If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and decide to seek professional therapy, you’re likely to hear the term “mindfulness” mentioned in some aspects of your treatment.
There’s a reason why mindfulness is so popular right now. CBT for OCD and mindfulness has been proved to be a significant technique in resolving various mental health conditions via research and clinical experience over the years.
Recently, several OCD specialists have discovered that mindfulness can help improve the efficiency of cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT).
There are fears that mindfulness practices may be misapplied as a “neutralizing” tool or that it would “cancel out” or undermine the effectiveness of traditional exposure and reaction prevention techniques (ERP).
CBT for OCD is a very successful therapy practice used worldwide to treat various mental health issues, including OCD.
This method is founded on the idea that OCD develops and worsens due to dysfunctional, deeply established thinking patterns that force people to assess and respond to ideas, emotions, and physical sensations in harmful ways.
The goal of CBT for OCD is to assist you in developing a new connection and a more effective method of reacting to your obsessions and compulsions that do not prolong your anxiety and dysfunction.
It also entails assisting you in testing particular predictions and identifying and challenging the cognitive processes that perpetuate your OCD symptoms and the significance you attach to them.
Following your CBT sessions, you will also be given ‘homework,’ which normally consists of you doing daily exposure and response prevention activities between treatment sessions to maintain building on these skills and minimizing the obsessive thoughts and rituals characteristic of OCD.
CBT has been shown to produce long-term advantages in OCD patients and a more practical approach to controlling unwelcome thoughts and sensations that do not impede your functioning in the long run.
OCD wants you to be terrified of your internal world, which drives you to do compulsions to push ideas away, which perpetuates the condition. The initial stage in teaching the CBT approach to someone seeking therapy is frequently psycho-education on how the brain interacts with the mind.
Understanding this connection and the obsessive-compulsive cycle is critical for preparing someone to participate in therapy. Thus, understanding what it means to be mindful is just as important as understanding what it means to be cognitive or behavioral in your therapeutic strategy.
To be “mindful” means observing and accepting undesired thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations without judging or assigning significance to them or attempting to stop or modify them.
This may be done at any time during the day by just noting what’s going on within while you go about your business (in a shower, for instance, you might notice the sound of the running water or the pressing pressure of your body against the seat you are in).
Formal meditation — devoting a particular amount of time to focusing on an “anchoring notion,” such as one’s breathing or heartbeat, while allowing the internal world to come and go without judgement or interpretation — is another technique for facing OCD.
Conclusion
By now, you know all the details about OCD and how you can easily treat it with CBT for OCD and mindfulness. All the best! Be confident and give your best shot for the next upcoming days.