My OCD intrusive thoughts I go to bed pretty peacefully but right when I get up in morning it is there the OCD it starts with the unwanted thoughts immediately! I usually end up reacting to some thought then the compulsion start in my bed on to the hampster wheel I go which I can take into my day for hours upon hours very exhausting and drives my wife crazy 😡 It seems my mind is most at peace about 7 at night though. Any suggestions how I can wake up and not start my day like this the morning seems to be the most difficult time.
Thanks Frank-
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Love316
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There is a podcast on Spotify by Ali Greymond called OCD recovery that covers this topic, if I remember correctly. I struggle extensively with this as well, but as I recall, she said the best way to deal with it is to immediately occupy yourself with something else and don’t spend even a moment letting yourself ruminate!
I find when my mind is busy with something things quiet down a little just not really that motivated in the morning to do much I think I need to immediately get up and do something but what sometimes it is to early.
Getting up and doing something right away would probably be a compulsion (way to avoid the anxiety). You can remind yourself that you can handle the anxious feelings and practice just sitting with them without doing anything to lessen them. (I know, it feels absolutely awful, but it's the only way for us to begin to heal and get our lives back.) You've got this!
Another trick that had helped me SO much is to stop feeding the OCD. I learned this from a YouTube video of a tedx talk called ocd:starving the monster. How it works is that when an obtrusive thought comes, instead of wondering whether or not it's true and thinking it would be awful if it's true, instead just agree with the awful thought. So an example in my situation would be having a thought that my loved one now hates me and thinks I'm a waste of time. So instead of freaking out, I'd tell myself "yep, I totally ruined that and now they hate me." And move on with my day. It sounds sad, but it helps me so much! It throws my ocd off and stops feeding the fuel! My husband has gotten good at this too. When I try to ruminate with him ("what if I never finish this important project and I let everyone down?"), he will reply with "yeah, you probably will fail and let everyone down."
Doing ERP therapy has helped me spend less time in the OCD mental feedback loop. I get triggered by things constantly and have found I have to do the "response prevention" part of ERP consistently or else I get caught up in compulsions, either physical or mental. For awhile I had pretty uneven results for the exact reason you mention -- I'd wake up, get triggered by something within a few minutes, and then respond with a compulsion either because I was not awake enough to want to fight it, or I was caught off guard and gave the intrusive thought credibility, or I was in a hurry and thought I'd save time by just doing the one compulsion.
Of course "the one compulsion" often leads into more and it often sets a bad precedent for the rest of the day. It effectively tells our brains that the intrusive thought is legitimate and requires our attention. Then when the next one pops up, it's even harder to resist, and the same for the next one, and pretty soon the whole day is shot.
I made real progress when I started putting a lot of effort into resisting the first compulsion of the day. It's often hard for me for the reasons already mentioned, but it pays off in making all the rest of the day's compulsions easier to resist. Essentially it starts the day "on the right foot."
At first I put a reminder on my phone to appear each morning ("Don't respond to the first obsession -- it's not real!" or something like that), since I often check my phone first thing. Alternatively you can put a note on your alarm clock or bathroom mirror. It just needs to be a message from your rational "evening self" to the sleep-fogged "morning self" on how to respond to those initial obsessions that seem so urgent.
This method didn't solve all my OCD problems but it did make a noticeable improvement and has given me many more "good days."
This sounds so difficult! One idea is you could plan a time to do an erp in the morning. You could go to bed and just plan on waking up and giving yourself ten to twenty minutes to stay in bed once the anxiety starts. Then just do the erp where you let yourself observe the feelings inside of you but don't do any compulsions. Maybe practicing like this in the morning will help you become more and more able to handle that anxiety and move on with your day rather than doing compulsions.
Dear Frank, I truly believe reading the book by Sally M. Winston "Overcoming Intrusive Thoughts, Will be of great help to you. This is very prominent with people with OCD. Pages 68-73.
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