Tip: “Delaying”–One of the Most Helpful OCD Therapy Tools

When that OCD anxiety hits you, it can often be overwhelming and terrifying. Your mind is screaming at you that you are something awful or that you have done or will do something terrible. And so your natural inclination is to want to quickly attend to the mental issue and try to convince yourself that all of the things your OCD mind is telling you are not true. And while none of these thoughts are true, paying attention to these thoughts gives them fuel. By giving these thoughts the time of day, you are essentially teaching your brain that these thoughts are important and deserve the alarm bells they are triggering. Rather, the key is to treat these false thoughts as insignificant and not worthy of your concern. And one of the most effective methods I have found to help train my mind to treat these OCD thoughts as unimportant rather than noteworthy is “delaying”.

Delaying occurs in the following manner:

1. OCD thought/worry arises
2. Instead of immediately attending to the problem, you pick a time in the future (10 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 1 week, etc.)
3. At that future time you picked, you are then allowed to attend to the OCD thought

Delaying helps you address those first few frightening moments of an OCD thought, which are often the most difficult, by forcing you to wait to check those thoughts. And then by the time you reach that future time period, you have often forgotten what you were even worried about in the first place or you look back on it and say “wow, what a dumb thing to be worried about!” I would estimate that roughly 95% of the time I delayed an OCD thought, I forgot about it or was no longer bothered by it by the time I reached that future time period. And during that other 5% of the time, sometimes I did check the thoughts and other times I just extended the delays. And that means I would just pick another future time to delay to, and occasionally, I would delay four or five times for one thought until the fear and anxiety finally dissipated.

If you do have to check, it is ok. Sometimes, the thoughts are just too powerful. But by delaying, rather than checking 100% of the thoughts, you are attending to a much smaller number. And this helps to teach your brain that these thoughts are inconsequential, thus reducing the impact OCD has on your life. However, like most coping skills and tools, OCD will try to repurpose it into a compulsion. But as long as you just keep it simple and tell yourself once or twice what your new delay time is (rather than say nine or ten times), then you can avoid compulsive tendencies. I still use delaying today even though I am nearing the end of my therapy. It helps keep me on track with the right thought process and I actually have one delay active right now. I throw any super tough OCD thoughts into this delay and just push this delay two or three days away. And then when I reach that future day, I just push it out another two to three days. And eventually, I will probably forgot about these thoughts altogether. But until then, I am not worried as I know that delaying is helping to reinforce the important truth that these thoughts mean nothing.