OCD helpful tips

Can you help yourself with OCD - you sure can!. You can successfully treat yourself with self-help books but most people find that they simply do not have the emotional energy or support to be able to do it alone. Self help is certainly worth a go and if it does not work out when you visit a psychologist they will probably do very similar things so you will be ahead of the game.

I have included a number of tips below that you can try by yourself.

1. Learn about your condition

OCD is actually not that difficult to understand. In fact OCD makes at lot of sense in many ways. It basically takes everyday behaviour and takes them a tad too far. So far that the the good intensions become annoying rather than useful - not unlike many in-laws. So the first step is to learn about how it starts and how to treat it. One of the classic books is by Foa and Kozak and is called Mastery of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Cognitive-Behavioral Approach. Their is a therapist and a client manual. The client manual has pretty much all you need to know and is very clearly written. You can also buy the therapist manual as their are never any secrets in this kind of therapy. The client manual is an ideal first book.

2. Change

You have to do something different if you want change. It is a very simple rule but one people really don't want to do. So to improve your life then you have to change things. Sometimes you need help from a psychologist and other times you can do it by yourself. Many people find that meeting with a psychologist can help just as a personal trainer can help with exercise programs. Fortunatelly psychologist will rarely ask you to do drop and do ten push-ups when you walk into the office.

3. Stay in charge

Doing therapy (self-help or with a psychologist) doesn't mean handing over control. It is actually the reverse. Staying in charge means that you set the agenda over the OCD. But try and imagine that you are going to eat away at it like a termite. A full on attack on OCD will rarely work so you must nibble away at the edges. People with OCD typically have a perfectionist streak so they will want to be free of OCD almost instantly. This is a real mistake. The goals you set need to be smaller than small. Even then they will be too big. Think termite and reduce your OCD behaviours by 5% and no more. When you achieve this add another 5%.

4. Relax

Your psychologist should assess your stress, depression and anxiety levels in the first session but their is a good chance that people with OCD have stress levels are probably higher than most. Many people enjoy relaxing to special relaxation CD's and often this is incorporated into the therapy.