OCD Wellness would like to wish you a Happy New Year!

The New Year can provide us a great opportunity for a new and fresh start. It gives us incentive to stop bad habits and begin new habits. It creates a sense of optimism and hope to become the best version of ourselves and achieve the goals we have hoped and longed to achieve.

Here at OCD Wellness – one of our major goals for 2023 is to help you learn more about OCD and yourself – giving you the tools you need to overcome OCD and take back your life!

Over the coming weeks and months, OCD Wellness will provide you with the knowledge and tools necessary to begin your 2023 with “sword and shield” in hand. We want you to have the tools that will help you in the fight against OCD in the New Year!

Where do we start?

Let’s focus on some strategies that can help you along your journey with OCD.

Before we set out on the journey together – we must come to accept that the journey will be a tough one, but an important one – one worth taking.

Where do we start?

We start by taking small steps. Small steps will lead to bigger steps.

Building Awareness

Building awareness is crucial in beginning your journey to conquer OCD. We want to become aware of the role OCD plays in your life. Building awareness allows you to gain insight into your OCD – and gaining that valuable insight allows you to start taking back control of your life.

Try and think of OCD as a false fire alarm (among other things). If you left the building every time the alarm went off, you would become exhausted and miss out on some awesome learning , like finding out it is a false alarm. The alarm ends up taking you away from other more important things in life.

It is important to become aware of the role OCD (the alarm) plays in your life, so you know where and when it is a false alarm. Once aware, you start to see opportunities to live through the alarm – sometimes catching it before the alarm even goes off.

Building awareness allows you to find pathways to newfound knowledge and can empower and motivate you to continue your journey with OCD.  When you pull from your own experiences – it builds your confidence – and allows you to notice that some compulsions are more habit-driven than fear-driven. Building awareness gives you the perfect opportunity to start small, take back from OCD and have a win!

But you’re not in it alone this New Year!!!

Awareness is a team game!

Beginning treatment at OCD Wellness will help you learn about how OCD presents. Having knowledge around obsessions and compulsions and how they present for you is a great starting point to begin catching them. OCD Wellness will complete an assessment and provide you with a self-monitoring form. This self-monitoring form allows you to track your experience with OCD. It is tracking in “real time” that helps you build awareness. Having recorded data on “time, place, obsession, compulsions, and distress level” will provide you with awareness which is so crucial in starting your OCD journey!

Next blog, we will explore the importance of language. And how “externalizing” OCD can be a game changer!