Brain Lock
An estimated 5 million Americans suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and live diminished lives in which they are compelled to obsess about something or to repeat a similar task over and over. Traditionally, OCD has been treated with Prozac or similar drugs. The problem with medication, aside from its cost, is that 30 percent of people treated don't respond to it, and when the pills stop, the symptoms invariably return.In Brain Lock, Jeffrey M. Schwartz presents a simple four-step method for overcoming OCD that is so effective, it's now used in academic treatment centers throughout the world. Proven by brain-imaging tests to actually alter the brain's chemistry, this method doesn't rely on psychopharmaceuticals. Instead, patients use cognitive self-therapy and behavior modification to develop new patterns of response to their obsessions. In essence, they use the mind to fix the brain. Using the real-life stories of actual patients, Brain Lock explains this revolutionary method and provides readers with the inspiration and tools to free themselves from their psychic prisons and regain control of their lives.
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What Hacker News says
- This is not a simple "do this", except to say you need to see a doctor. You are not alone! Many suffer with anxiety for their whole life. What helps is therapy to learn to train your brain that many are anxious too and that you are normal. The ones who don't have chronic anxiety are people you can learn from. When you figure it out you'll have superpowers that most would kill for.
You may choose medication to help you with that initial training, you may have a completely different diagnosis.
No one here should diagnose you, because a doctor wouldn't diagnose over the internet.
A helpful book: "Brain Lock" by Jeffrey Schwartz. It's about OCD but in my experience all these things are connected.
- OCD is going to find another outlet for you. For me, it transitions from AIDS to Rabies and then it'll find its way back to AIDS again, or maybe covid ... among many other issues.
You need to go after the OCD head-on, rather than the symptoms. My counselor recommended Brain Lock for me. I need to read it again, myself; but, I believe it to be a useful book and always recommend it.
- I'm diagnosed with OCD and have many of the symptoms for it. It tends to stay relatively low-grade and not life impacting, so long as I do the thing I said here. When it gets out of hand, I need to remember to follow through more with what this book told me to do: https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Lock-Twentieth-Anniversary-Obse...
That's the one my therapist had recommended.
I try to avoid medication, but that's a personal preference. I do hope you the best on your journey!
edit: removed a word that made my sentence mean what I didn't mean for it to mean.
- Recently I've read a book called "Brain Lock" which is about effective 4-step technique of rewiring your brain and getting rid of OCD symptoms. The steps are "Relabel", "Reattribute", "Refocus", "Revalue". Not getting into details, but among other things the author suggests to have a log of successes, which means a person should write down when he was able to workaround his compulsion.
The idea is to create a website, which is a place for people to have their ocd-journals, read each other successes and tips on how to struggle against compulsions (which might be useful, because one of the ideas in struggling against compulsions is to switch the attention to something else). What do you think about it? Do you think it'd be hard to makret such a thing? Getting money out of it? Any OCD sufferers here?
- I've got 3 different non-fiction books for me:
Thinking Fast and Slow. This book discusses how we think and at what level and where some of the shortcuts we use when thinking occur and what impact they have on us. It really was one of the best books I've ever read; and like many books on that subject, you don't have to read the whole thing to get a lot out of it.
The Dictator's Handbook. This is the book that spawned the video essay series by CGP Gray: Rules of Rulers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ). It has been a strong recommend for me on how and why the political world is the way it is.
Brain Lock: This is a book about OCD and it discusses a method of helping manage the symptoms and manifestations of OCD that creates a measurable and material change on the brain itself. Like self-help books, it does repeat itself quite a bit over the second half of the book. If you struggle with OCD, I do recommend it.
- The article reads like a case study on OCD from Brain Lock.
