Your OCD is a destructive CYCLE that can be BROKEN… Let’s slow things down and examine exactly what’s happening with your OCD so you can see that it’s a predictable cycle .
This anxiety triggers your fight or flight reaction which gets tricked into believing that a threat is present, and you begin to obsess about the thought or some other thought that has made you anxious before.
Your mind is doing what it supposed to do – figure out what the threat is. The problem is that since nothing is REALLY wrong, it decides to relentlessly figure out what COULD or MAY be wrong and obsession can be the result! Your mind wants to do SOMETHING to feel better, and it wrongly decides that engaging in your compulsive behavior will allow you to put an end to the anxiety you feel by “solving” the problem.
Your OCD is the result of this ongoing cycle of anxious thoughts, obsessions, and compulsions that have been repeated and learned… Your Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder gets stronger the more you “practice” it… you need to teach yourself SOMETHING NEW.
Your brain is like a problem solving machine, which is fantastic when there’s a real and solvable issue or threat, but it can be a disaster when there isn’t.
First, you think or feel something that makes you anxious. Maybe it’s a flutter in your chest, a thought that makes you doubt yourself, a memory of something that happened in the past or may happen in the future, or anything else.
Every time you experience the anxiety which causes your obsessive and compulsive behavior, you form ADDITIONAL neural pathways that strengthen your anxious response, resulting in a faster and more severe reaction of anxiety or even panic that makes it highly likely you’ll continue to react in the same way in the future.
Your obsessions and compulsions are what’s known as “conditioned” responses. Every time you even think about a situation that typically causes your OCD behavior, you recall how you responded the last time you were in the situation and your brain makes the assumption that if you considered it a threat IN THE PAST , it should react the same way NOW , and it engages the flight or flight response you learned about earlier and the destructive cycle that causes you to obsess and perform compulsive behavior begins once again.
This “learning” of OCD or any other conditioned behavior is thought to be accomplished by the formation of “neural pathways” in your brain.