Mindfulness Exercise for OCD | Ep. 468
In this episode, I share the one mindfulness skill I teach every OCD client to help you respond to intrusive thoughts without getting stuck in rumination, urgency, or compulsions—especially when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Why mindfulness can accidentally fuel OCD when it’s practiced the wrong way
- The simple stream-and-rocks metaphor that changes how you respond to intrusive thoughts
- How to stop treating thoughts like emergencies without trying to get rid of them
- The most common tricks OCD plays when you try to be mindful—and how to catch them
- What mindfulness is not (and why chasing calm can keep you stuck)
- How small, repeated responses can soften intrusive thoughts over time
Mindfulness Exercises for OCD (That Actually Help When You’re Overwhelmed)
If you have OCD, you’ve probably been told to “just be mindful.”
And if you’re anything like my clients, you may have tried mindfulness—only to feel more stuck, more focused on your thoughts, or even more overwhelmed.
So today, I want to slow this down and teach you the one mindfulness skill I use with every single client. It’s the skill I come back to over and over again when OCD feels loud, urgent, and relentless.
And yes—when practiced correctly, this skill can supercharge your OCD recovery.
Content
Why Mindfulness Can Backfire With OCD
Mindfulness is a skill.
And like any skill, if it’s applied incorrectly, it can accidentally turn into:
- Rumination
- Mental checking
- Analysis
- Or another sneaky compulsion
My goal here is to help you practice mindfulness in a way that supports recovery instead of feeding OCD.
What Mindfulness Actually Is
At its core, mindfulness is very simple:
Paying attention to the present moment with openness and without judgment.
That means noticing:
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- Sensations
- Urges
And allowing them to be there without fixing, resisting, analyzing, or changing them.
Simple? Yes.
Easy? Not at all.
That’s why I want to give you a very specific way to practice.
My Favorite Mindfulness Metaphor for OCD
I want you to imagine a stream.
The water is flowing—sometimes gently, sometimes rapidly. Along the streambed are rocks of all shapes and sizes.
In this metaphor:
- You are the water
- The rocks are intrusive thoughts, feelings, urges, sensations, or images
You don’t get to decide why the rocks are there.
You don’t get to decide what they mean.
Every stream has rocks.
Every human brain has uncomfortable thoughts.
The Skill: Flow Around the Rock
When water hits a rock, it doesn’t stop and throw a tantrum.
It doesn’t say:
“This rock shouldn’t be here.”
“What does this rock mean?”
“What if this rock is dangerous?”
It simply flows around it and keeps moving.
This is the mindfulness skill I want you to practice.
When an intrusive thought shows up:
- Notice it
- Don’t judge it
- Don’t analyze it
- Gently move on with your life
No splash.
No urgency.
No meaning-making.
Just: “There’s a rock. I’m moving around it.”
How This Softens Intrusive Thoughts Over Time
River rocks aren’t smooth by accident.
They’re shaped by repeated contact with flowing water.
In the same way, each time you:
- Notice a thought
- Don’t treat it like an emergency
- Don’t stop to argue with it
- And keep moving
That thought slowly loses its sharp edges.
Not because you forced it away—but because you stopped reacting to it.
When OCD Tries to Wear You Down
Here’s where OCD gets sneaky.
After a few rocks, it will whisper:
“This is exhausting.”
“You’ll be doing this all day.”
“This isn’t fair.”
And I want to be very honest with you here:
There is no better solution.
If there were, you would have found it already.
Mindfulness isn’t about fixing the whole day—it’s about staying present with this one rock, right now.
The Biggest Tricks OCD Plays With Mindfulness
“This Thought Is Special”
OCD will insist that this thought is more important, more dangerous, or more urgent.
It’s not.
A thought is a thought is a thought—no matter how disturbing it feels.
“Being Mindful Means Focusing on the Thought”
Looping around a thought is not mindfulness—it’s rumination.
Water doesn’t circle a rock to inspect it.
It touches it once and moves on.
“Not Responding Is Irresponsible”
OCD will tell you that allowing a thought without fixing it makes you careless or bad.
That’s a trick designed to keep you stuck.
“Sit With It Means Stop Living Your Life”
Mindfulness does not mean sitting still and staring at anxiety.
You can go to class.
You can work.
You can talk to people.
You do life while anxiety rides along.
“Accepting It Means I Want It”
Acceptance does not mean desire.
It means observing, giving no meaning, and moving forward.
Keep the Cadence Moving
If you notice yourself slowing down, stopping, or getting stuck on one thought, that’s usually a sign you’re giving it too much attention.
Your goal is a steady rhythm:
- Thought → move around it
- Thought → move around it
- Thought → move around it
Efficient. Flexible. Gentle.
What Mindfulness Is Not
Mindfulness is not:
- Trying to feel calm
- Getting rid of thoughts
- Monitoring anxiety
- Preventing discomfort
- Figuring out what thoughts mean
When mindfulness includes urgency or resistance, it stops being mindfulness—and becomes a compulsion.
A Final Word From Me
Mindfulness is a science-based supplement to OCD treatment, and when practiced correctly, it can be incredibly powerful.
You will struggle with this at first.
You will “suck” at it sometimes.
That doesn’t mean you’re failing—it means you’re learning.
Please be gentle with yourself as you practice.
Today is a beautiful day to do hard things.
And I’m really glad you’re here. 💛
The podcast is made possible by NOCD. NOCD offers effective, convenient therapy available in the US and outside the US. To find out more about NOCD, their therapy plans, and if they currently take your insurance, head over to https://learn.nocd.com/youranxietytoolkit
Transcription: Mindfulness Exercise for OCD
Welcome to your Anxiety toolkit. I’m your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal to inspire you. Anxiety doesn’t get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big fat virtual hug, because experiencing anxiety ain’t easy.
If that sounds good to you, let’s go mindfulness exercises for OCD. That will actually help when you’re feeling incredibly overwhelmed. Now, mindfulness is a skill. That will supercharge your OCD recovery. But if not applied correctly, it can sometimes lead to you focusing on the wrong things, maybe doing more compulsions, maybe catastrophizing some more.
And I want to really get to the bottom of this with you today by teaching you my favorite. Mindfulness skill. So today we are going to learn how mindfulness can be used in a way that actually supports your OCD recovery, especially when you’re overwhelmed. I’m gonna teach you my absolute favorite mindfulness skill.
I teach every one of my clients and I teach my students, and at the end, I’m going to give you some of the. The OCD gives you that makes you fall back into all behaviors. So we’re gonna really make sure that we cover all of our bases here today. Okay? So welcome to your anxiety toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you everything I know about anxiety, so that you can go and live your biggest, most meaningful life.
Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I’m an anxiety and OCD specialist. I treat. People with OCD and OCD related conditions, and my mission is to help you suffer less. That is my main goal with all of my students and all of my clients, and that’s what we’re gonna do today. Okay, so let’s first look at what is mindfulness.
Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the present moment. This moment right here, not. Moments down the road, it’s noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensation from a place of non-judgment, and it’s allowing them to be there without trying to fix them or analyze them, resist them, or change them. That is what mindfulness is.
Sounds pretty simple, right? But it’s actually quite hard to practice. So my goal today is to give you the skills that I teach my clients and hopefully make it really easy to practice now. As always, my goal with your anxiety toolkit is to actually give you skills that you can take with you and practice anywhere you go.
And so this is the one I want you to practice as much as you can. It’s the one that most of my clients say was really, really helpful. So let’s get started. I want you to envision. A stream of water and it is beautiful. There are flowers and there are trees, and it’s green, but the water is clear and the water is moving through, meandering through a bunch of rocks.
Usually a riverbed or a streambed has a bunch of rocks around the outside and. Over through the water. A part of being in a stream is going around and over and through these rocks. Now what I want you to do is I want you to imagine that you are the water, you are the flowing, moving, flexible. Water and what you’re going to have every single day is these emotions and thoughts and feelings that you don’t have control over that are going to cause you to hit them, and you have to make a decision on how you are going to respond to these rocks.
When you hit the rock, you could make a big splash and say, I hate the rocks, and I don’t want the rocks to be there. Or you could notice that the rocks are there and go around now. Each one of these rocks we wanna think of as an intrusive thought or an intrusive feeling as an intrusive sensation, an urge or an image.
And you don’t have control over these rocks. You cannot decide why they’re there, what they mean, and so forth. And so as you hit these rocks. I want you to practice first, mindfulness skill of not judging why they’re there. Every stream has a rock. We have to accept that that is a part of being in a stream, and it’s also part of being a human, that you will have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable feelings.
Some will be really uncomfortable, some will be moderately uncomfortable, and that is just a part of life. Okay, so you are the water and the rocks are your intrusive thoughts or your intrusive feelings. Now, sometimes. The stream is very gentle and sometimes the stream is very, very rapid. It like, you know, the rocks are big and the water is moving fast.
Again, we can’t control that, but we’re here to learn how to cope. Now, what I want you to practice here is this skill of being. Very gentle, flexible water as you hit an intrusive thought. We are not going to judge it as bad. We are going to notice it, and we are going to gently move around it. We are not gonna try and avoid it.
We’re not going to try and make a big splash when it comes. Again, we’re going to notice the rock do literally nothing about it and go around it. Now what you’re going to find is after you hit one rock, you’re gonna hit another rock, and you’re gonna have to make the decision to mindfully hit that rock, observe that it’s there.
We’re not gonna try and analyze why it’s there and what it means. We are going to move around it gently, and we’re going to be as effective and as efficient as we can by moving around it at a pace where we do not slow down for it. We don’t slow down and go, oh my God, I don’t want this thought. It shouldn’t be here.
You know, again, like and, and stop in front of it and have a tantrum. We’re just gonna note that it’s there and we’re going to move around it. Now what you’re going to find here, and this is the beautiful part of this metaphor, is at first when water hits a rock, the rock might be quite jagged, but the more you learn to hit the rock and move around the rock, the constant tension and traction around that rock smooths the rock and makes it nice and gentle.
And the more we practice having a thought. Not responding as if it’s an emergency or a dangerous thing or a terrible thing or making meaning. The more we will soften those rocks as well, they will feel less jagged. They will be less jagged because we have softened it by moving around it. Many, many, many, many times.
Again, rocks on a riverbed are usually nice and round and smooth, and that’s because the water has worn it down by practicing going around it each time, not avoiding it. So your practice here is to imagine again, that you are the water and every time you hit a. You’re go around it. We’re not throwing a tantrum about it.
We’re not judging it. We’re not reviewing what it means or just hitting it and going around it. Now what often happens is when you do this, you will start to get exhausted. I understand this is a practice of repetition, and I say this to all of my students in the Rumination Reset, which is course we have for rumination, is you’re gonna suck at this.
Like this is gonna take a lot of practice. So I want you to armor up. For this, this is going to take some work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t have this problem. And so I don’t want you to think that this should be easy. No, it’s going to be pretty dang painful to start with, but nothing good comes from easy things I have found right.
This is a strong strength that you are gonna have in your brain that you can use in any environment. Literally this morning my daughter went to have her finals. She’s in high school now, and I taught her this skill because the more you can practice having uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and not giving them attention and not stopping and ruminating and being angry about them, the faster you can move by them and the less tension and the less suffering you have, and where in the business of suffering less.
Now often what people do is once they’ve done this for, I don’t know, 3, 4, 5 times, they’ve noticed a thought. They go around the thought, they notice the thought. They go around the thought. They’re not judging it. They start to pivot and look down the stream and go, this sucks. I’m gonna be doing this all day.
Look at all the rocks down the river. I have to do this all day. This is not fair. This is not right. Surely there’s another solution, and I wanna remind you. No, there isn’t a better solution. If there were, you wouldn’t be in this scenario. A couple of times you would’ve done it and it would’ve fixed it completely.
So I wanna remind you, a part of being mindful as we went back at the very beginning with that definition is to remind you it’s staying present. It’s paying attention to the rock you are hitting right now. Mindfulness is not anticipating all of the things you’re gonna have to do throughout the day.
It’s staying present. Just dealing with one rock at a time, not looking down the river and the stream and saying, oh my gosh, I give up because I can see how bad the day’s gonna be. Just focus on the here and the now, and that’s gonna be your work. Staying present, staying non-judgmental and being flexible.
A big piece of this is our flexibility. We get really headstrong. I shouldn’t have to do this. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t have these thoughts. Guess what? Brains have thoughts. Brains have uncomfortable hearts. Sometimes our brains come up with complete crazy stuff and that’s normal. What, where we get into trouble is when we resist that, and this mindfulness practice is to teach you over and over again and remind you this is the only skill you need for right now to stay mindful.
Okay? So if you are looking for effective OCD or BFRB treatment that’s covered by insurance. I’m thrilled to announce to you this week’s sponsor no cd. No CD provides live face-to-face video sessions with licensed therapists who specialize in OCD and related conditions. Through exposure and response prevention therapy, a highly effective treatment designed specifically for OCD, their therapist can tailor a plan just for you.
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If you think you might have OCD or are struggling to manage symptoms, there is hope. Book a free call@nocd.com. You don’t have to struggle alone. Big hugs. And now let’s get back to the show. Now let’s look at some of the tricks that OCD plays on you. Okay, I’m gonna go through a few of them. Number one is OC.
D is going to say this is not just a thought. This is really important and we have to slow down and we have to make a splash and we have to try and figure this out because it’s O so important and it was O so terrible and dangerous for us not to do it. That is a trick. OCD is playing. You have to learn to catch that and say a rock is a rock is a rock.
Or a thought is a thought is a thought. There is no good thought and bad thought. There are uncomfortable thoughts, yes, but there is no good and bad thought when not thoughts don’t determine or define a person. So I want you to catch when OCD tricks you into taking thoughts as if they’re special. There is no OCD thought that is special.
None, no matter how absolutely disgusting it is. There is no OCD thought that you need to treat. As if it’s special. Now, the second piece here is often a lot of people on the internet have taught us that being mindful means that you, in this present moment, if you have fear that you should focus on that fear and really like, uh, like have it and dissected and being mindful about it is really just another form of ruminating about it.
And so I want you to remind yourself that. Mindfulness is not staying looping around and around. You never see in a stream water, like going around and around a rock. It hits the rock and it moves down the stream. It’s going with gravity. It’s not going back outstream to check out the rock and make sure that that rock was really a rock and not a, um, porcupine.
You know what I mean? Water isn’t doing that. It’s hitting each rock and moving. On, and so your work is to do the same. The next myth or trick that OCD plays is it says, being mindful is irresponsible. Having a thought and not tending to it, having a thought and not resisting it, having a thought and not judging it is irresponsible and that it’s bad for acting that way, or you’re a bad person for not.
You know, again, that is a trick that OCD is going to play on you and is gonna keep you stuck, keep you ruminating, keep you doing mental compulsions. We do not wanna get involved with that type of behavior. The next one is a lot of people, and I have fallen into this trap myself, so I take full responsibility for that, is we will often, as educators and therapists will say, just sit with the feeling, oh, you’re gonna just sit.
With the feeling, and I’m not particularly against that term, but I think people misinterpret that as that. You just have to sit there and like have it and stare at the wall and just be like, yep, anxiety’s here, and I have to let it be there and I just have to sit here with it. No, and that’s a trick that OCD will play on you as well.
No, we want you to go and act. Active part of the world. While you’re having these thoughts, you’re, again, the, the stream is not having this thought and then just like stopping and being like, okay, I am just gonna stay here ’cause it’s uncomfortable. No, we move on to the next one. We wanna keep active. We wanna keep reaching our goals, learning new things, interacting.
People we’re not just sitting with, I’m not actually saying to sit if you need to sit, let’s say you have to go to class. Yes, you can sit and be anxious, but you don’t have to just sit down and like focus on anxiety. That’s not what we’re saying. Now, another trick that gets played with OCD is that allowing or not resisting a thought or a feeling means that you must.
Want it, that accepting it and moving on must mean that you want it. And that’s again, another trick that OCD plays to get you back into the content of your obsessions. Again, no, we’re observing, we’re giving zero meaning and we’re moving around it. We’re going on to the next thing, and we’re trying to keep that cadence as consistent as we can.
So if you’re notice. Thing that you have a thought, you go around it, you have another thought, you go around it, you have another thought, and you slow down. You’re probably giving it too much attention. So try and keep that cadence or that beat as consistent as you can. All right, now let’s go over very clearly what mindfulness is not.
Mindfulness is not trying to feel calm. No. You may get a resultant calm feeling. From it, but it’s, again, we are not resisting what we’re presently experiencing. It is not getting rid of thoughts, right? It’s not figuring out what thoughts mean. It’s not monitoring your anxiety to see if it’s improving.
Again, we’re not looking down the stream to be like, please, please, please, please. I hope there’s no more rocks in the stream that’s resistant. We’re just going to say what will be will be, and I have complete confidence in myself that no matter how many rocks I hit. Today, I can simply go around them. No matter how much discomfort I have today, I can observe it, allow it, and move on.
Okay? When mindfulness involves urgency or resistance, it stops being mindfulness and it starts being a compulsion, right? So we really want to remind ourselves it does not involve urgency. It does not involve resistance. Okay? So if you wanna go deeper into how to really manage intrusive thoughts. Or urges or through feelings or sensations.
I have an entire toolkit called your OCD toolkit, which will walk you through step by step, the exact steps I take my clients through when I’m treating OCD. I walk you through the exact education. I give them the exact assessment kind of structure I give them, and I teach them the exact skills in an order so that they can put it and get the treatment that they need.
Now, this is not therapy, but it. Is for those folks who don’t have access to therapy, or maybe you’re not quite ready for therapy and you wanna try doing this on your own, this would be a perfect solution for you. I also have the clinician’s OCD toolkit. This is where I teach therapists how to implement exposure and response prevention and cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness to help their clients with OCD.
So you can head over to cbt school.com and learn all about. That there. Now, what did we learn today? Number one, we learned that mindfulness is a science-based supplement to OCD treatment. It is going to be incredibly helpful, but we have to watch out for OCDs tricks and we’ve also learned that you can do this, right?
That today is a beautiful day to do hard things. I say that in every episode, and that with this skill we can actually simplify the work. Go that we can hit one hard thing after another and build an incredible strength and resilience to those thoughts. We wanna hit them so many times effectively, that we soften them and we round them out.
That’s the beautiful goal here. All right. Please be gentle as you practice this. This is not easy. You will suck at it, and that’s okay. Please be gentle. Learn to laugh at yourself. There’ll be days where you’re like, oh my gosh, I got so stuck today. But that’s all right. That’s a part of the project. As always, I wanna thank you.
I know how valuable your time is, and I feel so honored that you’re spending your time here with me. I cannot wait to see you in next week’s episode. Hope you have a wonderful day. Please note that this podcast, or any other resources from cbt school.com should not replace professional mental health care.
If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbt school.com.
