Quick Tip: OCD and the Importance of Hobbies

While exposure therapy (which helped me immensely) requires the OCD patient to face the worries and fears that cause you anxiety, sometimes you just want to avoid dealing with your OCD anxiety for a while. And there is nothing wrong with that. Exposure therapy, despite its powerful benefits, can be overwhelming at times and so often it can be important to deal with your OCD in other ways. Finding hobbies you care about is a healthy form of coping with OCD. And while hobbies are not a replacement for cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure therapy, they can provide an excellent alternative for the moments when you aren’t actively engaging in those therapies. Hobbies focus your mind on a task you enjoy and consequently can help keep your mind from wandering and latching onto whatever OCD worries come your way. For me, intramural sports, piano, reading, and video games were all activities that helped me lead a better life with OCD. Not only did these hobbies just add some fun to the daily grind but also they helped me forget about my OCD while I was doing them. Even hobbies that society generally considers to be devoid of any greater worth, like watching Netflix, can be helpful for OCD. If watching The Office helps your mind go blank and limits your OCD anxiety, then by all means do that. With all the negative thoughts that OCD can attack us within a day, a couple hours of neutral, blank thoughts is certainly an improvement. So, I would advise people with OCD to find that one hobby that brings them joy and helps them pass the time as that activity can make a world of difference in dealing with your OCD.