So I really want to be active again

@stevow7, I'm going to completely disagree with Diana, because I've "known" you for, what is it now, going on 8 years? As I recall you were quite young back then, which means you are still relatively young now. I'm 73 and I'm telling you that there's nothing wrong with your body.

You know this rationally, and you know that it's the OCD combined with fear and massive anxiety telling you otherwise.

13 years ago I had to force myself to go to the gym because my brain and body were telling me I needed to stay in bed. I always felt better after going. ALWAYS. Every. Single. Time.

The way I got myself to the gym was to hire a personal trainer. If I didn't show up at the last minute, she charged me anyway, that's standard practice. But it was more than the money. I liked her, and I thought she was great at her job. She did NOT want to earn money for doing nothing, so the commitment I made was to her AND to myself, and that commitment was to show up once a week no matter what.

As always, @stevow7, let your fear be in charge, or you be in charge. Your choice.

 

@stevow7, I just posted on another thread for another member who suffers from OCD addictive thoughts. This person is not as far along as you are, but I was thinking of you as I wrote it, so I'll just repeat it here as well in case it's of use. I posted it at Feel joy with tms syntoms | TMS Forum (The Mindbody Syndrome) and I also suggested that it be bookmarked to go back to later.


You have mentioned OCD in other posts. I just finished The Myth of Normal, the new book by Gabor Mate MD, which is an impressive and dense collection of a LOT of mindbody information, including addictive behaviors. You know that OCD is an addiction of behavior, I hope? It's important to accept that fact, in order to understand and help ease the addiction. I'm going to cut and paste a section which mentions a psychiatry professor named Jeffrey M. Schwartz, who wrote a book called The Mind and the Brain, which includes a series of exercises that he designed specifically for OCD:

Excerpt from The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate MD, Chapter 29 "Seeing is Disbelieving: Undoing Self-Limiting Beliefs"

The following exercise will suggest some first steps to liberating ourselves, to waking up from the hypnotic reverie of unworthiness. For the healing section in my book on addiction, I adapted—with permission—a series of steps formulated by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in his book The Mind and the Brain*. Here I take the adaptation one step further, applying the method to self-limiting beliefs of all stripes.

While Dr. Schwartz originally developed these steps for healing obsessive-compulsive disorder, they readily lend themselves to reprogramming other kinds of thought loops as well. After all, negative thinking has a more-than-obsessive quality: we are compelled to it, over and over, despite deriving no pleasure from it. The idea is to retrain the brain, to strengthen through conscious effort the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to break out of a past-based trance and repatriate us to the present. Any repetitively self-deprecating thought pattern can be worked with in this way.

The method is an experiential one, requiring commitment and mindfulness. It needs to be not only done but fully experienced. Only when attention is present can the mind rewire the brain. “Conscious attention must be paid,” Jeffrey Schwartz insists. “Therein lies the key. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention. Paying attention matters.”

To Dr. Schwartz’s original four steps, I add one more. These five steps are most effective when practiced regularly, but also whenever a self-undermining belief pulls you so strongly that you fear becoming mired in it. Find a place to sit and write, preferably a quiet place. With this exercise, too, you’ll want to keep a handwritten journal.

*[Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: ReganBooks, 2002).]

Step 1: Relabel
The first step is to call the self-limiting thought what it is: a thought, a belief, not the truth. For example, “I seem to believe that I’m responsible for everyone’s feelings.” Or, “I’m having the thought that I have to be strong.” Or, “I’m acting as if I think I’m only worthy when I’m being helpful.” Bringing conscious awareness to this step in particular is vital: we are awakening the part of ourselves that can observe mental content without identifying with it—acting as our own interested but impartial observer.
The point of relabeling is not to make the self-negating thought disappear: a longtime occupant of your brain, it will resist eviction with everything it has. In fact, it is strengthened by efforts to suppress or expel it, just as surely as by giving in to it. Remember: you’re not trying to debunk the story or make it wrong. Arguing with it would be like telling a two-year-old screaming, “I hate you!” over a plate of vegetables: “No, you don’t. That’s just a thought you’re having.” Nor do you try to replace it with some sort of cheerful opposite—for example, “I’m a good person,” or “I am a channel of pure light.” Rather, you are divesting from the certainty that the implicit belief is true. In doing so, you put the story in its place, gently taking it off the nonfiction shelf. It is no longer an ironclad law to be resisted or an accusation to be refuted: just a thought, painful or dysfunctional though it may be. Odds are, the thought will come back—at which point you’ll relabel it again, with calm determination and mindful, vigilant awareness.

Step 2: Reattribute
In this step you learn to assign the relabeled belief to its proper source: “This is my brain sending me an old, familiar message.” Rather than blaming yourself or anyone else, you are ascribing cause to its proper place: neural circuits programmed into your brain when you were a child. It represents a time, early in life, when you lacked the necessary conditions for your emotional circuitry’s healthy development. You’re not pushing the thought away, but you’re also making clear that you didn’t ask for it, nor have you ever deserved it.
Reattribution is directly linked with compassionate curiosity toward the self. The presence of a negative belief says nothing about you as a person; it is not a moral failure or a character weakness, just the effect of circumstances over which you had no control. What you do have now is some say over how you respond to the negative belief. The quality of your present-moment experience is far more tied to that choice of responses than to anything fixed or preordained by the past.

Step 3: Refocus
This one is all about buying yourself a little time. Being mind phantoms, your negative self-beliefs will pass—if you give them time. The key principle, Jeffrey Schwartz points out, is this: “It’s not how you feel; it’s what you do that counts.” That doesn’t mean you suppress your feelings or beliefs, only that you don’t let them pull you under or derail your inquiry. You stay in relationship with them even as you consciously take a detour.
So here’s the game plan: if you manage to catch a negative self-belief striving to seize control, find something else to do. This takes awareness, and it’s best not to beat yourself up if you miss it at first. Sometimes these belief patterns just take over before we can swing into action.
Your initial goal is modest: buy yourself a quarter of an hour. Choose something that you enjoy and will keep you active, preferably something healthy and creative, but really anything that will please you without causing greater harm. Instead of helplessly sinking into the familiar despair of negative self-belief, go for a walk, turn on some music, do a crossword puzzle—whatever can get you through the next fifteen little minutes. “Physical activity seems to be especially helpful,” Schwartz suggests. “But the important thing is that whatever activity you choose, it must be something you enjoy doing.” Or, if you don’t immediately have the energy for that, you might refocus on what is loving and alive in your life: on possibilities you have fulfilled or glimpsed, on what you have contributed to yourself or others, on people you have loved or who have offered you love.
The purpose of refocusing is to teach your brain that it doesn’t have to succumb to the old, tired story. It can learn to choose something else, even if—to begin with—it’s only for a while.

Step 4: Revalue
Here’s where you take stock and get real. Up until now, the self-rejecting belief has ruled the roost, overshadowing whatever else you may consciously believe about yourself. Let’s say you’ve told yourself, “I deserve love in my life,” but all the while your mind is assigning greater value to the currency of “I’m worthless.” It’s that second one that tips the scales at least nine times out of ten. You can think of this step, then, as a kind of audit, an investigation into the objective costs of the beliefs your mind has invested so much time and energy in.
What has this belief actually done for me? you ask. Possible answers: It has left me feeling ashamed and isolated. It has produced bitterness. It has stopped me from pursuing dreams, from taking risks, from experiencing intimate love. It has incurred physical illness or symptoms. To recognize its impact, allow your answers to go beyond the conceptual. Feel your own body state as you consider the space the belief has occupied in your mind. The impacts live right there, in your physiology, as surely as they do in your actions and relationships.
Be specific: What has been the net value of the unworthiness story—or whichever identified story you are working on—in your relationship with your partner, wife, husband? Your best friend, your children, your boss, your employees, your co-workers? What happened yesterday when you allowed the belief to rule you? What happened last week? What will happen today? Pay close attention to what you feel when you recall these events and when you foresee what’s predictably ahead. A complete revaluation also takes into account any payoffs or dividends you have derived from this belief. Has it kept you safe from harm, even in the short term? Has it protected you from criticism or rejection? Include these, too: the more thorough the audit, the better.
Above all, do this exercise without judging yourself. You didn’t come into life asking to be programmed in this way, and you will not be punished for what gets uncovered—on the contrary, you are trying to commute the sentence you’ve been living out. Remember, too, that it’s not personal to you. Millions of others with similar experiences have developed the same mechanisms. What is personal to you is how you choose to respond to it in the present.

Step 5: Re-create
What has determined your identity up until now? You’ve been acting out mechanisms wired into your brain before you had a choice in the matter, and from those automatic mechanisms and long-ago programmed beliefs you have fashioned a life. It is time to re-create: to imagine a different life, one truly worth choosing.
You have values. You have passions. You have intention, talent, capability, a desire to contribute, perhaps a latent sense of purpose or calling. In your heart there is love, and you want to connect that with the love in the universe. As you relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue, you are releasing patterns that have held you and that you have held on to. In place of a life blighted by your compulsive obsession with acquisition, self-soothing, self-justification, admiration, oblivion, and meaningless activity, what is the life you really want? What do you choose to create? Write down your values and intentions and, once again, do so with conscious awareness. Envision yourself living with integrity, being able to look people in the eye with compassion for them—and for yourself.

The road to hell is not paved with good intentions; it is paved with lack of intention. The more you relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue, the freer you will be to re-create. Are you afraid you will stumble? Guess what: you will. That’s called being a human being.

Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (pp. 423-429). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.​

 

To be abundantly clear, the quote just above is what I quoted from Dr. Mate, it's not mine!

I listened to the audiobook version of The Myth of Normal (borrowed it from the library before buying kindle ebook) so I'm not 100% sure about this, but it seems that this is the only place in the book where he lays out specific action steps. I made a note to remember this section, because we have a number of forum members who suffer greatly from intractable OCD, which, because it is itself a mindbody symptom (as Dr. Mate explains) is a significant roadblock to all TMS recovery.