In this chapter, we’ll discuss mindfulness in the context of having OCD. Don’t be ashamed of thinking at this point that mindfulness is that thing that people with OCD can’t do, or associating mindfulness with trying really hard to ignore your thoughts and pretend they don’t bother you. In the pages ahead, we will explore what mindfulness is and ways you might conceptualize it that reveal it as tailor-made for the obsessive mind. By learning to be a better observer of your mind, you may also become a better master of your OCD.
When you have OCD, it’s easy to get caught up in the minute details of your thoughts. OCD sufferers are people who see, without even trying, the fine print of the human experience. It’s not just a curse, though it can be very painful. This fine attention to detail is an asset as well. The OCD sufferer is a noticer. You may notice the way your partner’s mouth curves into a smile in a slightly crooked way, and that becomes another thing to love. You may notice that the color of the sky shifts from orange to purple at the horizon, but not until it just barely reveals a color for which we have no name. And this becomes another thing to admire. You may notice the bass line to an otherwise mediocre song and find something to really get into. This enhanced attention to detail in the mind lends itself to creativity, humor, and ingenuity. Being able to enjoy the fruits of a noticer’s mind necessitates being able to shoulder the burdens of that same mind. Noticing that your shoelace may have dragged along the sidewalk by a puddle filled with unknown liquid, that your door may not have made the signature clicking sound it usually does when you lock it, or that nothing but free will stands between you, the kitchen knife, and a violent encounter with someone you love—this kind of noticing is something you need to make space for as well. It comes with the equipment.
If you want to let yourself be carried off by the positive things you notice and return safely from that experience, you have to be able to observe when you’ve been carried off by negative experiences and return safely from those as well. Indeed, this is really the main problem with OCD. You get pulled away from the present moment by obsessions, and by the time you realize that this has happened, you are so deep into it that it requires great effort to disengage. These efforts to disengage from unwanted thoughts, feelings, and sensations come in the form of judgment, analysis, rationalizations, and neutralizations (in other words, compulsions). But what if there were another way? What if you could (1) increase the speed with which you realize that you’ve been distracted by your thoughts and (2) return from that distraction without preconditions (that is, without rituals)? That skill is called mindfulness.
Mindfulness, simply defined, is nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. To experience the world mindfully is to observe it (both the external and internal) without evaluation, in the here and now, with no expectation or mandate to change it. In other words, it is using your noticing abilities to your advantage by stepping back and watching thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise. Mindfulness isn’t an intervention. You may hear people say things like, “I was really scared, but then I used mindfulness.” This fails to capture the true nature of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way of experiencing the world, not something you do to it.
Imagine for a moment that you are driving down the road when, all of a sudden, your OCD suggests that perhaps you weren’t paying enough attention at the last intersection and you might have run a red light. And not only that—maybe in running the light you caused a horrific accident and someone is now really hurt or maybe even dead because of you. A non-mindful approach to dealing with that obsession would be to react to the anxiety you are feeling (“I feel anxious, so something must be wrong!”), believe the obsession (“Oh, no! I may have killed someone!”), and start acting as if that obsession were true (“I must turn the car around now so I can go back and check to see if everyone’s okay!”). This sequence of non-mindful events, of course, leads to a full-blown OCD episode.
A mindful approach to dealing with this obsession is quite different. Viewing the experience mindfully, you would start by simply noticing that this obsession just popped up in your mind. You see it as just a thought that has arisen. “Hey, look at that, there’s my mind again, coming up with one of those thoughts.” You become aware that you are feeling anxious, recognizing the telltale body sensations that can accompany your OCD: “I’m feeling my heart race, and my hands are getting sweaty.” If you are used to having this come up in your OCD, you might also note that this experience is typical of your OCD: “Looks like I’m having one of those OCD triggers.” You then notice an urge to go back and check the road for evidence of your imagined crime. Rather than give in to this compulsion to get certainty about your obsession, you simply notice the presence of that urge: “I’m feeling an urge to go back and check.” You then make the decision to allow yourself to be in the presence of that urge (instead of dwelling on whether or not to do compulsions) and then bring your attention back to the present moment. You continue driving down the road toward your destination in the presence of your internal experience (your thoughts and feelings) while also being aware of what’s going on in the external world (cars passing you, vehicles entering and leaving the road around you, and so on).
Mindfulness keeps us from fusing with our thoughts and feelings—even those created by obsessive-compulsive disorder. Being mindful does not mean pushing thoughts away or clearing our minds of obsessions or the urges to do compulsions; rather, it allows us to step back and see them for what they are, and this distance makes it easier for us to stop confusing the perceived intensity of the content of the thoughts with their importance.
Joseph Goldstein, one of the people who originally brought the mindfulness tradition to the United States from the East, shared that sometimes he will play a game where he pretends that all the thoughts he’s having are coming from the person next to him (Goldstein and Harris 2016). Take a moment to consider that frame of reference. If you could see the thoughts of the person sitting next to you as they occurred, scrolling by as if on a news stream on the bottom of a TV screen, you would just watch them, mostly without much emotion. You might find some of them interesting, boring, shocking, or entertaining, but overall they wouldn’t pack the same emotional punch as those same thoughts coming from your own head—in fact, you might have a hard time staying focused on these thoughts coming from another person’s mind because to you they just don’t have any meaning. That’s why learning mindfulness in the context of OCD is so powerful: it helps you recognize that no thought is inherently more meaningful than any other thought, regardless of its content.
Framing your experience this way is no easy feat in the face of disturbing thoughts, painful feelings, and powerful urges to respond compulsively. And yet, if we can position ourselves as observers, rather than victims, of the mind, we immediately have the upper hand over OCD. To give this more clarity, let’s talk about another metaphor for how to conceptualize mindfulness.
One way of understanding mindfulness is to think of awareness in three parts: the brain, the self, and the mind. The brain is that gelatinous mass in your skull. The self is you. And the mind is the interface with which you and your brain interact. Consider that the brain is somewhat like a computer hard drive. It creates, calculates, and stores data. This data is presented and displayed on a screen, like the computer monitor. This screen can be considered the mind in this metaphor. Though you may often hear about the mind doing this or that, being very active, you might also think of it as simply a stationary display of what is going on in the brain. It may have a lot of information on it, or a little. It may have a beautiful and serene backdrop (your wallpaper) or it may be cluttered with pictures, files, folders, and so on.
You are the self, the person who decides how much and what kind of attention to pay to the various things displayed on the monitor. You might focus most of your attention on an e-mail in front of you, a little attention to some software update alert off to the side, and almost no attention to the different icons in your toolbar at the bottom. This attention can be shifted at will from one thing to another in different parts of the screen.
Problems occur when we find ourselves positioned too close to the screen. Imagine your nose squished up against a computer monitor, trying to process what’s going on. Whatever is directly in front of your eyes will get 100 percent of your attention, and whatever it is will seem severe, distorted by the intensity of its being right in your face. This is what it is like to be mind-less. You just can’t take it all in from that close. So to be mind-full you must have enough distance from your mind (the monitor) to take it all in.
People in general, but people with OCD especially, can find themselves too close to the screen of their mind and overwhelmed by whatever piece of data is being presented at any given time. This is why you may have a thought about being dirty and then immediately feel dirty. Or you may have a thought about committing a bad act and immediately feel guilty. The notion of thoughts just being thoughts seems ridiculous when the thought is demanding all of your attention and flashing so closely to your eyes. So the trick is to back up and get some distance. From a reasonable distance, we can see all of the little bits of data on the screen and choose how much attention to give each thing—a little, a lot, or all of it. None, as you may have noticed, is usually not on the table. The farther away from the screen, the easier it is to choose what to focus on. Move back even farther, and we may choose to release a focus on our thoughts altogether. But if we can strive to be more mindful and back up from the screen even just a bit, we can live more mindfully and as joyfully as we choose. The trick is to become aware of when we have gotten too close to the screen and use this awareness as a cue to back up and give ourselves some distance.
To practice mindfulness, at least in the context in which we are using it, is to develop greater skill in being mindful, or to give ourselves distance from our metaphorical screen. One way to conceptualize this is to consider that you have a kind of muscle in your brain that brings you back from your obsessions. It is not literally a muscle, of course, but a muscle in the sense that this part of the brain can be exercised and strengthened to improve its performance. If you are trying to stick with the present moment and your obsession pulls you away, distracting you from that present moment, then in order to be present again you need to somehow pull yourself back. But when the glue that binds you to your obsession is stronger than your drive to come back from it, you get stuck. You end up using compulsions to get back, and compulsions are the fuel for your OCD. However, if you have an internal willingness—a muscle that you have exercised and is thus very strong—it can supersede the OCD and allow you to bring yourself back to the present moment. One way to exercise that muscle in your brain is meditation.
In the context of OCD, meditation is an exercise and nothing more—like weightlifting for people in training for an athletic event. It is not a religious rite or a path to self-realization. It is not even a tool for relaxation (though it can sometimes be used that way). Quite simply, meditation is an act of mental fitness or mental hygiene wherein you repeatedly flex and contract your ability to pay attention to the present moment. There is no one perfect way to meditate for OCD, but the vipassana tradition is probably the most appropriate for these purposes. Vipassana comes from an ancient Indian practice; it is a Pali word that can be translated as “insight meditation.” In this type of meditation, we gain insight in part by focusing on the body and its sensations, and most commonly, on the breath. In a larger sense, vipassana is a series of philosophical and moral perspectives, but one of the tools used to achieve this perspective is a form of meditation that involves training the mind to become aware of when it is distracted by thoughts or feelings and to remain attentive to the present moment (Goldstein 2013).
In the pages that follow, we’ve broken down an example meditation into a basic format you can use to enhance your OCD-fighting strengths:
Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
The most helpful environment for meditating is one where you feel you have privacy and are not going to be disrupted. This may seem like a challenge, but do your best to identify a suitable space. If you have kids or you work or go to school, there are surprisingly few locations where you can just sit and be without something or someone asking for your attention. So you need to make the best of what you have available. Your bedroom or any room where you can feel genuinely alone is a good place. If your car is the only place where you can find this, that is fine—just don’t try to meditate while driving, please. Meditating outdoors can be good if you have access to an isolated and peaceful place. In general, just consider whether the space you are choosing is at least limited in its distractions.
The traditional approach to meditation, sitting on a cushion on the floor, is not for everyone; if you can do so comfortably, great. But if not, we recommend sitting in a comfortable chair with good back support, adding a pillow behind your lower back if you need additional support. You can meditate lying down, but this might put you at greater risk of falling asleep.
Start by sitting in a comfortable, but upright position, without straining or slouching; if in a chair, with your feet planted on the floor and your hands resting on your knees or thighs. It can be helpful to get in the mood before doing the work, so start by simply taking a few deep breaths and considering a simple concept: “Here I am…in this space.” Remember, the point of the meditation is to develop or strengthen the skill of returning to the present moment, so the more clear you are about the present moment, the better. After a few breaths and taking in your immediate environment, close your eyes and just breathe normally (in and out through your nose). If you tend to get dizzy or nauseous with your eyes closed, you can do this exercise with your eyes open, resting your vision on a space a few feet in front of you.
You may have heard meditation directions like “clear your mind.” That’s fine for other people, especially those who don’t have OCD, but if you want to use meditation as an exercise to develop better mastery over the disorder, don’t attempt that clear-your-mind stuff. OCD sufferers are busy-minded people, and the aim is to soften this busy-ness, not become empty. When thinking happens, the aim of mindfulness is to be aware that you are thinking instead of being lost in thought. The moment you close your eyes, you are likely to be very aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. It will get noisy in there pretty quick. Just allow that to be. This is where you are in this moment, so it’s still perfectly welcomed in your meditation. Remember, the idea is, “Here I am…in this space.”
Your meditation is not about calming down or being mentally still. It’s actually quite active. So start by noticing all those thoughts and feelings and sensations. Go ahead and comment gently to yourself about how you’re feeling in this moment. “Wow, there’s a lot going on there” is a perfectly mindful statement. “Ugh, I am terrible at this, what a waste” is not so useful (and not so self-compassionate, which we’ll get to later).
Next, you are going to check in with your body, so to speak, first by focusing on and scanning a few key areas and then by doing a full body scan. To begin, actively direct your attention to your feet. For the next minute or so, try to mentally sketch out all the various aspects of your experience that are happening right now. So, considering the soles of your feet, mentally draw the areas of your feet that are in contact with your shoes or the floor. Again, “Here I am in this space, my feet pressing down in this way.” Let all of your other thoughts circle you and just keep coming back to this task of creating a mental image of the experience of your feet resting on the floor. There’s no right or wrong here, so don’t get too caught up in doing this “right.” If you start by just thinking about your feet, that’s not the main objective, but it’s fine. If you can observe the experience of how your feet feel, the sensation of each foot resting on the floor, that’s getting off on an even better foot. (Admit it—that’s a functional pun.)
Next, scale back your attention from your feet and shift it to your buttocks. Yes, this is also a glute exercise! Notice how you are pushing down on the seat, or rather, you are being pulled into the seat by gravity and the seat is pushing back against you. If you notice pressure on one side more than another, good. Just go ahead and notice that experience.
Now switch your attention to your hands. Mentally outline your fingers and sketch in your palms, paying special attention to where your hands are touching or not touching your legs. All of this may seem quite busy, which is fine. If you get distracted, also fine. Just notice when you’ve become distracted and return to what you were doing. At this moment, you are attending to your hands resting on your lap in this moment in this space.
Next, shift your attention to your face. Check in with whatever is going on there. Can you feel the air on your face? Is it warm or cold? Are there any smells or tastes worth noting? Now to your ears. Imagine, if you can, opening up your ear holes to the space you are in. Instead of the sounds you may encounter (an air vent, distant voices, your own breath, a fan, footsteps, and so on) being problems, try to view them as simply elements of the space you are in. Too much noise can be too distracting, of course, and may mean this is not an ideal space for meditating. But some noise can add shape and texture to your environment. If there are too many dynamic sounds distracting you, it’s perfectly fine to turn on a fan or white noise machine.
Between sitting and arriving at this point, you may have spent thirty seconds or several minutes. This is entirely up to you.
The final scanning step is the full body scan. A good way to think of scanning the body is that your mind is like an inkjet printer. It goes back and forth, back and forth, again quite actively, printing out line by line what it sees until it has produced a complete picture. Starting at the top of the head and gradually, slowly, and evenly working your way down to your feet, print out a mental picture of your body. This printout is not just what you think your body looks like in this moment, but what it feels like too. It’s your experience of your body. If at any point you come across a part that’s uncomfortable or that raises strong feelings, don’t stop printing. Just notice what’s going on there and let the printer move on evenly. At the end, you will have checked in with all of your points of contact, your senses, and your body as a whole in this space in this moment of time. You are now ready to begin the meditating part of meditation.
There are many different ways to practice meditation, but for strengthening your mindful muscles against OCD, we will be focusing on a breathing meditation. For the next segment of the meditation exercise, you will rest your attention on your breath. This means shining a spotlight in your mind on where you feel your breath the most. It could be the whoosh as it enters your nose, or the sensation of your solar plexus rising and falling, or the feeling of your belly inflating and deflating. This is your anchor. Home base. For the next few minutes, this is the thing you will keep coming back to: this feeling of breathing in and breathing out.
You will have thoughts that disrupt your attention on the breath. This is perfectly fine. All distractions are just that: distractions. The idea is to become aware that you have wandered off, simply acknowledge this, and then return to the breath. This, in and of itself, is being mindful and practicing mindfulness.
It doesn’t matter if you catch yourself wandering away from the breath a little or a lot. Your mind is like a puppy that you’re training to sit or roll over, and it easily gets lured away by things in its environment (like an enticing smell or a bug it could chase). To bring the puppy back, you have to be gentle, friendly, and patient, and above all, you’ll want to just remember that puppies are like this: prone to distraction.
Actually, in the beginning at least, wandering off a lot is a good thing. Remember, what you are trying to teach yourself is to notice when you’ve wandered away from your anchor and to return without precondition. If you never wander off, there’s nothing to notice and there’s no opportunity to strengthen that coming-back muscle. And again, it is this muscle in your brain that releases you from the power of your obsessions, so we want to exercise it.
As you continue to meditate—that is, to rest your attention on the breath—notice when your attention goes elsewhere, and then return to the breath. You are going to be distracted by thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The key is to stay out of problem-solving the content—otherwise known as “anything at all that you’re stuck on and worried about” (Wilson 2016, p. 62)—and stick to the main theme: that these are thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and only thoughts, feelings, and sensations. They are streams of data in the mind. Liking them or disliking them is not at issue here. The skill you are trying to develop is simply observing them.
Mindfulness entails observing things in the present moment without judgment as they are, not as they could or should be. When you observe a thought, then you have done just that, observed a thought. It doesn’t matter what the thought is about or where it came from, or how often you have been in its presence. When meditating, there is a thought, and then we return to the breath.
Reasonable people can agree that watching your breath for more than a few seconds is pretty boring. Remember that the purpose of meditation for OCD is to develop the skill of coming back to the present, back to your anchor. So it is precisely because the breath is so boring that it’s the perfect anchor for this exercise. It requires intention to both observe that you have wandered off into thought or feeling, and to allow yourself to return to the anchor of the breath even when that may seem unimportant. It is meant to be challenging. But it is also meant to open you up to having curiosity about the banal. Why, in the presence of an OCD thought or anxious feeling, are you not impressed by the flavor of your food or the sensation of a breeze? Consider that if you were to improve in your ability to return to and remain with something noncompelling, such as the breath, how could OCD ever hope to compel you to do your compulsions?
You can choose a specific time to end the meditation or end when it feels appropriate to do so, but start with short sessions, such as five or ten minutes, or even one minute. When you are ready to end the practice, bring your attention back to the space. End the meditation more or less the same way you began, by checking in with the various elements of the present space you are in. Open your eyes. Take a few beats to collect yourself and return to your day.
By meditating and practicing the skill of returning to the present without judging your distractions, you are likely to find that you become better at doing so in your day-to-day life. You might say meditation is “working” when you notice that you are generally responding to OCD symptoms the way you might respond to those same symptoms if they occurred during a meditation exercise: by acknowledging them and then turning your attention back to what you were doing.
This approach often gets confused with ignoring your symptoms, but in fact it is much more powerful. Ignoring your thoughts is an act of denial, of pretending something isn’t there when it is. Mindfulness asks you to acknowledge the thoughts, but choose to respond to them openly and without attachment. We know, easier said than done. But that’s what we’re aiming for. More presence. More pursuit of the things we care about. Less wandering around lost, at the mercy of OCD.
People with OCD tend to approach tasks from an evaluative standpoint. If you are reading this, you are no stranger to questions like, “Am I doing this right?” or “On a scale of 1 to I-should-never-have-been-born, how poorly am I doing?” This is the hardest part about meditation and mindfulness in general. It doesn’t really work as a performance. “Good” meditations are just meditations you feel good about. They don’t have specific qualities that are better than meditations you feel bad about. If you are able to stay attuned to your anchor (the breath) for ten seconds out of ten minutes, then that’s great. Twenty seconds doesn’t make you a better person or a better meditator. The only thing to assess is simply: when you become aware that you have wandered off, do you note this and bring yourself back, even if just for a moment? If so, that was a moment of mindfulness. Every time your mind wanders and you bring it gently back, that’s being mindful. So if that happens two times, twenty times, two hundred times, or two thousand times during your meditations, those are all moments of mindfulness.
You are trying to increase the speed and ease with which you become aware of being distracted and then return from it to your anchor. But if you position yourself as a success or failure based on how many thoughts you have or how relaxed you feel or how focused you were, then you will not benefit from this exercise. In fact, Tom Magliozzi, cohost of the National Public Radio hit show Car Talk, had a great saying about expectations that we think applies here (and to all of life): happiness equals reality minus expectations. Try to reduce your expectations about meditation and mindfulness; this will help you peacefully tolerate, if not outright enjoy, the process.
In this chapter we’ve given you a sense of the power of mindfulness, one that you may not have realized before. We looked at why people with OCD might want to take an interest in mindfulness; then we explored a basic definition of the term. We have taken you through some of the basic steps of a mindfulness meditation exercise and discussed how the actions you take in meditation can positively affect how you relate to your OCD. Through meditating, you build the mental muscle that allows you to bring yourself back, again and again, to the experience of the present moment. You can learn to see thoughts as just thoughts and feelings as just feelings. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, is widely credited with the observation that there is a space between any stimulus and our response to it; that in that space we find the freedom and power to choose how we respond; and that in our response lies our growth, freedom, and happiness. Mindfulness gives us that space and forms an essential part of the foundation for freedom from OCD. The other part of that foundation is self-compassion—the ability to allow yourself to be who you are in the present moment. We will discuss this concept of giving yourself a fair shot—a concept which may also be new to you—in the next chapter.