Any fix for OCD? I am trying to avoid pharmaceuticals as much as possible. I've tried being active/cutting carbs and sugar and most healthy "lifestyle" changes but it remains. A doctor prescribed me wellbutrin but I don't want to take it until i've exhausted all other avenues. It's also linked to hair loss and tapering off pharmaceuticals is torture once you are on them.
Welbutrin is very mild, anon, if your doctor recommends it I say you should try it. Not OCD, but I was on it for a bit and it gave me enough breathing room to teach myself healthier habits and then come off it.
I just look up "wellbutrin hair loss/facial aging" and see hundreds of posts so it spooks me
Keep in mind, people with incredibly mild/no side effects will be a lot less motivated to share about it since it just werks for them.
Psychiatric medicine is still an absolutely deranged shitshow, but it's still possible to look up typical doses of different meds and decide for yourself whether whatever sides you might get from a starter dose are worth it
t.was mentally ill in college
Wellbutrin doesn't treat anxiety disorders, which OCD ultimately is
SSRIs work but may shut down your penis while you're on them
Try avoiding gluten, it is related to a large number of mental illnesses (OCD, ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson's, etc). In some people who do not have gluten intolerance, it overloads their nervous system. You also have to make sure you are not malnourished, many people for example have magnesium deficiency, getting magnesium+potassium can lower your cortisol level, which could lower your compulsions,It is usually found in green vegetables, both (potassium and magnesium), if magnesium when you consume it activates you instead of calming you down, consume it earlier. Also try exposure, you have to show your brain that if you don't comply with your compulsions nothing happens. Casein (found in dairy) apparently is also related to mental problems such as autism, but the truth is I did not find a relationship with as many problems as gluten, I remember seeing a study where a young child with autism was stopped from giving products with casein, and he improved, but you can try to leave dairy if you wish.
Yeah I've tried the exposure stuff, and the longest I lasted about as specific compulsion was around 5 days? But it never truly goes away, it just sits in the back of my head, and eventually I give up
You get distress from obsessions and compulsions but you also get distress from not giving in to compulsions, even for days or weeks in my experience for just one compulsion being resisted. Exposure therapy isn't so much about getting to the conclusion of "the bad thing that was supposed to happen didn't happen even though I didn't do the compulsion so I know its safe not to do the compulsion". Even though this way of thinking is rational and sound its important to know OCD is irrational by nature and using this reasoning might not solve the problem. Exposure therapy is more of being okay with the uncertainty and the event that the bad thing might happen anyway even though you didn't do the compulsion.
Still, ERP doesn't fully solve OCD and it is still something you're going to have to put effort into for the rest of your life. The obsessions and compulsions will always evolve and find new ways to frick up your life and it's a constant struggle. It does work to some degree and even though it may not solve everything it's still better to have the fortitude and willpower to resist the compulsions as much as possible.
2 years of a PUFA-free animal-based diet and my anxiety and OCD are almost entirely gone
You don't have OCD you have mild autism. OCD is actually rare as shit
Yeah staring at light switches for 30 minutes is mild autism not ocd to make sure they are off. im glad i have learned
Shut up homie most people when they say they have OCD they're just referring to a tic or stim they have. This is true, and it was completely acceptable for me to assume you were one of those people.
holy relatable homie this ocd shit get tuff i just turned the tap handles like 50 times in a row to make sure it wasn't running
Frick I should go see someone huh
Not a problem for your ancestors or people outside of the western world and its sphere of influence. Just focus your quirks elsewhere. I like to count and add/multiply/subtract up the seconds on Youtube and Spotify but I would never take a pill for it. The Democrats want you to be on welfare and hooked on psychotropic drugs, stay straight edge Anon!
Take NAC. It's allegedly good for OCD.
But you shouldn't rely on supplementation/medication alone. You have to make the psychological effort as well to not engage with your OCD thoughts.
Just live a more interesting life.
Oh frick, got confused with ADHD, nevermind
Wellbutrin never helped me much. Just kept me from sleeping. Tbh ssirs never worked for me much either. After years of being on and off different meds its clear psychiatry is just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Im off antidepressants now and honestly id rather deal with slightly more OCD than the side effects of ssirs.
To answer your question though as another anon here said cutting out gluten is a good idea, I'm gonna try that too. I also tried inositol supplements too but it never really helped me much. L-Theanine sorta helped at one point too and might be worth a shot. St. Johns wort is also supposed to be worth a try. Also it goes without saying but I'll say it anyway, alcohol always makes it worse especially when you're hungover. Excessive stimulants like caffeine can also be a hindrance.
I tried to beat OCD without medication for years. The only cure for OCD is exposures, and I was never able to do proper exposures until I started medication (yeah I tried all the other shit). Was prescribed 20mg Citalopram, and within a year I was back to normal. I'm working on getting off it now, you've gotta do a really slow taper. I'm reducing my dose by 2.5g every 3 weeks and its still a bit of a struggle. But having beaten my compulsions and intrusive thoughts while on the medication, I now know them to be harmless. While getting off meds is a b***h, it's less of a b***h then trying to live with severe OCD. OP, have you talked to an actual OCD therapist? If you haven't already, I highly suggest it. A good therapist won't push you to taking meds (this is why you see a therapist, not a psychiatrist, a therapist can't prescribe meds). good luck brother, it's going to get harder, but then it will get better.
>OCD haver since early childhood here
it will never go away, you can put up effort and keep it minimum tho
>as for rituals
record yourself doing moronic check ups, then watch it once you calmed the frick down and think through, next time you start your moronic ritual DO 1 thing less, keep doing that 1 thing less untill eventually you get used to not being bothered by that shit
another thing that helps is changing your surrounding, if it's your home that is main point of these rituals, then literally go on vacation somewhere else, you'll notice, once you come back that some of rituals you used to do aren't as urgent as they used to be and some might even disappear
>if it's the intrusive thoughts that are main bother for you
idk the cure for that one, for me they disappeared completly the moment i grew older and cynical, threw faith away so there was no longer that omnipotent being "listening to my thoughts" and ready to execute them if you catch my drift
another thing that helps is to keep yourself occupied, if you have too much free time to think, you will have these thoughts torment you again
in the end it's (you) against (you) anon, you need no meds for that shit
>it will never go away.
Yep. The younger anons don’t know that yet though. Takes a while to figure that out.
>>OCD haver since early childhood here
>it will never go away, you can put up effort and keep it minimum tho
Seconding this. I've had OCD my entire life. I don't think it makes sense to even think of it as a mental illness, it's literally just how our brains function, they work a bit differently than the average person's brain in some specific ways and this leads to the tendency toward obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
But it is definitely manageable. Right now mine is not the best it's ever been, but it's still miles better than it was when I was younger. Voluntary exposure really does help, and not just doing it in big ways but in small ways throughout the day. For instance, one thing I have is contamination OCD, and washing and sanitizing my hands has always been one of my compulsions, so I just do whatever I can to voluntarily resist the urge as many times as I can throughout the day. And it definitely does help over time.
I have a germ issue and it’s literally ruining my life. Had ocd symptoms start when I was 7 or 8 and I think the trigger was my parents getting divorced and moving away. I won’t get into the details but after a few years off dealing with weird shit and not really knowing what was going on, all the ocd stuff went away. Completely , I just grew out of it.
Now I’m 36 and I was living in an apartment with a fly problem. Room was next to garbage chute and long story short, maintenance wasn’t doing the trash compaction correctly and there were probably 20 flies in the apartment every single day and I would spend 1.5 hours just killing flies every day after getting home from work. We moved to a new house that had a mouse problem. The mice were there before we moved in because house was vacant during colder months, I killed 23 mice and the. 2 rats. We moved again and had a sewage backup in the basement repeatedly.
It feels like god is just playing a cruel joke on me, because of all this bad luck but basically I have some sort of ptsd from all of this over the past few years and my ocd is full blown and worse than it’s ever been
I'm sorry to hear that, it's very understandable that going through those experiences led to some trauma. But you overcame your OCD once and you can overcome it again. It might take actual effort this time but you can definitely do it.
Meds are the only way.
Not at all. You’d probably have better luck with CBT. People of our generation have this idea that pills are magic. Everyone wants an easy fix. It’s pills, pills for everything. But it’s not a fix at all. Not only do doctors not understand the mechanics of the pills they’re prescribing (how and why do SSRIs actually work, or not work, in certain cases?), they don’t know what the cause is of the conditions they’re prescribing the pills for. Science cant even tell us why some people have OCD and others don’t.
For anyone who’s reading this, is young and has OCD and thinking of getting meds, try everything else before doing so. The pills might not do anything except making you fat, incapable of feeling anything, trouble having or orgasms, or psychotic breaks. People who glibly say “get meds” don’t know what they’re talking about.
It will only do that stuff to you if you don't actually need it.
Stop using the internet. Not what you want to hear but it's the only way
OCD is a legit chemical imbalance.
People with it have reduced grey matter volume in their frontal lobes, while also showering hyper activity in that region, indicating the person is exerting greater effort to make that compromised area work.
Meds increase grey matter and reduces brain activity.
If your case is mild, you can train yourself to ignore the symptoms. It just depends how bad you have it.