If you've been struggling with anxiety or OCD, chances are you've already tried hard to make it stop. In a previous article, I described what each one looks like (Understanding Anxiety and OCD). This one is about what to do about them: first, why the things most of us try tend to backfire, and then what actually helps.
Why the usual strategies backfire
Most of us try to handle anxiety the way we handle any other problem: we try to solve it. Problem solving works for a lot of things in life, but it doesn't work for anxiety. In fact, it tends to make things worse.
Here's why. Anxiety isn't a logical problem — it's an emotional one. When you fight it, you end up anxious about being anxious, and it keeps building on itself.
With OCD, something similar happens with the thoughts. The more you try to push an intrusive thought away, the more you end up checking whether it's still there — and when you check, there it is. The checking itself produces the very thing you're checking for.
The same goes for arguing with the thought, avoiding the situations that bring it up, or asking the people around you for reassurance. Each of these gives you a moment of relief, but each one also teaches your mind that the thought was a real threat that needed handling. So the thought comes back.
What actually helps
In my practice I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, along with some tools from CBT. In everyday terms, here's what that looks like when we work together.
We do look at beliefs that aren't serving you well. Sometimes a more useful way of thinking about something makes a real difference, and that's part of the work. And simply talking through what you're going through with someone who understands it can help on its own.
But the main shift is in how you relate to your thoughts and feelings. Instead of fighting them, you'll learn to notice them. A thought is a thought and a feeling is a feeling, and you can have an anxious thought without treating it as an emergency. In ACT this is called defusion — getting unhooked.
You'll also learn to make room for discomfort. The uncertainty is going to be there, and the anxious feeling is going to show up. The goal isn't to make it go away — it's to let it be there without doing what it demands.
That last part matters. When the urge to check, avoid, or seek reassurance shows up, you practice not acting on it. In CBT this is called exposure and response prevention, and it's the most well-established approach for OCD. You face the thing you've been avoiding, and you don't do the compulsion. I won't pretend this is easy at first — but it gets easier with practice, and you won't be doing it alone.
One more thing I want to be clear about: I don't measure success by how much your anxiety goes down. Anxiety often does drop as a side effect of this work, but it isn't the target. You're going to have good days and bad days, and even if your anxiety eases for a while, it will probably show up again at some point. If low anxiety has to come first before you can live your life, your life stays on hold — and that's really just avoidance in disguise.
What I'm looking for instead is willingness. When you're no longer spending all your energy fighting your thoughts and feelings, you have energy for the things that matter to you — and you can take steps toward the life you want even while some anxiety is still there.
When to reach out
You don't have to wait until things get really bad to ask for help, and you don't have to be in crisis.
Here are a few signs it might be time: your life feels like it's on hold. You're avoiding things you'd like to do, or finding reasons to put off steps that would be good for you. You're spending a lot of time trying to problem-solve your thoughts and feelings. Or you've been fighting your anxiety for a long time, and it isn't working.
If any of that sounds familiar, I'd be glad to talk with you. You can reach me through the contact page.
