my name is John Glanvill and I specialise in treating anxiety and OCD.
And in this short video I would like to share with you some of the patterns and
knowledge that I've gathered, whilst helping hundreds of people including myself,
to understand then interrupt and finally let go of OCD and its associated fears,
worries, anxieties and silly games. We will delve deeper into the way OCD
operates, so you can have a clearer understanding of what's happening to you
and therefore when you're ready to tackle the OCD head-on you'll be better
informed of just what you're dealing with,
because OCD really is a sneaky little creature. I won't be saying pull yourself
together and I won't be saying can't you see how silly this is? Because we already
know that. So, what's OCD? Obsessive compulsive
disorder? And I don't really like that word disorder, it's more like obsessive
compulsive order, because there's no disorder in OCD, in fact, it's quite the
opposite. Most things are unbelievably planned, thought through and very orderly.
I sometimes call it COD, carefully orchestrated dilemmas, anyway, a popular
medical definition for OCD is; OCD is a common chronic and long-lasting disorder,
in which a person has uncontrollable reoccurring thoughts, obsessions and
behaviours. Compulsions that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over.
That seems okay, however I think we need to add how it affects the experiencers
life, their health, their happiness, their emotional stability, their self-worth,
their energy. How it affects their work, how it disrupts their relationships.
It truly can unsettle a person's life. Now, OCD is part of the anxiety group of
mental health issues, and I'm not going to go into too much depth about anxiety
in this video, however there's lots of information on my website about anxiety.
It is very important though to be aware that the management of anxiety at a core
level will need to be initially addressed so that the subsequent phasing
out of this secondary condition, which we call OCD, is actually possible. Then we need to
ask ourselves, is OCD the problem or the symptom? Is checking that the door is
locked, a symptom of something else or a problem in his own right? And, of
course, the answer is, it's both! However most people focus on stopping the
behaviour and not identifying with the underlying source of that behaviour - and
we often lose track of what has become the norm, rather than what started all
off in the first place, which may have been many, many years ago. And when
observed from my own experience OCD breaks down into four key areas. The first
group are the intrusive thoughts that often lead to obsessive ways of thinking,
and these may range from simple self doubts, right through to horrific
unwanted thoughts about harming people or all sorts of different things. And
secondly, we have the compulsions, and these are the mental, bodily or
behavioural rituals that we feel we must carry out, to lessen our anxiety or to
calm us down, or to stop something else happening. then, thirdly we must
acknowledge that OCD tends to make us very controlling individuals! Controlling
of people, situations, outcomes, to ensure that we can control and avoid the
anxiety triggers, or to manage our rituals. And often, we can't see this
control, but it's very obvious to other people. And these controlling strategies
may be overt, such as getting angry at someone to to make the person comply or
quite covert, such as saying "I'll just stay in, you go out, I'll be fine." Where
guilt is used to control others, and then we may even feel guilty for doing
it in the first place. Then comes the strategies that we may need to run, that
allow us to cover up our habits, for example; someone might say "if I get to
work early, then nobody will see me disinfect my desk and disinfect my phone."
Or they may say well, they may think, "if I'm shy and quiet, people won't ask me to
do things." So, let's dig deeper into these four headlines, starting with the
obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Let's explore some of the more common ways OCD
hits us with involuntary thoughts and obsessions - and remember this, just
because you have a thought, it doesn't mean you made it, it doesn't even mean it
actually means anything. Your brain is just a very clever thought proposal
device! And we all have some unsolicited thoughts from time to time
that are silly or weird, and for most people, they just ignore them. for example; it's
pretty often, people have a little thought, that comes and says "what if I
just kill myself?" And these people, they just seem to, watch that thought arise,
they watch it, and then they just let it go, they don't take it personally, or they
don't give it any deep meaning. It was just an unsolicited thought. However when
we experience OCD, we have a lot more uninvited thoughts that cover a wide
spectrum of topics and fearful dilemmas. Examples are, "What if I harm someone? Did
I hit that cyclist whilst I was driving? Did I poison that cup of tea I gave to
that person? Are those people following me? Did I lock the house? What if I harm my
baby? Does that pain in my stomach mean I have cancer?" And as these intrusive
thoughts become more common, more repetitive, the fears that they engender
seem to become more and more real, and more and more relentless, and it's scary
and it's exhausting. And to combat these scary, real but unrequested obsessive
thoughts, we might stumble upon strange habits, which may often become
compulsions, that provide a temporary respite or a distraction from the
anxiety. And the fear and the compulsions, in and of themselves, are quite
irrelevant, whether you have to count everything three times or line up all
your tins in a cupboard, or put your left shoe on first, these are just strange
behaviours that you've picked up to help you control your anxiety. And please be
aware, that if you're trying to overcome your OCD by solely focusing on
overcoming these compulsions, yeah you're missing the point, the compulsions are
just a symptom of the anxiety, plus even if you learn to manage a particular
compulsion, your unconscious mind will just morph it into another different
compulsion. This is why the three most important things to work on when you
are ready for change, is; number one, separating you from your thoughts, the
thoughts are in you, but they're not you. You're not asking for them, they don't
mean anything. Secondly, understanding and managing the underlying anxiety, and then,
the third thing, is to spend more time being calm, so that you can recalibrate
your emotions. If we look at some of the more common compulsions, rituals and
thoughts and behaviours, the actual list is
truly endless. The human unconscious mind, can with the logic of a child, get
you to believe and do almost anything! Maybe pause video just now,
and take a moment to have a look? Either way, it's exhausting, just looking at all
the ways we can trap and scare ourselves. And as I said before, these are the
symptoms of the underlying anxiety and it's there where your focus needs to be
placed, if you really want big change. If we look at covering it all up it can be
exhausting to cover up your anxiety to cover up all the the behavioral tics and
rituals you have to perform, and what I've noticed, over the years, is people
fall into a few categories. The first category, I call the stay-at-home
prisoner, and for some individuals who have experienced OCD issues around germs,
infection, blood and cleanliness, the idea of working in shared offices, or visiting
shopping centres or public areas, or even taking children to school, with so many
germs and colds and things, it becomes fearful and distressing. Therefore, it
becomes easier to stay at home, in a sanitised environment. Then we have the
technical loners, this group learned how to manage their ruminations and compulsions,
by losing themselves in distracting thought processes, or complex mental
tasks, like science-based activities or technical careers where they can often
just work alone or in small groups. And they often attract partners who are also
very technical, or happy to live in a more enclosed and unstructured living
environment. One of my favourite groups are the self-employed controllers, and
for some, it's just so much easier to manage their OCD compulsions by working
for themselves - and I've always been amazed at how many business owners have
varying degrees of compulsive behaviours and scary intrusive thoughts. And not
only do they work for themselves, they usually only have one or two employees,
or they employ family members to assist them, this way they can still earn a
living and they can more easily cover up their compulsions, and if they can do it in
the privacy of their own office and if their office is in their home, all the
better! The next group are called the "get on with it anyway pragmatists" and I
think this is by far the biggest group, and in some ways they have the hardest
time because they're always trying to face their fears and just get on with it.
In other ways, they're the most free of the group, because they can 'kind of'
function, despite the OCD and this group will find
that their compulsions and ruminations will increase with stress and disruption,
therefore, holidays and Christmas and job interviews and dating, travel, surprise
events, they can be times of great anxiety and very very mentally
exhausting. Now one of the things I mentioned earlier is that OCD is a
subset of anxiety, therefore if you're going to overcome your OCD, first you
need to understand the headlines about anxiety and how it operates. Anxiety
rule number one, is you can't think your way out of anxiety, anxiety is in fact a
problem of thinking too much, and because your body responds to your thoughts as
if they were true, your body becomes very tired and very exhausted. Anxiety rule
number two, anxiety unconsciously tries to make you stay at home, and nearly all
forms of anxiety try to unconsciously make the experiencer stay at home or
to go back home where they'll feel safer, or at least, less unsafe. And OCD is no
exception, the way your unconscious does this is to
look for any underlying fears that you have probably learned in childhood, and
then it plays on them, a simple way to look at this might be to say; that the
unconscious nervous system becomes very tired, very exhausted, from long periods
of being anxious and it doesn't like this, and he wants to be able to relax and
recharge. And it assumes, with only the logic of a ten-year-old, that if you
stay at home, you'll recover, you'll get better, however this only works if you
stay at home and you stop thinking - and most people with OCD, they stay at home
and then they think even more, which tires them out even more, and thus the cycle
just repeats itself, around and around! These unconscious sabotaging compulsions
can be sorted into five categories and typically any anxiety sufferer has
symptoms from at least a couple of these categories. The first unconscious
hijacking class is travel, here the anxiety heightens the
further you travel away from home, so for example flying, driving on motorways,
going on trains, and the logic here is very simple, when viewed from your
unconscious mind which is quite childlike, it's "If I give him a panic
attack on an aeroplane, he'll stop flying and he'll stay at home." It's quite simple
when you look at it from this perspective, the second class of
unconscious hijacking is your health - and your unconscious mind in association
with your unconscious nervous system can use your health in three main ways to
scare you and to frighten you into staying at home. Firstly, it can make you
ill, it can give you serious diseases we know this for a fact.
Secondly, the mind can present you with psychosomatic illnesses, like headaches
and eczema, chronic fatigue ,IBS, ME, fibromyalgia - where there's no actual
disease, but there is an illness and that illness has real physical symptoms, which
often make you stay at home. And then, finally in this group there's
hypochondria - where the person fears every little a ache and pain and needs
constant reassurance that they'll be okay. They hate being left alone and this
leads to them not being able to work, so they stay at home. Can you see how these
patterns start to form? Category 3 is unconsciously sabotaging your work, and
here your unconscious wants you to be at home and not at work, so it unconsciously
sabotages you - and you end up doing really, really silly things at work and
if someone says "Why did you do that?" you say "I don't know!" But you just keep doing
them. Category four is the same thing but sabotaging relationships and it takes a
lot of energy and a lot of compromise to be in a relationship.
However, OCD doesn't like to compromise, therefore it's very common for anxious
people to unconsciously sabotage their close relationships, with things like
anger or affairs, or to be too controlling, or very rude comments,
and unconsciously they try to end the relationship, so that they can stay at
home and be realigned with their OCD propensity. These are unconscious
strategies that run underneath your conscious radar.
And the last category is sabotaging your social life, this means getting
anxious around friends or in intimate social events, or becoming afraid in
social places like cinemas, shopping centres, busy streets, and once again, the
logic is simple , "If she goes out of the house, I'll scare her, and then she'll go
home!" And when you look at OCD from this perspective, you can see why it takes
such a long time to get ready to leave the house, and then to lock the house.
And then, once you're out of the house you have to control everything until you can
get back home again.
Let's talk about some sensible mindsets that you can
develop that will help you when you're ready to look at some sort of recovery
program. With the right help and the right attitude and enough time, I believe
that most people can get their OCD to a very manageable state, or even overcome
it, it's not easy, but it is possible. So here are 10 things to consider when
you're ready to do something about your OCD. Tip number one, OCD is not a disease,
you weren't born with it, you didn't catch it, it's a complex combination of
thoughts, feelings and behaviours, that have unconsciously programmed the brain
and the body, and with the right help it can usually be unprogrammed. Tip number
two, most of the things that need changing are held unconsciously, or you
might call it subconsciously, which means they're involuntary, therefore you can't
consciously think your way out of OCD! Logical thinking makes it worse.
Tip number three, your compulsions are a symptom, not the problem, although they do
cause problems. You need help to address the underlying fear of being anxious,
before the compulsions can be worked on. Tip number four, you are not your
thoughts, the brain is just an organ that coordinates and proposes thoughts, they
aren't truths and just watch the thoughts, just observe the thoughts as
they arise and don't give them any meaning. Tip number five, your unconscious
mind uses the logic of a child to try to keep you safe, for example; it thinks "If
he stays in his room, then nothing bad will happen." This is the simple logic
that you need to apply to all of OCD behaviours and then
they begin to make a little bit more sense. And if she panics on the motorway
then she won't go out. Tip number six, don't wait for motivation to come before
you get help. Motivation is an emotion and your
emotions are currently not working properly, just get started anyway.
Tip number seven, who will you be and what will you do differently when you no
longer have OCD? And do you have the skills required to do that?
How can you acquire them? Is there a secondary gain by having OCD? Does having
OCD stop you from having to face reality? An interesting thing you might
want to go onto google and search the word secondary gain? It''s an interesting
topic. Tip eight, OCD makes you doubt everything, therefore you need a process
to follow that guides you step by step through your recovery, or you'll begin to
doubt trusting yourself to do it. Tip nine, are your family or caregivers
unknowingly keeping you stuck, by pampering to your needs or not knowing
properly how anxiety and OCD operates, therefore, giving you poor advice ? And tip
number ten, you probably will need some form of professional guidance and
therapy to release unconscious habits, to release past trauma, and to change any
self-limiting beliefs that you've developed. And I'll just say make sure
you choose a person who really understands anxiety, as in my experience
very few people do. I hope this short video has given you some new
perspectives to consider, and to better understand your condition? If you found
it useful please like it or share it on social media, and feel free to forward this
link to anybody you know who's battling with OCD or anxiety. And there's lots
more information on my website at
www.johnglanvill.com & my online OCD recovery course at www.patreon.com/theanxietyspecialist