscious feels heard—when the anxiety is experienced without resistance—it tends to reduce the frequency and intensity of intrusive thoughts
These are the reasons why I believe mindfulness can be helpful for OCD. Of course, this is just how I’ve come to understand it—it’s not necessarily how mindfulness is formally taught or defined
Also, mindfulness isn’t just for mental illness—it can be helpful for everyday stress too.
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. While you're focused on the task, your mind might start catastrophizing: “If I mess this up, I won’t get a good bonus.” That extra layer of worry pushes 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.
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 page is on alternative therapies - please click the below button.