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What is OCD?
Obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a mental health condition characterized by intrusive, unwanted thoughts and rumination. Primary symptoms include anxiety. Most additional symptoms (fear of going crazy, disassociation, etc.) are branches on the anxiety tree.
Picture this.
Your mind is spinning out. You check your pulse because you’ve heard that stress and anxiety can sometimes lead to heart problems, and you can hear your pulse thumping in your ears. 100 bpm. That’s way too high for someone sitting grabbing onto the arms of the couch to keep from drifting away, because the anxiety has got you feeling like the breeze from the door opening might loosen your grip on reality forever.
Maybe you’re having a heart attack. It’s not unheard of, and once you think of the possibility, you can’t get it out of your mind. You put two fingers to your carotid artery and feel the twitching, ragged rhythm of your blood and stare at your watch.
110 bpm now, and it feels like it’s only going to go up.
Your can’t catch a full breath, and now you’re convinced that you’re scarcely breathing at all. Now the couch is slipping away from you, and your tongue feels thick and unwieldy in your mouth so you couldn’t call for help even if you tried. And just as you’re shuffling toward what insanity, which has always been a fundamental fear for you, primal and shadowy, although you’ve tried to ignore it, you remember something about a breathing exercise for anxiety that the therapist of a friend of yours told them about.
In for four, hold for four, out for six.
You struggle at first, but after a few cycles, you can feel the weight of your body on the couch. The room’s stopped spinning. Reality has settled. You check your pulse. 80 bpm and slowing. That friend of yours talked about focusing on the breath, on the feeling of the inhale and the exhale, so you do. After a few minutes, the desperation of the last half hour has dissolved, and you feel a overwhelming sense of relief.
Read up on our supplements for OCD article to find out which supplements been shown to help alleviate OCD symptoms
How meditation helps alleviate OCD
The situation above may feel familiar if you suffer from OCD symptoms. Meditation can offer acute relief from symptoms panic attacks or anxiety, which are just physical manifestations of thoughts. Meditation offers the practitioner space from the thoughts that set the body to react as if it’s experiencing an existential threat. Think of it like a middle school dance chaperone with a yardstick. Anytime you and your thoughts get a little too close, meditation is there to create that buffer (room for Jesus, if it’s a Catholic school).
We know that regular meditation practice helps grow the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for, among other things, emotional regulation.
Think of meditating regularly like going to the gym as a means of injury prevention. No, you won’t experience the twisting and shearing forces on your knee that occur during a competition every day, but you go to the gym every day and build the protective muscles around your knees so that when those stresses do occur, you’re prepared for them.
The more regularly you meditate, the more you’ll come to experience stability in your emotional state. Not to be confused with apathy or dullness, this stability allows you to experience the world as it is, in the present moment.
The Blue Sky Analogy
One of our favorite analogies is that of the blue sky. No matter how many clouds (thoughts) obscure the sky, it (the feeling of contentment, of being in the present moment), is always there. The blue sky is the natural state of your mind, there’s no need to build it or strive for it. Meditation just helps give you the tools to clear away the clouds.
Anyone who suffers from OCD symptoms knows that one of the most difficult things about the disorder is to not act on the desire to follow thoughts as they appear and destroy them. A thought pops into the brain, an unpleasant thought, and the first instinct is to follow it, to wrangle it and somehow unthink it. Our first instinct, in other words, is to do the impossible.
Using meditation to ignore intrusive thoughts
The point of meditation is not to eliminate negative thoughts. That isn’t possible. Everyone, OCD symptom-suffering or not, has negative thoughts pop into their brain. The difficulty with OCD sufferers is getting stuck in a loop. Trying to “erase” or “unthink” the negative thought, whether purely through thinking or by engaging in whatever ritual they’ve created to neutralize the thought. Meditation helps us by giving us the ability to ignore thoughts, to understand that if you don’t interact with the thought, it will go away.
The gift of mental space for OCD
Thoughts are just thoughts. Immaterial. Random. A great deal of the time, our thoughts are nonsense, the products of an illogical mind poorly conditioned for all the stimuli life throws at it. And they are not permanent. They dissolve if you ignore them. That’s the beautiful, healing aspect of meditation, the gift of space. The space to understand that you don’t need to “neutralize” or “dissolve” or “unthink” your thoughts. You can let them sit there, embrace the discomfort that comes with letting them sit there, and watch your mind release the thought.
Remember, there is no such thing as perfection
If you find yourself stuck in one of your old loops, don’t worry about it. There is nothing that you can do to change the past. Nothing, no matter how much you think about it. There’s nothing you can do to change the future. The only moment that exists is this moment. So be kind to yourself, internalize the fact that life is a process of constant work, and there is no such thing as perfection. And then get back at it, sit down, close your eyes, and sink into now.
One last note. As you build your meditation practice, particularly as someone suffering from OCD symptoms (one of which is disassociation), you may feel as thought meditation causes a sense of disassociation. We’d urge you to sit with the feeling, continue meditating, and let the feeling (and all the accompanying anxious thoughts) dissolve.
In short, what can meditation do for OCD?
- Give you space from your thoughts
- Make you understand that you are not your thoughts
- Provide relief from acute OCD and OCD-adjacent symptoms (anxiety, shortness of breath, disassociation)
Here’s a list of peer-reviewed research that supports the notion that mindfulness and OCD relief go hand in hand.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36410261/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30849066/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8052887/
Compare EMDR vs. mindfulness meditation to find out how the two therapy modalities stack up against each other (they tend to be complementary).
Happy meditating, and we hope this helps give someone out there a tool with which they can tackle some of their OCD symptoms.
Further Reading on EMDR Healing
- Read up on how to self-administer EMDR
- Or check out how to find an EMDR therapist near you
- Curious about EMDR in general? Read our guide on what is EMDR and how does it work
