Next Step

I desperately need to cut down on my ruminating. I've spent a lot of today worried that the weather will not cooperate on Wednesday, simply because I have a friend who wants to ski that day and I hate to see her disappointed. It somehow gets all wrapped up in my OCD: one, in that a big piece of my OCD is fear of bad things happening to others, including plain old disappointment, but also two, that when I really get ruminating, I start to think that if the weather's bad when she's skiing, she'll get hurt (or if it's raining, she will of course get a cold!). Not that I think this would be my fault in any way, but somehow, my OCD convinces me that by thinking about it over and over and over, I can somehow improve the results.

So, I'm working on letting the thought go, and also a cognitive shift to remember that worrying about something (like this, at least), will in no way impact the outcome. Because I would really like to get that time back in my life.

I think back about all of the similar rumination sessions I had, the ones in which nothing bad happened, or even if something bad did happen, it didn't lead to disaster. Learn, brain, learn!!

For now, I think I will try to implement the "you get a half hour each day to worry and you can only worry then" method. When the worry comes along, I will attempt to save it for later.

Yay for Friday

Another okay if not great week. I had literally 10 meetings at work, and I'm not a fan, so I was happy to get through those. Managed two nights without a shower. Now I absolutely MUST work on my underlying fear of being sick. Without that, no matter how many exposures I do, I feel just as scared as always. With the holidays starting, it seems like an especially good, if totally scary, time to try. I've read a couple of interesting mental health related books recently and hope to get a review or two up over the weekend.

So What?

That is what my therapist tells me I should be saying to myself. As in, "Oh, no. I'm afraid I'm going to get sick!" "So what?" Now if I could just internalize that, it would be awesome. I have about 10 minute blocks of time where it works great, and I feel pretty mellow about it all. Then, like today, I go to a meeting and the guy next to me has a hacking cough, and I'm right back to "Oh, no. I'm afraid I'm going to get sick!" Sigh. My blog might not be so accurately named.

Hmm, I think my plate is too full

So I've been working on regular old ERP, plus CBT, plus ACT. That is too many acronyms, for sure.

Today I went for a walk, and I was going to do the mindfulness practice of really noticing everything around me. But then I was feeling really anxious, so I thought instead I should re-run through the CBT approach that looks at alternatives to my assumed worst case scenarios.

Then my brain got overwhelmed by the choice, and I did neither. So that was really productive. I think this weekend I need to spend some time thinking about how to focus some of these ideas.

On the plus side, one of the harder exposures for me at work is the darned communal birthday card. There are about 30 people in my department, and for every birthday, we pass around a card. Even without OCD I would hate the card, because almost everyone writes something totally generic. But on the OCD side, I'm in the corner and almost always one of the last to sign, after everyone else has touched it. So I've been working hard to not immediately wash my hands after I sign a work birthday card. Today I literally walked toward the sink (thinking of the guy who's been sneezing all week), stopped, walked back to my desk, and repeated this two or three times. But I didn't wash. Stupid birthday cards.

Rethinking Being Sick

A few days ago, I realized that while I'm moving at a decent clip down my OCD hierarchy, there's one thing I haven't worked on changing yet: the underlying feeling that being sick with a cold or flu would be REALLY bad, and would cause something terrible to happen to me or, more likely, someone else.

So while I'm doing a lot of exposures, and sort of resigning myself to getting sick (although I haven't yet, interestingly enough), I still feel like when I do finally get sick, it'll be awful and lead to a catastrophe of some kind. Which frankly, makes it all the weirder that I'm doing some of these exposures. But it's also keeping me from doing some of the harder ones.

I guess I need to work on a parallel track of non-exposure CBT, retraining my brain to acknowledge that people get sick without it leading to a doomsday scenario. It's a tricky balance, because the goal is NOT to reassure myself that "it will be okay, nothing bad will happen," but instead to take a more realistic view of the risk, all the while knowing that nothing much is certain in this world.

My plate is full!