How to manage stress?

[Ariadnee]

Hello everyone. I am 29 years old and I deal with OCD the last 10 years. I have been living with anxiety since I was a child. Can anyone please give me some advice about how to manage my anxiety? I have reocurring thoughts-not only compulsions- everyday. Everyday I stress about something different. What should I do? Every single day I stress about something else... about the pandemic, about work, about my parents, friends and fiance... Is there a chance that maybe in the future I can live my life???

[MothFir]

"Is there a chance that maybe in the future I can live my life???"

Yes but you'll probably have to work at it if you are anxiety-prone. Do you see a therapist or take medication? Both can help quite a bit, as long as it is the right therapist (trained in OCD) and the right medication.

I'm 46 and only recently have realized how much of my life has been spent in needless worry, mostly from OCD. A lot of episodes I would not have labeled OCD at the time, but now I realize that OCD's catastrophic logic and unreasonable demands for 100% certainty can take hold of any routine problem and make it feel like the end of the world.

I think that getting off the anxiety train really requires reframing your whole view of reality, especially if you are anxious about a variety of topics. You need to learn to expect and habituate to anxiety in all its forms. One of the best books I've read recently on the subject is "Stopping the Noise in Your Head" by Reid Wilson. It is full of good insights and techniques, such as:

1) Learning to separate "signals" (good anxiety about real problems that spurs us to find a solution) from "noise" (bad anxiety from hypothetical, exaggerated, or imagined problems, which does nothing but make us miserable). An example of a signal would be that there's a pandemic going on, so you should follow health officials' recommendations about masks, washing hands, and social distancing. Noise would be all the unsubstantiated worry that might come with that -- "What if I don't follow the protocols perfectly?" "What if I make somebody sick anyway?" "What if there's virus on this or that and I touched something that touched it?" "What if, what if, what if..."

2) Embracing the anxiety instead of dreading it. This sounds ridiculous (as the author frequently admits), but it is actually pretty helpful. After all, the anxiety is coming anyway, and trying to push it away is like trying to push against a bus that's rolling downhill at you. It's better to try to jump on board and try control it.

3) How to expose yourself to your fears and habituate to the anxiety that results. The author is very good at constantly reminding you that the content of your fears is not relevant, once you have decided that the content is mostly likely noise. The real battle is with the anxiety that is giving you a distorted picture of reality and makes the content FEEL relevant.

There's a lot more, but that gives you an idea!

Just don't give up until you find some sort of system (with a therapist, medication, self-help, etc) that helps you get your anxiety under control so that it doesn't constantly make you miserable. It may take a bit of effort, but it is possible, and it's better than letting anxiety limit what you can do in life.