What is Anxiety? ocd?

anxiety 101

Anxiety is a natural, human experience! It is not all bad, and has a function! Anxiety can motivate you to get things done, be on time, study, or predict actual obstacles. Biologically, anxiety helped with survival. In our modern world, the brain still reacts as if every day events, even thoughts and feelings, are threats of life or death!

Anxiety is the body and brain’s response to a perceived threat. The brain is so powerful, that even thinking about something that is scary to you can cause a chain of events from hormones being released to physical changes in the body (pulse, sweat, heat/cold, etc). This system of the fight-flight-freeze occurs instinctually and quickly as the brain experiences stress. Sometimes, the threat is real—snake! And sometimes, the threat is not real—not a snake, just the idea of one!

Some people can be more sensitive to anxiety, noticing its presence right away. While others may go through life not knowing why their stomach hurts, why they get headaches, poor sleep and struggle with certain situations or people in their lives!

One common attribute of anxiety is the experience of overestimating the likelihood of something unwanted happening and over exaggerate the outcome if it does. In therapy, you can learn about how you experience anxiety, learn skills to cope and manage it, normalize this experience and accept yourself!

Whether you’re experiencing generalized anxiety, panic, separation anxiety, selective mutism, or social anxiety there is a path for you where anxiety won’t get in the way of your life the way it might right now. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) are two excellent evidence-based therapies that are highly effective at treating anxiety!

Recommended Podcasts:

Great resources for learning more about OCD, OC-Spectrum Disorders:

Do’s & Dont’s For Loved Ones:

  • Do: Learn about OCD. This is the best thing you can do for your loved one!

  • Don’t: Try to interview your loved one about their exact OCD thoughts and feelings. It can feel very scary and shameful for people to experience OCD, let alone share it! They may not want to share with you, and you can still support them regardless of what you know about their OCD!

  • Do: Offer compassion! Feeling accepted and loved, despite the symptoms, will help so much on the journey!

  • Don’t: Let your frustration, confusion, stress get the best of you. It can be really trying when someone you love is suffering with OCD and it is impacting you. Watching from the outside you might be thinking “Just do it! What’s the big deal?” What might seem trivial or small to you, might feel very threatening and hard for the sufferer.

  • Do: Get yourself to a support group for loved ones! You will need support as it is hard to watch someone you love struggle.

  • Don’t: Try to solve or fix your loved ones symptoms. It’s their journey and you can be a loving support to them through it. The best thing you can do to help is to work on expanding your bandwidth, develop your own self-care and emotion regulation strategies.

OCD 101

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is made up of two parts: obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are recurring, unwanted and distressing feelings, sensations and thoughts that cause a person to do something about it. The doing something about is the compulsion. Compulsions are mental or physical behaviors that are intended to get rid of the anxiety or distress that the thoughts have caused or prevent the thoughts and unwanted outcome.

OCD affects 1 in 40 adults and 1 in 100 children. It often begins in adolescence and takes an average of 17 years to be properly diagnosed and treated!

One of the hardest things about experiencing OCD is that it targets the values of the person (i.e. someone who loves kids is someone who will fear hurting them, someone who wants to live a full, healthy life will fear becoming sick with a preventable illness).

Some common themes in OCD include:

  • Contamination / Emotional Contamination

  • Disgust

  • Existential

  • Harm

  • Health anxiety

  • Hit and run

  • Identity (sexual orientation or gender)

  • Just right

  • Magical thinking

  • Moral/Scrupulosity/Religious

  • Morphing

  • Perfectionism

  • Pedophile (P-OCD)

  • Perinatal

  • Pure “O”

  • Real event

  • Relationships

  • Responsibility

  • Sexual or Violent

  • Somatic or sensorimotor

Some common compulsions:

  • Arranging, ordering, symmetry, evening out

  • Avoidance

  • Blinking, swallowing, staring

  • Checking (physical and mental)

  • Cleaning/washing

  • Counting

  • Hoarding (digitally or physically)

  • Mental compulsions, rituals (reviewing, replaying, keeping track, etc.)

  • Neutralizing

  • Praying

  • Repeating

  • Reassurance seeking

  • Re-doing/reading/writing

  • Researching

  • Rituals (a combination of actions done in a particular way)

  • Rumination

  • Self-punishment/neglect

  • Tapping/touching

OCD continues to evolve with our culture, so if your theme or compulsion isn’t described here—that’s OK and likely other people worry about the same thing as you! Most people with OCD have more than one theme going on at a time. Anything can become a compulsion—even therapy skills like mindfulness or tapping.

The good news is that there are more evidence-based practices for OCD than ever before! Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) has been a proven treatment for over 60 years and is considered the first line of OCD treatment. ERP is also effective for other diagnoses like generalized anxiety, panic and phobias. A second line treatment with over 20 years of treatment for OCD is Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT). When you schedule your consultation with Sarah, she will go over therapy options. It is an incredible time to be addressing OCD symptoms with so much research available and effective therapies!

Reach out to Sarah Weber Belka!

“there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. we need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu