Brad Stulberg

And when I have them, I have tools and they're less intense.

So if these intrusive thoughts and feelings used to take up eight, nine hours of a day, and that's what it was like when it was bad.

Now, maybe it's a few hours a month.

How did I get there?

The short answer is through eight months of therapy and medication.

And I am so grateful, again, that I got the right care.

I got in treatment early.

And now I meet with my therapist about once a month.

But now it's more just like a coaching relationship since I do have the skills to navigate the OCD when it comes on.

But yeah, for those eight months, it was pretty intensive therapy.

And then the book...

helps me make sense of all this.

So at first I'm going through this and I want to intellectualize it and I want to problem solve.

And actually that just makes it worse.

So when I was in the thick of it, the thought of writing it, I would be faking it going through the motions.

Like there was no, I was not in good enough mental health to create any kind of good intellectual work.

When I got to the other side of it, that's when I could look back and examine, hey, here are the things that I've learned in therapy.

Here are maybe some of the things that I've overlooked in the past.

And oh, when I hear so many people that I work with in my coaching practice complaining about being restless or never being able to turn it off or constantly checking their email or social media, I now have this new framework to think about it, which are, sure, these aren't extreme clinical obsessions, but so many of the things in day-to-day life that make us feel restless and anxious are

are very similar in the fact that they're things that we don't want to be thinking about or we don't want to be feeling, but we feel like we get sucked into them and we're not really sure how.