Living With OCD: OCD Coping Strategies and Support
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) isn’t a “personality quirk.” It’s a mental health condition that affects 2.5 million adults in the U.S., and can impact work, relationships, and overall well-being.1 Fortunately, although OCD might cause you to feel like you’re stuck in an endless loop, there are ways to better manage symptoms and reclaim control.
If OCD is severely impacting your mental health, professional guidance is always advised. Mission Connection can talk to you about treatment options and ways of effectively living with OCD. This article can also help by introducing you to coping strategies and tools to help manage daily life with OCD. It covers:
The impact of living with OCD- Different OCD coping strategies
- How to manage compulsions
- Effective therapies for treating OCD
- Where to find professional support for OCD
Living with OCD: The Impact on Daily Life
For many adults with OCD, the condition can find its way into nearly every part of daily life. From the moment you wake up until the time you go to sleep, intrusive thoughts and rituals can dominate and dictate your daily routine.
Even though others may not be able to see it, you can still feel OCD’s presence. The following section takes a look at how OCD can impact your life in various ways.
Real-Life Impact of OCD
Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder has the potential to create challenges wherever you are.
For example, at work, OCD might show up as needing to double-check your “sent emails” folder for hours on end. At home, it may affect how you perform everyday tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, or locking up your apartment at the end of the day. It could even impact how you act around your partner, parents, or children.
Clearly, OCD can make life feel exhausting, especially when you’re trying so hard to manage the anxiety that OCD brings, or disguising rituals so that others don’t notice them.
While OCD can affect people in highly unique ways, these examples illustrate how it can make someone feel like they’re living under constant mental and emotional pressure. Eventually, this pressure can lead to frustration, burnout, and shame – highlighting the need for OCD coping strategies and support.
Managing Mental Wellness With OCD
It’s important to remember that OCD is not a personality quirk. Neither is it a failing nor a flaw. It is a mental health condition that is completely treatable. Understanding how OCD affects you on a day-to-day basis can be a massive step toward managing it with more clarity and compassion.
OCD mental wellness can be supported through lifestyle, self-help strategies, and professional support. The following sections in this article explore the ways that you can better support yourself while living with OCD.
OCD Coping Strategies
Living with OCD can be difficult to manage, and sometimes, the things we think may help us feel better can actually have the opposite effect. But there are ways to manage the symptoms and to feel better. Below you will find some ideas for OCD self-help techniques you could try.
Learning About OCD
Understanding OCD, particularly how it affects you, can allow you to have self-compassion when things feel overwhelming. It increases your self-awareness and can support you when managing compulsions through exposure and response prevention – the gold-standard therapy for OCD treatment.
Being Patient
Managing OCD is often an ongoing process. There may be days when things feel more manageable, and times when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed. Try to be patient with yourself, and take things one day at a time.
Creating a Mindfulness Practice
Techniques such as mindfulness can help you acknowledge intrusive thoughts when they come to mind, without feeling the need to act on them. Instead, mindfulness helps you to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and recognize that they cannot harm you.3,4
Keeping a Journal
Journaling has been shown to improve symptoms across several mental health conditions, including anxiety disorders.5 Therefore, it can help you manage obsessive thoughts relating to OCD. When journaling, you could write down your thoughts and feelings, and, over time, you may notice patterns emerging. It’s also helpful for removing distressing thoughts from your head and finding relief.
Practicing Detachment From Thoughts
Sometimes, thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t always have a meaning, and don’t need to be acted on. Sitting with thoughts, letting them come and go, and detaching from them can help lessen their power. Relabeling thoughts may help with this process. For example, if an obsessive thought occurs, such as There’s a typo in the email I just sent, I’ll lose my job, this could be relabeled or reframed. For example, this may sound like I’m having a thought that by sending an email with a typo in it, I may lose my job. Reframing may be helpful for taking a step back and reducing the distress that the original thought brought.
Joining OCD Support Groups
OCD support groups can be a great place to find other people who share similar experiences to you. These people can provide advice, support, and a feeling of community in a safe environment.
Practicing Self-Care
Looking after your overall health and well-being is important when it comes to daily life OCD management. Suggestions of OCD lifestyle tips involve prioritizing self-care. Regular movement, getting good quality sleep, and eating a healthy diet can all make positive differences to how you feel both physically and mentally. Further, these techniques have been backed up by research; studies have found that exercise, OCD stress management, and eating a balanced diet can potentially improve OCD symptoms.6,7
These mental health coping tips can help not only with OCD, but with other mental health challenges too. To put their benefits simply, they are ways to understand OCD better, cope with it better, and improve your overall well-being.
While these techniques can be effective in managing OCD in general, the compulsions associated with it can often be resistant to change. For this reason, the following section considers strategies for specifically dealing with these.
Strategies for Managing Compulsions
Managing compulsions is often one of the hardest aspects of OCD, so if you struggle with this, know that you’re not alone. By understanding that the compulsive rituals are actually what keep OCD going, you can learn to manage your compulsions more effectively.
The following sections explore some ideas that may be useful when it comes to managing compulsions for those living with OCD.
1. Identify Compulsions
Being able to recognize compulsions is a key step toward managing OCD. Compulsions are the things that you might say, do, or think to help alleviate the anxiety caused by obsessions. Yet, compulsions can sometimes be hard to identify.
As compulsions are what keep the OCD loop going, it’s important to be able to recognize them and know how to manage them. It may be helpful to list what you think your unique compulsions are, so that you know which behaviors are contributing to the OCD cycle. Tracking these during the coming days and weeks might also increase your awareness.
2. Resisting Compulsions
When living with OCD, the aim is to be able to resist your compulsions entirely. This means being able to intentionally sit with obsessions that cause you anxiety or distress without doing anything to make yourself feel better. Understandably, this process will likely feel unpleasant at first, especially if a compulsive urge is very strong. However, know that the unpleasant feeling will not last forever.
You may want to take some deep breaths if you feel the urge to perform a ritual, or to write how you are feeling in a journal rather than acting out the compulsions. Tackle the least-challenging compulsions first, and build up to the more distressing ones. This way, you gain experience facing your fears in a manageable way. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Additionally, Urge Surfing is a great mindfulness-based technique for resisting compulsions.
3. Positive Distractions
Overcoming compulsions involves being able to sit with distressing feelings without acting on them. However, this can be challenging to begin with. Therefore, when you have the urge to perform a compulsion, it may help to shift your attention to something else. This can assist with retraining the mind, showing that it is not important to carry out compulsions to alleviate distress.
For instance, if you feel the urge to perform a ritual, you could instead go for a walk or listen to a podcast that you’ve not yet found time for. If your mind wanders back to worries and obsessions, you could gently bring your focus back to the present activity. Grounding exercises can be especially useful in these circumstances, as they are designed to bring your focus and attention into the present moment.
Managing Challenges With Resisting Compulsions
Sometimes, resisting rituals entirely just feels too difficult at the beginning. If this is the case, it may help to alter the nature of the compulsion rather than resisting it altogether at the start. In time, you could work your way up to disengaging from rituals completely.
Some ideas for achieving this include:
- Delaying compulsions: If you would normally complete a ritual as soon as you have an obsessive thought, try waiting one or two minutes before carrying it out. You could then extend this time as you begin to feel more comfortable tolerating the anxiety the obsession brings. From this point, you can work up to stopping the compulsion altogether.
- Changing the ritual: If you have a set ritual, you could try doing one part of it differently to shake up the compulsion. For example, if your usual compulsion is to check plug-sockets in a certain order, try mixing the order up each time. Or, bring a different, unrelated element into the process, such as performing your checks while standing on your left foot. This can start to break the mental link between the obsession and the ritual. Just remember to change different elements each time; otherwise, this new action could become part of the compulsion.
- Reducing the compulsive behaviors: Another way to work up to resisting compulsions is to reduce them. For example, if you usually wash your hands until you feel “just right,” you could set a timer that tells you when to stop. Each time, you could potentially try reducing the duration by a few seconds to see how you feel. This process could continue until you feel able to resist the ritual altogether.
OCD Therapy Support and Professional Help
The first-line therapy treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP). It’s an evidence-based, structured form of therapy that is especially effective for treating compulsions and obsessions.8-10 ERP enables patients to expose themselves to triggers that provoke their OCD in a safe, gradual manner, while helping them to resist engaging in their compulsions. In this way, they can learn to face their fears in a manageable way and improve their OCD symptoms.
Additionally, a therapeutic approach called “acceptance and commitment therapy” (ACT) can be effective for improving symptoms of OCD in people living with the condition.11,12 ACT helps people with OCD experience intrusive thoughts and urges without being controlled by them.
In general, working with a therapist can be one of the best OCD recovery strategies. Therapists trained in a variety of specialisms can create an OCD care plan to help you heal and gain control of your symptoms in a way that works well for you. Often, the relationship with this therapist becomes more important than their area of specialism.
OCD Recovery With Mission Connection
Living with OCD can be challenging, but with the right support and tools, it’s possible to create positive, meaningful changes. Whether you struggle with intrusive thoughts, constant compulsions, or are just feeling overwhelmed by everything, know that you don’t have to go through this alone.
At Mission Connection, we specialize in helping adults with their mental health. With training in evidence-based therapies such as CBT and ERP – the gold standard treatments for OCD – our compassionate licensed therapists can help you to break free from obsessions and compulsions. By providing personalized treatment, we can help you to create a life that feels more manageable and fulfilling, putting you back in control.
If you’re ready to take the next step on your recovery journey, we’re here with you every step of the way. Contact us today for a free, confidential consultation to find out how we can help you heal.
References
- Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA. (2025, August 21). Anxiety Disorders – Facts & Statistics. https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
- American Psychological Association (APA). (2023, November 15). Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/obsessive-compulsive-disorder
- International OCD Foundation. (2020, August 5). Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for OCD. https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/mindfulness-and-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-for-ocd/
- Bürkle, J. J., Schmidt, S., & Fendel, J. C. (2025). Mindfulness- and acceptance-based programmes for obsessive-compulsive disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 110, 102977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2025.102977
- Sohal, M., Singh, P., Dhillon, B. S., & Gill, H. S. (2022). Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Family Medicine and Community Health, 10(1), e001154. https://doi.org/10.1136/fmch-2021-001154
- Brierley, M. E., Albertella, L., Christensen, E., Rotaru, K., Jacka, F. N., Segrave, R. A., Richardson, K. E., Lee, R. S., Kayayan, E., Hughes, S., Yücel, M., & Fontenelle, L. F. (2022). Lifestyle risk factors for obsessive-compulsive symptoms and related phenomena: What should lifestyle interventions target? Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 57(3), 379–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/00048674221085923
- Brierley, M. E., Thompson, E. M., Albertella, L., & Fontenelle, L. F. (2021). Lifestyle Interventions in the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: A Systematic review. Psychosomatic Medicine, 83(8), 817–833. https://doi.org/10.1097/psy.0000000000000988
- Brock, H., Rizvi, A., & Hany, M. (2024, February 24). Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK553162/
- Nezgovorova, V., Reid, J., Fineberg, N., & Hollander, E. (2022). Optimizing first line treatments for adults with OCD. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 115, 152305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2022.152305
- Law, C., & Boisseau, C. L. (2019). Exposure and Response Prevention in the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Current Perspectives. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, Volume 12, 1167–1174. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s211117
- Philip, J., & Cherian, V. (2020). Acceptance and commitment therapy in the treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A systematic review. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, 28, 100603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocrd.2020.100603
- Soondrum, T., Wang, X., Gao, F., Liu, Q., Fan, J., & Zhu, X. (2022). The Applicability of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Brain Sciences, 12(5), 656. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12050656
