OCD fucking sucks. I’ve faced a lot of challenges in my life, but none come close to my battle with severe OCD. Thankfully, I was able to reduce my OCD symptoms by about 50% after 6 months of meditation practice, 75% after 1.5 years, and 99.9% after 2 years.

In addition to these astonishing results, it cost my family $1,000 (it could have been $0, but my dad donated $1k to the meditation center I went to), I never took any medication, and I never regularly went to any therapists. Of course, I still experience anxiety, anger, and other challenges on a regular basis, but it is the greatest relief in the world not to suffer from crippling OCD anymore.

At this point, if you’re a skeptic like me, you’re probably thinking to yourself “this sounds too good to be true”, and I don’t blame you. However, I’m not asking you to trust me right away or blindly believe me as if I’m some sort of cult leader — I’m just asking that you read this post with an open mind and then, if my ideas sound reasonable, you can try out some of the steps that I outlined. However, please keep in mind that I’m not a mental health professional and that this path is not for everyone. If it resonates with you, it may be worth exploring while taking adequate precautions along the way.

Additionally, the path I took is not easy — I’m not going to recommend any magic pills, superfoods, or 1 week crash courses. Instead, I’m going to recommend meditating for at least 2 hours per day for at least 3-6 months in order to start seeing real results.

This sounds daunting, but as I’ll show you later, it’s way more doable than you think. So, if this sounds interesting to you, please read on. My hope is that by the end of this post, you’ll feel well-equipped to take on OCD and have a clear path to a happier life.

If you’re short on time, feel free to skip the first 2 sections, as the first is about my personal experience with OCD and the second explains what it is (for those who may not be familiar).

Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

My Story with OCD *warning: contains OCD examples that can be triggering* What OCD Is *warning: contains OCD examples that can be triggering* Why Vipassana Meditation is an Effective Treatment for OCD How I Overcame OCD Step by Step Conclusion

My Story with OCD *warning: contains OCD examples that can be triggering*

It’s a perfect, sunny day in 2013 and I’m standing in the middle of a cobblestone street in Rome with the girl of my dreams. We were exploring a beautiful country on the vacation we had waited months to take, but my OCD wasn’t having any of it.

“Are you sure you didn’t kiss him?” I ask her. Her eyes roll and I know her reaction is going to be worse than anger or frustration — it’s going to be sheer helplessness, a feeling I know too well. My stomach sinks. This was the 3rd time that day, the 15th time that week, and well over the 100th time that year that I had asked her this same question.

At the time, my girlfriend was by far the most important thing in the world to me, and my OCD knew it and thus set out to ruin our relationship. This particular obsession was centered around something my girlfriend had told me in passing — that she had been dared to kiss a guy 2 days after we started dating, but had refused because she already knew that she liked me.

For most people, this piece of information would be wonderful, but it caused my mind to fill up with thoughts on a daily basis that she had actually kissed this boy and thus our perfect relationship would be ruined. Thinking about this rationally, it’s completely absurd, but OCD, as you probably know, isn’t very rational.

After I asked her if she’d done it, she’d tell me “no,” and then I’d always respond the same way, “are you sure? How do you know? What if you aren’t remembering correctly?” And on it went until another fight would ensue, tearing our relationship apart one obsessive thought at a time.

At the time I didn’t even know what was wrong with me, all I knew was that my daily existence was plagued by thoughts that sought to ruin everything I cared about. My OCD thoughts weren’t just related to my girlfriend: sometimes my OCD would torture me with twisted thoughts about harming my family or about how I was going to develop brain cancer because I had tried a drug when I was 17 or about how I was going to scream expletives in the middle of class that would get me permanently kicked out of school. My OCD knew what I cared about and wanted to destroy all of it.

What OCD Is *warning: contains OCD examples that can be triggering*

Hopefully, from this personal anecdote, you’re starting to get a sense of what OCD is. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, it’s hard to imagine the full extent of how difficult it is to live with.

At its onset, you feel like you’re going into a state of psychosis — you don’t know what has happened to your brain. Once it becomes a part of your daily life, you somehow learn to live with the demonic thoughts and anxiety that pollute your mind and body for hours every day. OCD isn’t a cute condition that just makes you more organized (like many people think), it’s a plague that forces its sufferers into a battle for their well-being and lives.

Let me make this all a bit more concrete by showing you the difference between a “normal” person that experiences an unpleasant, intrusive thought versus someone with severe OCD.

“Normal” Person (Bob): An intrusive thought pops into Bob’s mind such as “I’m going to stab my cat.” Bob thinks to himself, “well that’s a strange thought” or “yikes, that would be terrible” or “I wish that thought didn’t pop into my head” and then continues on with his day.

OCD Person (Alice): “I’m going to stab my cat” pops into Alice’s mind. Anxiety overtakes her body and her mind goes into a thought spiral — she can’t get it out of her head. She spends 30 minutes in a debate trying to convince herself that she won’t, but her entire body feels like it’s about to sprint towards her cat without control. She feels like she can’t stop herself, it’s going to happen. She looks for some relief and decides to hide the kitchen knives so that she won’t do it. This compulsion reduces her anxiety for a few minutes, but the feeling and the thoughts are still there. What if I do it? What if I can’t stop myself? These thoughts continue to run through her head for hours as she performs other rituals to reduce the anxiety, but alas nothing works. She ends up in her bed crying herself to sleep and wakes up the next day knowing that she will go through the same battle again.

If you want to see some real examples of people posting about OCD thoughts, check out these posts: “I’m going to push my cat out of the window and stab my brother”, “Check if I locked car 20 times”, “Sexual + Religious OCD”. There are so many more examples, but if you want a visceral idea of what extremely severe OCD looks like (far more severe than mine), check out this YouTube video (I skip to a specific part, but recommend listening to the entire speech). While Ethan’s OCD is apparent to the outside observer, for most people with OCD others can’t even tell that they’re battling the disorder.

Now that we’ve looked at some specific examples, I want to take a step back and lay out a more general chain of events that OCD sufferers face:

Intrusive thought pops into their mind. Huge amount of anxiety floods their body. They respond to this anxiety by spending hours wrestling with the thought. They then perform compulsions or seek reassurance from others with the hope that it will relieve the anxiety. The compulsion doesn’t soothe the anxiety enough so they repeat it several times or they simply continue to worry about the thought for hours on end. At some point, the anxiety decreases or their attention is diverted and they continue on with their day until the next intrusive thought comes, at which point the cycle starts again.

Armed with this understanding of what the general chain of events looks like, let’s explore why Vipassana meditation can be an effective remedy for OCD.

Why Vipassana Meditation is an Effective Treatment for OCD

Vipassana meditation teaches you to focus on the sensations throughout your body and observe them without any craving or aversion. You realize that every emotion, sensation, and feeling is fleeting. Therefore, you don’t need to react so strongly to every passing sensation, instead you feel it and pay more attention to it than you ever have before, but observe that it is constantly changing and will eventually dissipate. Over time, your reactivity to different emotions, sensations, and feelings decrease while your awareness of them increases. This pairing of awareness and equanimity provides you with a greater sense of peace and happiness. I really recommend watching S.N. Goenka describe it in more detail in this fantastic video.

Let’s look at the OCD cause and effect chain I outlined above (copied below for reference) again:

Intrusive thought pops into their mind. Huge amount of anxiety floods their body. They respond to this anxiety by spending hours wrestling with the thought. They then perform compulsions or seek reassurance from others with the hope that it will relieve the anxiety. The compulsion doesn’t soothe the anxiety enough so they repeat it several times or they simply continue to worry about the thought for hours on end. At some point, the anxiety decreases or their attention is diverted and they continue on with their day until the next intrusive thought comes, at which point the cycle starts again.

The most detrimental part of this chain isn’t the intrusive thought (everyone has those) or even the anxiety that builds up in the body, it’s the reaction to the anxious sensations. Since the anxiety is overwhelming and bothersome, the sufferer spends hours compulsing, worrying, and seeking reassurance as an attempt to reduce it. This is where Vipassana can help.

Since Vipassana allows you to focus on the ephemeral nature of anxiety and teaches you to become at peace with it, after an intrusive thought pops into your mind you can direct your attention inwards and pay attention to the sensations of anxiety that cover your body. You can watch them impartially and learn to be totally at peace with them. Once you’ve learned this skill, you have no need to perform a compulsion or go into a thought spiral as you aren’t trying to actively get rid of the anxiety. In fact, you welcome the anxiety and are totally OK with it being there!

So the chain above turns into the chain below after this person has meditated for a few months:

Intrusive thought pops into their mind. Anxiety floods their body (although the amount of anxiety decreases dramatically over time). They direct their awareness towards the sensations of anxiety rather than entering a thought spiral, performing a ritual, or seeking reassurance. Their awareness is matched with equanimity (non-reactiveness) and they are at peace with the anxious sensations as they rise and fall without aversion towards them. Since they’ve observed the feeling impartially and it isn’t as bothersome as it was before, there is no need to ask for reassurance or perform a compulsion. They can continue on with their day more or less at peace.

This ability doesn’t develop overnight, but I’ve found that it can develop substantially within 3 months to 1 year of regularly practicing Vipassana meditation.

How I Overcame OCD Step by Step

I hope at this point it sounds reasonable, intellectually, that meditation could help with OCD. Of course, intellectualization isn’t going to get rid of your OCD; you need to actually practice the technique. Below is the step by step process I followed as well as helpful resources // advice that I hope will help others.

Step 1: I signed up for a silent Vipassana meditation retreat in March 2014.

The first course I went on was Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka. I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s completely free (you have the option to donate at the end of the 10 days), the technique is taught in a clear way, there are centers all over the world, and the instruction is the exact same at each one, as it’s taught from recorded videos with live instructors present to answer questions that come up during practice.

While this course is fantastic and greatly helpful, it is 10 days long, completely silent, and the schedule is gruelling. You wake up at 4am and meditate pretty much nonstop until 10pm at night. For any meditator, let alone a novice struggling with OCD, it can be really difficult. But OCD is such a bitch that you have to put in some serious work to cure it and, at least in my experience, this technique alone can get you there. Furthermore, it isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds when you adjust to the schedule after the first few days and you’re surrounded by other people that are going through the journey with you.

If you want something slightly less intense but still immersive, I really recommend looking at courses taught at Spirit Rock or other courses from the Insight Meditation Society. Last year, I did an 8 day course taught by Joseph Goldstein at Spirit Rock and it was absolutely amazing. The schedule is less intense than the Goenka course, the technique is very similar and super high quality, the facilities are great, and the instruction is fantastic. The only drawback to these courses is that you have to pay for them. That being said, they offer discounts/scholarships to those in need and it’s a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

If these courses sound appealing but intimidating, I’d recommend meditating for a few minutes a day to see how it feels before attending them. There are quite a few apps out there and I don’t have personal experience with any of them, but I’ve heard good things about Waking Up by Sam Harris and 10% Happier. It also might be worth checking out Joseph Goldstein’s meditations since he’s such a great teacher (and wonderful person).

(Side note: after trying these apps out, you may feel that you’re unable to meditate well or that the sessions are really challenging. Don’t let this discourage you. I rarely find myself in a deep state of focus in my daily meditations even though I’ve been at it for 6 years. Also, the courses aren’t as difficult as you’d think since the continuous practice gets you into a nice flow. You also get a tremendous amount of energy and support by sitting with other people at the course, even though you don’t speak to them.)

After your initial exploration, I recommend moving on to a silent retreat because there are benefits from long courses that you can’t get from the short meditations you do on an app. Here are 10 of them:

You get a lot of practice in a short amount of time. You need to spend a lot of concentrated time learning this new technique. If you spend 10 days meditating for 8 hours per day, you’ve already hit 80 hours of meditation, which is enough time for you to grasp the technique. If you meditate for 10 minutes a day using an app, it would take you 480 days to get in the same 80 hours of practice. You develop a routine during the course that you can follow after. The course itself is just the beginning — you should be meditating for 2 hours per day afterwards if you want to beat your OCD (at least that’s what I did) and it’s really hard to establish this schedule unless you have been in that routine for the last 8-10 days. You have actual instructors that you can ask questions. When you’re learning something new, you’re going to have a bunch of questions (especially when you have OCD, lol). Therefore, it’s really helpful to have teachers there to answer your questions directly. You are in a more conducive environment to quiet your mind and can therefore work with it at a deeper level. In the retreat, your mind takes very little input (since you can’t read, write, or talk), which allows it to settle down, and allows you to work with deeper parts of the mind. It sounds scary to hand in your phone and go off the grid, but it really helps the practice. You make friends that you can meditate with later. Even though the course is silent, you’ll make friends before and after as you are given time to chat with the other attendees. Having friends that meditate is far more important than I could have imagined as it makes it easier to keep up your motivation and your routine. It also makes it more fun! You gain access to a community’s resources. This allows you to attend group sits, shorter courses, and more. You gain a ton of confidence in yourself. After completing something this hard, you feel really confident about your ability to beat OCD. If you can get through those 10 days, you can do anything! You break your daily habit patterns. Just by getting away from your house, the people you know, etc. your mind gets some space, which is useful for breaking old habit patterns of the mind. You learn about Buddhist philosophy. I wasn’t initially interested in Buddhist philosophy, but the courses I recommended above have super fascinating and inspiring lectures. They’re also helpful in terms of showing you how to cultivate a peaceful life in all aspects, which is vital to gaining peace of mind. You walk away from a lot of unhelpful aspects of life. Getting a break from parties, alcohol, girlfriends/boyfriends, stressful friendships, etc. is great for the mind.

Step 2: I meditated for at least 2 hours every single day.

OK, this is intense, but I told you there was no magic pill in this guide. It’s possible that you could get away with less, but again, this guide is based off of my own experience. I was meditating for 2 hours every single day for the first 6 months, then started meditating 3 hours a day for the next 3 months, then went back to 2 hours per day.

After that point, I saw a dramatic reduction in my OCD symptoms, and over the last 2 years I’ve reduced my meditation to around 45 minutes per day and am still symptom-free. My hypothesis is that you need to put a ton of time in at the beginning to change these habit patterns of your mind and you can ease off a bit over time if you like.

That being said, many people that get in the routine of meditating for 2 hours a day continue to do so for the rest of their lives because there are so many benefits outside of reducing anxiety. You generally become a happier, kinder, and more peaceful person. On a more practical level, your focus improves dramatically as well as your emotional regulation, both of which are great for your career and interpersonal relationships.

If you’re worried about losing time, I’d recommend that you think about how much time you spend in your compulsions every day. Also, think about how much time you spend distracted while you’re attempting to work on a project or schoolwork. As you meditate more often, you’ll spend less time on compulsions, you’ll focus better (thus you’ll get work done quicker), and you’ll require less sleep. In fact, I’m confident that you’ll have more time in your day compared to if you didn’t meditate at all.

Step 3: I reaped the benefits and continued doing meditation courses.

Everyone is going to be different, but I barely saw any benefits for the first 3 months. During the next 3-6 months, however, I saw around a 50% reduction in my symptoms for the following 3-6 months. From 9-18 months after starting meditation, I’d have some OCD flare-ups, but on average I’d say my symptoms were about 25% of what they once were. After about 2 years, I got to the point where I didn’t have any symptoms except maybe one or two OCD flare-ups during extremely stressful times every 2-3 years.

It’s also important to continue doing silent retreats each year as you make big strides they supercharge your progress. If you can do one 10-day course per year, you’re on the right track.

Conclusion

As you can see, there was no magic involved here, just a lot of hard work and a great technique.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to email me and I’ll get back to you shortly.

For additional information, check out the super in-depth eBook I wrote on this subject — it’ll serve as a helpful companion on your meditation journey.

You might also be interested in listening to a podcast episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify) I recorded with Brian Prost (speaker at the OCD Conference in 2018) about his recovery from his OCD.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps!