CBT in Overcoming your OCD Fears

To overcome your fears, you must learn stress-reducing tactics to help you clear your mind and overcome your problems. The process involves learning to meditate. In this OCD article, we will walk you through the steps to meditation.

Mindful Meditation in CBT Learning

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, better known as CBT, is a union of cognitive as well as behavioral therapies. CBT is useful for healing depression, eating disorders, anger, drug addiction, sleep problems and many more. Mindful meditation is all about focusing your mind entirely on your present state. If you are mindful, you will have awareness of your thoughts and present actions, devoid of self-judgment. There is significant scope for mindful meditation in CBT.

How to use Mindful Meditation to Overcome your Problems Effectivel

If you are facing problems like stress, depression, low confidence, social anxiety, low self-esteem or some sort of addiction, you can make use of mindful meditation for effectively overcoming those. With mindful meditation, you have to learn the art of realizing your negative thoughts as well as emotional reactions, which cause the above problems. Revisit those reactions and observe them. Try to sense the emotional tone without thinking. Communicate with those emotional tones. Every time you sense the suffering caused by the emotional reaction, there will be healing. It is a slow natural process of allowing your mind to realize, to sense and to heal the present problem, by simply listening to intuition with an open mind without thinking.

How you benefit from meditation

There are many benefits from practicing meditation regularly. It can help you in overcoming emotional problems, healing illness, improving health and concentration as well as developing a positive mental attitude. If you focus your mind on a specific part of your body, there will be increase in blood flow to that region. It will facilitate availability of a greater amount of nutrients and oxygen to the cells there. If you meditate, your mind will be strengthened. You will have better control over your mind and hence you will be able to guide your body efficiently to discharge all the orders. Meditation can help you in managing your lifestyle in a better manner. It will help in developing will power and self-observation. It will lower oxygen consumption. It will decrease the respiratory rate and can help you in achieving higher levels of relaxation.

Ways to meditate

The first thing you have to do before meditating is creating a quiet space without any distraction. After that, choose an appropriate posture. You can lie on the floor with or without your legs crossed, sit on a chair or even walk back and forth. If you are sitting, make sure that your shoulders and back are straight. Release all the pressure from all of your body and relax. Take a deep breath and release it slowly. Focus on breathing slowly and then try to control the thoughts coming into your mind. Be patient and detach yourself from all thoughts. Concentrate your mind entirely on the breathing counts or some mantra. That way you can get rid of other thoughts and slowly breathing will become natural. Meditate with great intensity to achieve good results. You can meditate for a few minutes or hours. In the case of mindful meditation, after putting yourself in the right position, rid yourself of all thoughts related to the past as well as the future. Focus your mind entirely on your present thoughts. Then focus on your breathing exercise with minute attention to variations in breathing. Just as you breathe, take note of all your present thoughts coming into mind, even if its anxiety, fear, hopes, worry or anything else. Observe the path of your mind if some thoughts carry it away from its normal state. You should return to your breathing routine without any judgment. Towards the end of your meditation give yourself couple of minutes to get back to a normal state.

Write – After you practice your meditation, write out the fears that you have discovered about yourself. Take a few moments to focus on those fears and ask questions – is this a legitimate fear? What are the facts that support the fear? How does this fear affect me? Who caused this fear? When did the fear develop? The more questions you ask of yourself the easier it will be for you to discover something new about the fear. You will find in most cases that the fears we have are either invalid or need validation.

Study – Take some time during your day to schedule a few moments to study your fears. Learn about the history of your fears and what they lead up to. Write out your thoughts and feelings of what you discover about the fears. Try to discover something new.

Practice

Add new triggers to your list daily and use them to confront and interpret new meaning.

Summary

In this OCD article, we helped you to discover how to use meditation effectively. Now in the next article you can learn with us how to be a fool!