This behavior may be physical, such as washing or checking, or mental, such as reviewing or neutralizing. We will discuss these terms in more detail in upcoming chapters. For the condition to be considered a disorder, you have to experience impaired functioning, reduced quality of life, and lost time from attending to your obsessions and compulsions. Your story is unique because it happened to you.
But for the most part, all OCD stories are your story. But it was your thought. Why would you have it without believing it? Like any healthy, rational person, you set out to get rid of that pain. However, everything you could come up with seemed to help only for a brief moment and then caused the pain to strike back more viciously.
The more you tried not to think about it, the more the thoughts intruded. The more you avoided, the more you were forced to confront things. Your world got smaller and smaller, the things you love became reminders of what you hate, and you began to see yourself as an imposter. When you see yourself as the imposter, you perceive yourself as merely pretending to be a functioning human being; inside you experience constant, relentless suffering.
The imposter is contaminated, a danger to others, deviant, unloved, disconnected, imperfect, immoral, and, above all, not in control. But all is not lost. Although your suffering may be great, your ability to change this experience is within your grasp.
The brain is a physical collection of organic matter that resides in your skull. Like other organs in the body, it serves a variety of functions through a complex series of chemical and electrical interactions. One of the main functions of the brain is to organize data.
This includes thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. The brain presents this data similarly to how a computer presents zeros and ones to a processor.
The mind is that processor. It receives the data and acts on it in a variety of ways. It works on the data. It filters it, promotes it, rejects it, and adds color and meaning to it. You are simply you. You are the one who goes by your name and the one watching what the mind is doing with the data it receives. Most of us have great difficulty separating ourselves from the mind.
If the mind is analyzing the meaning of a thought, then it seems as if we are personally responsible for that analysis. Mindfulness is a concept grounded in the idea that you can observe what your mind is doing and decide for yourself how involved you want to be in the process. What we are attempting to understand here is how the mind interacts with the OCD brain and with you, the OCD sufferer. The Basic Concept of Mindfulness Mindfulness is the state of acknowledging and accepting whatever is happening in the present moment exactly as it is.
As a skill, it emerges from your developing the ability to notice what your mind is doing with the information it receives from the brain. This involves noticing individual acts of the mind, as well as patterns and tendencies of the mind. The practice of mindfulness for OCD is the cultivation of a relationship between you and your mind, in which you cooperate with one another in your battle against the disorder.
The experience of OCD is feeling very much out of control of your mind. That means you not only are being asked to cope with the presence of intrusive thoughts that come with your OCD, but also are taking on personal responsibility for how terrible they appear. The brain presents, the mind receives and acts, and you feel like a slave to the whole process. But if you develop the capacity to better observe what the mind is doing, you can begin to view the OCD thoughts as something different from their content.
Because those of us with OCD so often find pain in OCD thoughts, we become accustomed to seeing our minds focused on judgment and rejection of what the brain offers. Rather than let the mind take in the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as they are, we fight. If you can choose to stay on the sidelines and observe what your mind is receiving and where it tends to go with it, you can begin to choose measured responses to your OCD thoughts.
Instead of automatically reacting as when two chemicals spontaneously change form, you can begin to respond. To react to OCD is to jump into compulsions. To respond to OCD is to observe what your mind is doing and choose your next step. At first, this may seem a bit silly, and you may think, How can I be anywhere but the present? Right now is awful! It is, in fact, the past, which no longer exists, and the future, which exists only in theory. You are just a person reading a book, looking at words right now.
Even thinking can be done in the present. Okay, you are a person thinking. That is compulsion. Another way of looking at this is to consider that mindfulness is about keeping your mind close to your body.
Your body is sitting in a chair with this book. Your mind is there with you, reading these words. When your mind wanders off to replay a conversation you had last week or to think about an upcoming event, then your mind is nowhere near your body. In that space is where OCD presumes ownership of the mind. Can you think of a situation in which you often find your mind traveling to the past or the future instead of staying where you are in the present?
You may feel anxious right now. What is may mean that right now, where you sit, as you are, you do not know when or if the thoughts, feelings, and sensations you are experiencing will ever go away. Only in the present can you look at that without judgment and potentially experience it without fear.
Thoughts Are Thoughts, Not Threats The primary difference between people with OCD and those without it is not simply the content of the thoughts, but their perspective on the thoughts. In an anxious state, that same thought may seem like a terrible indictment or warning of a nightmare to come: If this is in my head, I have to get it out!
If you can imagine your thoughts as a line of train cars, people with OCD and other anxiety disorders tend to keep stopping the train to make sure everyone has a ticket. Mindfulness asks that you simply observe the train as it passes.
This means acknowledging that unwanted thoughts are occurring, but not evaluating those thoughts as being particularly meaningful. Instead of changing what the thought means, you are changing your perspective toward the thought and how you process the fact that the thought is occurring.
Thoughts as Words Another way of considering the notion that thoughts are thoughts, not threats, is to look at how you view words. When you see a word, you call it the thing that it relates to.
When you experience an OCD thought, you are also being made aware of all the things to which you relate that thought. Look at the following word. However, if you stared at this page and tried to do your hair or makeup using it, we would consider this a bit odd.
Yes and no. And what are letters anyway? So a series of meaningless symbols is given meaning and then put in an order that adds to its meaning. If you have OCD, experiencing an unwanted thought is as if you opened this book and an actual mirror fell out onto the floor.
The thoughts are presented as having intrinsic value, automatic importance, and urgent relevance to some behavioral response. Mindfulness practice suggests that you view the thought in much the same way as you look at words.
They are empty vessels that are given power after the mind organizes and considers them. You get a lump in your throat, tightness in your chest, sweaty palms, and dry mouth, and then you call it something: guilt, for example. You say, That means guilt. I am guilty. Then your OCD pushes you to explain the presence of guilt rather than accept it as it is. So you begin an endless journey of trying to figure out what crime you committed that could justify such guilt, until you eventually come up with something to blame the guilt on.
They are not facts. They are not fingerprints. They are just ideas about physical experiences. Like thoughts, they are born empty and are given meaning through behavior. Or maybe you just feel that something is off. The OCD threatens you with severe punishment, the severest of all: the idea that your feelings signify who you are, that guilt means you are a criminal, and that fear means you will be annihilated.
The OCD says that these feelings are problems and that you must fix them or suffer. Experience the feeling as a feeling, a thing that comes and goes in the body and provides little useful information about who you are or what you will do. For the person with sexual obsessions, every tingling sensation in the groin is viewed as proof of deviant orientation and predatory predisposition.
So physical sensations trigger feelings, which trigger thoughts, and they all converge in your mind like waves crashing on the shore. Mindfulness asks that you view physical sensations just as you see thoughts and feelings. They are experiences. Pain is pain, and we can all agree that it feels bad.
But if you let it feel bad and leave it at that, you maintain clarity. Clarity is what enables you to see the difference between a headache and a brain tumor.
In other words, see physical sensations as what they are and observe your urges to define them as what they could be.
They may be interesting and desirable, or interesting and undesirable. You might think about getting a bonus at work on the left side of the spectrum and about being audited by the IRS on the right side of the spectrum.
These are thoughts that draw your interest when you are aware of them. These interesting thoughts may be exciting or upsetting. The average person has these thoughts readily available but must turn his attention toward them to take notice of them.
This is where thoughts about death, extreme irresponsibility, peculiar sexual or aggressive notions, and so forth reside. The average person has these thoughts. Occasionally the thoughts appear uninvited.
Usually they have to be dug for. If you tell someone to come up with a wacky idea for a birthday present or a pitch for a horror movie, this is where she will go in the mind to find them.
These thoughts are more than interesting: they are out there. Many people will claim not to have any of these thoughts. I could suddenly grab it and stab my husband. That pedestrian is no longer in my rearview mirror. I may have hit him with my car without noticing it. In our experience, if you get more than a handful of OCD sufferers in a room, most of them will look at the previous list and acknowledge that at one point or another, they were aware of having some of these fringe thoughts.
The thoughts just popped into their heads. Take a few moments to list some of your disturbing fringe thoughts here. What thoughts emerge at the surface of your mind that you think belong far deeper down? Be a superhero. Let these thoughts be just as insane as the ugly, scary ones you obsess about.
Notice how hard this is. We all tend to think of our positive fringe thoughts as silly and not worth much attention. What would the OCD experience be like if we applied the same emphasis on our negative fringe thoughts?
Mindfulness suggests that to remove the need to reduce the spectrum of the spotlight, you simply acknowledge that brightly lit thoughts are not more important just because they are more noticeable. The intensity of the thoughts, feelings, or sensations you experience need not correlate to their value. The Broken Dam Try to imagine your mind as a village. Picture a valley floor with little huts, people, livestock, roads, and lots of streams of water, like veins connecting one area of the village to another.
The valley is surrounded by steep mountains and, on one side, a huge dam, larger than the imagination. On the other side of this dam is the largest body of water in the universe. There are 31,, seconds in a leap year. Now, because the village your mind needs water thoughts in order to function, there are lots of carefully placed holes in the dam that allow for a steady stream of desirable input.
This water lands safely on the village floor and goes through all of the necessary streams and aqueducts for the village to thrive. For the most part, the dam holds everything back. It separates you from your thoughts. Most of what goes on in the mind is a complete mystery. All you really need are some basics, just a consistent trickle of certain thoughts so that you can tie your shoes and brush your teeth.
But when you have OCD, there are some cracks in the dam such that extra water comes leaking through. The barrier that separates your wanted thoughts from the rest of 17 The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD your thoughts seems to be doing a subpar job.
You can view this unwanted stream of thought as the definition of an obsession. Your first response to it may be to climb the dam and plug the cracks with something. Or in the heat of anxiety, you may find yourself just taking a hammer to it. But this never works.
At first, doing so may appear to slow the leak, but soon the crack gets bigger and the stream of obsessive thoughts gets more intense. It means taking a moment to notice that although most things are working as you expected, there are in fact some cracks in the dam and there are in fact some intruding streams of thought. This leaves you with two options: pound your fists against the dam, hoping this stops the leak, or accept the leak as simply something that is. Maybe you can use the extra water in your mind to better irrigate the crops of your mind.
Or maybe this water has no specific use and you need to learn to live in a wetter climate. Let the thoughts in. Let them mingle with the other thoughts. Let them simply be, and accommodate them by changing your perspective on the value of their presence. Framing the presence of unwanted thoughts as just the added flow of particles to a larger body of water takes away the importance of identifying them as good or bad.
It creates space for you to view the thoughts as mere thoughts, without judgment and without your having to do anything about them. Still, you might want to meditate, and it might help. Meditation, in its simplest form, is literally practicing mindfulness. All basic sitting and breathing meditation really means is that you are attending to sitting and breathing only and that anything else is temporarily less important for you to attend to.
Whenever you become aware of something other than sitting and breathing, you acknowledge it and then return to sitting and breathing.
Basically, you are practicing 18 The Brain, the Mind, and You mindfulness by practicing not minding whatever happens to be going on internally or externally as you sit and breathe. The present is a magnetic anchor that you are clinging to. Gentleness is actually important here. If you judgmentally call yourself back to the present with thoughts like Think about your breath! Stop obsessing! This only pulls you further away from the present and into the judgmental stance the OCD thrives on.
Returning to the present is an ability and, as such, something that can be strengthened with practice. Even a little practice makes you stronger in this regard. What you are practicing is the coming back. You may have noticed that many times when you are in the throes of an obsession, you ask yourself to stop: to come back from the review and just let things be.
You try, but the runaway mind ropes you back in. By practicing anchoring yourself to the present in meditation, you can improve your ability to return from an obsession even when you are not meditating. When you have OCD, being in the present may hurt, whereas letting your compulsions pull you away may spell relief. The OCD has a way of turning the very concept of meditation into its opposite. It means you have to allow for the OCD when you choose to meditate.
I just get bored and annoyed with myself. I keep thinking and ruining it. Plant your feet and rest your hands at your sides. Instead, start observing how your mind is full, and let it be that way for now.
Close your eyes and breathe in through your nose. Then exhale through your mouth. If you are unfamiliar with diaphragmatic breathing, try to imagine the air going through your nose and then down through a tube to your stomach, not to your lungs.
When you inhale, let your stomach expand. If this is too odd for you, breathe as you normally would, but the advantage to diaphragmatic breathing or belly breathing is that it gives you something else to connect to as you breathe. It also keeps your shoulders from rising as much when you inhale, which helps keep your body in a more relaxed position.
This can help make the breathing more intentional, making it an even wider anchor for you to stay present with. However slowly you start to breathe, try to slow down your breathing even more. One of the things you are accomplishing by breathing slowly and intentionally is 20 The Brain, the Mind, and You modulating the way the brain receives oxygen. When we panic, we hyperventilate, because the brain is telling the body that it needs energy to fight or run from something horrible.
We give the brain energy by pumping it with short bursts of oxygen. Pacing your breath in meditation helps put your brain in a more relaxed state. When you smoke a cigarette, you inhale and exhale, slowly and with intention. And you do this paced breathing for roughly seven minutes. If you took a break from work, went outside, and just pretended to smoke a cigarette, you would see the results and without the smoke!
Almost immediately after sitting and making the conscious decision to meditate, you might notice that your OCD is out to get you. You become aware of all your uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, plus annoying thoughts about how meditation itself is simply peculiar. You may feel distracted by anxiety, stomach discomfort, dizziness, a thousand unreachable itches around your body. The tendency is to see these things as blocking you from meditating.
Mindfulness would suggest that you see these things not as distractions, but simply as experiences. The thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations are just happening. Notice them and practice not minding. But for now, for the next few minutes, let yourself act differently.
Let yourself not mind. After a minute or two of pacing your breath and practicing returning to it whenever something grabs hold of your attention, you can stop. You basically just stayed present and practiced not taking the bait from your OCD.
Tomorrow, do it again. Maybe during the process, you had five actual seconds of relief from OCD problem solving. Or maybe, more importantly, 21 The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD next time you become aware of an obsession about the past or future, you will come back to the present that much quicker. A Progressive Muscle Relaxation Meditation If you want to meditate some more today, add this version of progressive muscle relaxation.
Progressive muscle relaxation was first developed in by Edmund Jacobson, whose research demonstrated that systematic release of tension in the muscle fibers represented the opposite physiological response to anxiety and, thus, was effective in reducing anxiety states McCallie, Blum, and Hood This is typically performed by purposely tensing and releasing muscles, but in this exercise, focus on release without tension to avoid the potential of getting stuck in a physically tense position.
What you will do for the remainder of the exercise is to continue the paced breathing while visualizing breathing into various parts of your body. Picture a line floating above your head, like a little cartoon halo.
Once you have a clear image in mind of this line above your head, take a nice, slow breath into it. And as you exhale, imagine the line passing over your scalp, your eyes, your nose, your cheeks, and your lips and then stopping just above your chin. As it passes over this part of your body, imagine that it takes with it some of your angst, some of your tension, even some of your OCD. Let yourself notice any sensations that might occur in your earlobes, your eyelashes, and so forth.
Let yourself attend to where this imaginary line is resting, and how everything above it feels just a little more relaxed than everything below it, which has remained unchanged. When you are in doubt, or if you become confused or lost during the meditation, just nod politely to your confusion and return to the breath. Now go again, breathing into that line and lowering it as you exhale. Let it pass by the muscles and bones in your neck, and let it rest just above your shoulders.
Let your head lean forward a bit if it helps make it more real for you. Let yourself be aware of how the entirety of your head and neck is just a little lighter, somehow a little different from the rest of your body. Breathe into that line and lower it down across your shoulders and chest. Let the line stop at your elbows and rest just above your belly. Imagine your shoulders dropping, as if your arms could just slide off. Feel that knot in your chest that the OCD is constantly messing with, and acknowledge whether it has loosened up at all.
Notice how your biceps and forearms feel different from one another, separated by the imaginary line of attention. Breathe into that line and lower it again, now across your belly to your waist, down your wrists and hands, and out your fingertips. The entire upper half of your body is just a little lighter than the lower half, a little simpler. Meanwhile, your OCD is getting itchy.
Just nod at the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. You will return to them soon enough. Breathe into the line and lower it down to your knees. Finally breathe in, breathe out, and push that line down across your ankles and the tops of your feet, and out your toes. Finish with another minute or so of just sitting and breathing, always returning to your anchor, the present.
You may feel more relaxed afterward. But more importantly, in terms of changing the way you relate to your OCD, these practices aim to strengthen that muscle in your brain that allows you to disengage from an obsession; accept the uncertainty when the thoughts remain unresolved; and come back, come back, come back to whatever is actually present and real in this moment.
You can do any form of meditation you like, guided or unguided. Start by giving yourself just a minute a day. For many people with OCD, meditation is pretty uncomfortable, because you are being asked to sit with your thoughts and do nothing about them. You are not ignoring them either. You are doing what is, at times, a seemingly impossible task when you have OCD: acknowledging but not responding.
There will be a lot of heavy things to lift throughout the day. Practice disengaging from the OCD urge to judge, analyze, or resolve your thoughts. Return to the present, whatever it may be. You can help yourself practice mindfulness throughout the day by exchanging whatever OCD rumination may be occurring for attending to something real in the moment.
This is not distraction. This is attention. Place things in your life that you value that warrant your attention. When you have a thought, acknowledge it, say hello to it, and then return to whatever exists and is real for you in that moment. Set up hobbies for yourself. Listen to audiobooks in the car.
Be social. Do all of these things in moderation, but then moderate your moderation by allowing them to be overdone sometimes. You automate life and forget that there are tiny variations in the taste of the food you are eating, unique complexities in the music you listen to, a trillion complex interactions taking place when you are stuck in traffic, and countless physical sensations occurring in your fingertips as you flip through the pages of this book.
In other words, when you become aware of thoughts that trigger you, you make assumptions about the meaning of those thoughts, and this drives you toward compulsions. Cognitive Therapy During the s, a therapist by the name of Aaron Beck noticed that people were having strong emotional responses to certain kinds of thoughts that came up in the course of psychoanalysis.
This led to an examination of how thoughts lead to emotions, and how emotions influence behavior. Certain types of thoughts became correlated with certain responses, and when these thought types could be identified, the responses could be changed. You may also find the term mistaken, or faulty, beliefs used interchangeably with cognitive distortions.
Cognitive distortions can best be understood as lenses that we put over our thoughts that affect how we view them. They are the mechanisms by which we are derailed from mindfulness and fall victim to automatic thoughts. A thought happens, and rather than experience the thought simply as it is, we push the thought through a lens that distorts it and spits it out as something quite more troubling. Challenging Cognitive Distortions Challenging distorted thinking is a delicate process when you are using mindfulness to help relieve your OCD.
Challenging the thoughts requires you to pay a level of attention to them that gives them some intrinsic importance. Yet leaving distorted patterns of thinking unchallenged allows the mind to repeat faulty patterns that lead you to believe that you must act on compulsions. If you can notice when you are engaging in cognitive distortions, you can identify them as part of the language of OCD. They are spoken in a language based on fear, not on evidence.
When you become aware that your mind is engaging in a way of thinking, you open yourself to the opportunity to release that thinking and return to the present. The power of noticing when your thinking is distorted is the crossroad between cognitive therapy and mindfulness. In other words, you may have a thought about being dirty. However, challenging such notions as, Because I had a thought about being dirty, I must wash can give you the freedom to make a noncompulsive choice.
So the goal is not to prove your fears away, but to demonstrate to your mind that you can be in the presence of your fear without having to respond to it with compulsions. The first step in applying mindfulness to cognitive therapy is practicing being aware of when you are engaging in one or more cognitive distortions. In the next several pages, we 26 Mindfulness and Cognitive Therapy will look at some of the more commonly understood faulty beliefs found in OCD and discuss strategies for challenging them without doing compulsions.
We have combined and modified some beliefs to make them more specific to the OCD process. We live in a world that seems very black and white. Movies have good guys and bad guys; things are either clean or dirty, pure or evil, safe or dangerous, and so on.
But this is not the real world. Real life always involves some amount of gray. You were probably somewhere in between clean and dirty, and after touching that uncomfortable public item, you were, at best, somewhat dirtier on one hand than you were before. Usually this involves saying something more diplomatic. For example, if you were anxious during a night out, you might think, It was difficult to enjoy myself, instead of, The evening was ruined. You may be very bright and really good at guessing, but you are not a psychic.
The thoughts may present themselves in such a way that you are not only thinking about a horrible future, but also predicting your inability to tolerate or cope with that future. What kind of terrifying predictions does your OCD make?
Now, what could you say if you included this fact? If it does, that could be bad, and I might have to come up with a way of dealing with it. Maybe the worst thing you can think of will come to pass. Rather than trying to convince yourself that your catastrophic fears are guaranteed not to happen, how can you reword your previous catastrophizing examples to reflect an acknowledgment that the future is unknown, or that you lack evidence for your prediction?
Every cold seems like a horrible disease, every raised voice seems like an act of violence, and every error in judgment seems like a federal crime. What are some thoughts that run through your head that seem horrendous but, in moments of calm clarity, seem like just, well, stuff? It just means acknowledging what something is as it is. How could you describe in a more observational way the magnifications in the previous examples you wrote?
You may be the most devoted father on earth, but the moment you had a thought about shaking your crying baby, you started sentencing yourself to death for a lifetime of being an abusive father. You may also find it practically impossible to take a compliment due to your commitment to shutting down compliments, only because they run contrary to what you hear in your head all day. Taking yes for an answer and accepting that the evidence in front of you supports that you are probably okay may elude you in an OCD episode.
When do you sometimes disregard evidence that runs contrary to your obsessions? So if you are struggling with sexual orientation OCD, you may be discounting your life experience of being with one kind of person. You can challenge this by responding, In my experience, I have typically chosen to be with this kind of person.
Notice how we are intentionally resisting addressing the orientation itself. What are some ways you can challenge your disqualifying distortions? Of course, we use our emotions to make sense of reality. So we find ourselves thinking that something must be true because it just feels that way! Your 30 Mindfulness and Cognitive Therapy upcoming performance feels as if it will be a disaster because you are nervous. You may think you will be violently attacked because you feel unsafe.
Challenging emotional reasoning requires separating the experience of having a feeling from the meaning that the feeling may imply. What are ways in which you notice yourself thinking that things are true only because they feel that way? The mindfulness element here is that you are acknowledging that the feelings you are having are simply the feelings you are having. OCD insists that these feelings must mean some specific thing. How can you challenge some of your mistaken assumptions about feelings as facts?
Selective abstraction works by making you tie every experience you have into whatever you are obsessed with. Yes, it may look that way, but still you understand that the sky is not purple. The love songs were there before, but you are selectively abstracting them from your environment and connecting them to your thoughts. What does it sound like in your mind when you are only noticing the obsession instead of the bigger picture? This is a true mindfulness challenge in which you can acknowledge your mind pattern: that you tend to associate things with your obsession.
In reality, perfection is the perpetual state in which something horrible is about to happen. You may tell yourself that you should always be health conscious, even though you want to have a doughnut for breakfast on a lazy Sunday morning. If you have obsessions of a sexual or violent nature, you may berate yourself for having the thoughts, believing that you must never think them.
You may feel that you should be able to recall the details of every conversation and must comprehend every word of every book you read. If something should be one way and happens not to be that way, that means it cannot be accepted the way it is. That leaves no room for mindfulness. No matter the loss, the mindfulness skills in this workbook help readers process their grief, determine the function their addiction is serving, and replace the addiction with healthy coping behaviors.
Begin your own mindfulness practice with help from the Mindfulness Workbook for Beginners, filled with specific guidance, step-by-step meditations, and easy activities for newcomers. Explore topics like focusing on the present moment, setting intentions, and spending time with your thoughts and feelings.
Then, dive deeper by learning how to practice gratitude, create space for joy, embrace your emotions, and feel compassion and empathy toward yourself and others.
This book about mindfulness for beginners includes: An intro to mindfulness--Find essential info about what mindfulness is and isn't , its origins, its benefits, and more. Guidance for getting started--Learn the building blocks of a mindfulness practice: attentional breathing, awareness and insight, taking time to slow down, and connecting with your values.
A range of exercises--Foster mindfulness with a wide variety of activities, including meditations, writing and drawing prompts, quizzes, body scans, yoga poses, and more. Discover the path to greater peace, positivity, and presence with this practical workbook about mindfulness for beginners. That program is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy MBCT , and it has been tested and proven effective in clinical trials throughout the world.
Now you can get the benefits of MBCT any time, any place, by working through this carefully constructed book. The expert authors introduce specific mindfulness practices to try each week, plus reflection questions, tools for keeping track of progress, and helpful comments from others going through the program.
Like a trusted map, this book guides you step by step along the path of change. Guided meditations are provided on the accompanying MP3 CD and are also available as audio downloads.
See also the authors' The Mindful Way through Depression, which demonstrates these proven strategies with in-depth stories and examples. Plus, mental health professionals, see also the authors' bestselling therapy guide: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression, Second Edition. Current research has proven that mindfulness is an effective way to reduce and relieve anxiety.
The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety delivers practical strategies for applying mindfulness to the daily events that cause anxiety and stress. From basic skills building to real-life application, The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety outlines simple techniques that are specially designed to replace anxiety with peace and wellbeing.
Even those with no prior experience will find that the practical exercises outlined in The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety provide effective and lasting relief from the physical and emotional effects of anxiety. Presented in a straightforward, easy-to-navigate format, The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety offers: A well organized 8-week program for applying mindfulness to the root causes of your anxiety Clear day-by-day guidance outlining the structure for specific mindfulness techniques Simple activities designed to help you manage and decrease your anxiety symptoms Practicing mindfulness doesn't mean spending hours meditating.
How did I get OCD? How does OCD affect the mind and body? What is the best way to manage the symptoms and live a better life? Is it possible to overcome stress? If so, how? If that's you, then this beginner's friendly workbook is all you need to get all the answers and find a long-term solution to your problem.
It's essentially a simple mindfulness workbook that contains many strategies and tips to help your brain cope with the intrusive thoughts, empower it to manage the symptoms like stress definitively, and put you on track to recovery. More precisely, you'll learn: What having obsessive-compulsive disorder means The different types of OCD you need to know How OCD affects your body and brain How to change positively, manage your emotions and become stronger through effective strategies like CBT and ERP How to think better and act better through life-changing means How to manage your anxieties, fears, depression, and panic attacks How to become stress-free And much, much more!
Unfortunately, there is no cure for OCD, but the good news is that millions of people have been able to get substantial control over the debilitating symptoms such as anxiety, depression, stress, and panic attacks with the right therapy. Even if you feel your condition cannot improve and has only been getting worse, this workbook will help you turn things around! This book is here to offer you the best therapy you can get in the simplest of ways.
The question is, are you ready to see your life turn around? Are you sick and tired of all that stress? If the answer is yes, Then scroll up and click Buy Now to get your solution now! People with harm OCD--a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD --suffer from violent, unwanted thoughts and a crippling fear of harming others.
They may also resist seeking treatment for fear of being judged. In Overcoming Harm OCD, psychotherapist and OCD expert Jon Hershfield offers powerful cognitive behavioral therapy CBT and mindfulness tools to help readers break the endless cycle of pain and self-doubt caused by their disorder, and overcome their most debilitating symptoms.
Stand up to your OCD! A compassionate guide to help you manage OCD symptoms, overcome feelings of shame and stigma, and revitalize your life!
In addition, the stigma associated with OCD can make you feel unworthy of receiving the compassion and kindness you need and deserve.
You may even experience unwanted intrusive thoughts that result in harsh self-judgment—which can actually hinder your recovery and lead to additional mental health problems. So, how can you break this destructive cycle and start feeling better? The Self-Compassion Workbook for OCD outlines a step-by-step program to help you understand the emotional experience of OCD, and develop the tools you need to manage your disorder and build a better life.
Drawing on a powerful combination of cognitive behavioral therapy CBT , exposure and response prevention ERP , and compassion-focused therapy CFT , this breakthrough guide will teach you how to balance intense emotions, lean into your fear, and focus on recovery. You are so much more than your disorder! Let this book be your guide to discovering, supporting, and loving the best you that you can be.
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