If you log on to any social media site, it’s not long before you come across videos and posts of people who have transformed their bodies. Often going from being very obese, to being extremely fit and toned. We celebrate their transformations publicly; congratulating each other on body fat becoming muscle, physical weakness becoming strength and stamina.

We watch people in exercise classes, working out at the gym or running through nature. The physical transformation is one to be proud of and quite rightly so. But what about the mental transformation ? Why do we ‘check in’ publically on our social media accounts for hospital appointments or A+E visits but we dare not mention how our brains may need the same kind of care and treatment ? Why is it perfectly acceptable to watch somebody sweating in a gym session but we wouldn’t dare take a peek at what goes on in therapy ? Yet again, the reason is stigma and shame. Especially here in Europe.

In my last post I talked about the Pink Elephant experiment in an attempt to show that we have vey little control over our brains. Although this is true, it does not mean that we should just give in, letting it behave in any way it likes. The brain, like the rest of the body needs not only exercise, but rest and care.

The brain, despite being an organ, behaves very much like a muscle. It can be strengthened through exercise. It has a memory and with training and hard work, it can learn to behave in different ways. This statement alone for anybody suffering with mental health issues offers a huge amount of relief. The brain is extremely malleable and in the same way that my son is able to transform a lump of play dough into something quite different, we are able to transform our brains into something which is balanced, efficient and less prone to breaking down.

OCD is an example of the brain breaking down quite spectacularly. In my case, I can pinpoint pretty much to the day when my brain started to misfire (4 days after Mathew was born in 2013) but the process of falling ill was slow and crept up on me in such a way that it took a long time to realise that I was actually unwell. Like all mental illness, when we are in the throes of it, it is often very difficult to understand and see clearly. People around us see that we are changing, we may even notice it ourselves, but it is often such a slow, gradual process that it can take weeks or months or in my case years, before we realise that something is very wrong.By 2015 my brain was functioning very badly. I lived in a constant state of anxiety, had many obsessions, silent compulsions which I perfomed in my head, I had developed a stutter and doubted everything around me . My thoughts had driven me crazy

In 2019, a year after my second baby was born, I find it hard to recognise myself as I was. My behaviour and personality was unrecognisable. Lionel told me once that at my worst, he thought he had lost me and would never get me back.

So how have I managed to transform my brain ? How have I gone from being very unwell to feeling at peace with myself and my brain ? There are lots of things I did, but the most important was therapy and medication. Any mental health problem should be treated by a specialist. I had two therapists; the first a psychiatrist who provided me with medication and therapy, and the second an online counsellor who provided CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). It is in these CBT sessions where I made most progress. Therapy allowed me to question my thought processes and behaviour, while medication gave me the support I needed during the process. It was the scaffolding to my crumbling, cracked, malfunctioning structure of a brain. Therapy took courage and hard work. It was like digging into a nasty wound in order to extract the bacteria. Medication made it less painful. For both I am extremely grateful.

Other ways in which I learnt to tame my brain include meditation, exercise and plenty of sleep.

I have practised meditation for years in yoga classes and when well, I find it easy to focus on breathing and allow the thoughts to come and to go. When unwell, it becomes a lot harder. But like any exercise, the more you do it the easier it becomes. Meditation doesn’t have to be about sitting on the floor with your legs crossed and eyes closed. I love the fact that it can be done at any time, anywhere. Meditation is about space and stillness. Between our thoughts there is always a space, even if it is the smallest of spaces, it is still there. When I type these sentences for example, my mind is drawn to the space between each word, when I sit in my living room amongst the children’s toys and furniture, I focus on the gaps between objects and the space between furniture. This for me is my meditation. It is a relief and a break from the intensity of having a brain so wired and active. My meditation I carry around with me and delve into it whenever I can. They are my moments of calm throughout a busy day.

OCD, depression and anxiety have all been linked to low levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is linked to exercise and as most of us live very sedentary lives compared to our ancestors, this discovery comes as no surprise. Before going to bed, Lionel often puts my trainers by the front door as a visual reminder that I have to run. Running for me forces my attention from my brain to my lungs, each breath being really difficult and uncomfortable. A little further into my run and as I grow fitter, my attention moves from my body, to my surroundings. My focus often returns to my brain and the thoughts passing through it, but those breaks when I notice the trees and the sky, when I feel just the stillness around me, are wonderful. The real difference though for me is when I get home and notice that my brain has re-set itself and whatever had been troubling it, however fast it had been moving before, however dark its thoughts had been, running has re-set the counter to zero.

Since my OCD diagnosis, I have tried to live a slow, meditative life in order to keep my brain from malfunctioning again. As the world around me rushes from activity to activity, filling their lives with scheduled appointments and classes, I have made myself stop. In the same way as meditation looks for the spaces between thoughts, I have guarded with all my might, any space that I have throughout my day. I have learnt how invaluable it is, how needed it is for both my mental and physical health and how my brain functions so much better when it has time to rest and pause.

So these are some of the things which have helped me to live with my brain. We are now co-existing in such a peaceful way that there are days when I am overcome with gratitude. Being well is such a priority ; both physically and mentally.  And I thank my lucky stars that I have found that wellness again.

In my next post, I would like to write about why so many new mums fall ill and how to spot the warning signs.

When I walk around Versailles I often notice how deep in thought people are. This is not unique to my town. If you walk down any street anywhere in the world, most people seem to be lost in their thoughts. You can see it in their furrowed brows or sometimes in the way their eyes fix downwards as they walk, not making eye contact, just letting their thoughts consume them. Some people take this one step further and often talk to themselves as they are walking, maybe going over a conversation that has already happened or repeating their shopping list in an attempt to not forget anything. It is rare to come across someone who is not spending the majority of their time in their heads.

Our heads are like computers, taking in information, processing it and producing more information. Most of the time the information we produce is recycled or repeated and very little coming out of our brains is original or new. So why do we do this ? Why do we spend so much time in our heads, often trapped in repetitive thought patterns we may not even be aware of.

For many of us it is all that we know. We only know one way of being and that is through thinking. Descartes famously said ‘I think, therefore I am’ and this seems to have been the way and continues to be the way for many of us. Our thoughts form our reality.  We think we are clever, so we label ourselves as clever. We believe we are fat, so we call ourselves fat. We interpret a situation as disasterous so we declare to the world that this is in fact a disasterous situation. Our thoughts become our reality. But what most of us don’t realise is that our reality exists before our thoughts are even formed.

I have one story which demonstrates this perfectly. A year after I moved to France In 2011, I was on a flight back to Bristol sitting next to a man of a similar age. Like me, he had been in France for a year and was going home to see family. We spent the entire flight chattting away and we soon realised that we had a lot in common. We had both come to France to be with our partners, neither of us spoke much of the language, we both had jobs, spent time in similar places, ate similar food, shopped at the same shops etc. The one thing which separated us though, was that he was having an amazing time and I hated it here. He spoke about his love of discovering French patiseries, whereas I talked about how expensive they were. He told me how he enjoyed cycling in the forests around Paris, whereas I spoke of the prostitutes who frequented the forests near us. He told me funny stories about how the language barrier had caused great embarrasment and laughter, I told him how frustrated I was at not being understood. At the end of the flight as we said goodbye, I was left feeling gobsmacked at how both of us had had very similar experiences in Paris, yet his had filled him with excitment and joy and mine had brought frustration and sometimes misery. I realised that the situation was the situation, but our thoughts were processed by two very different kind of computers. His was processing the situation in a very positive way, mine processing the situation in an extremely negative way. This was one of my first wake up calls. I began to realise that I wasn’t happy with the way my brain was functioning.

In one of my therapy sessions after my OCD diagnosis I remember talking about how I often spent time dwelling on the negatives rather than the positives. When I was a teacher, I often believed that my day had been bad because I had had a difficult class, conveniently forgetting that four other classes had gone quite well. My psychiatrist told me this was common and some of us, especially those prone to depression and anxiety, seem to get stuck on the negatives far more than the positives in our life.

Yet during my sessions of therapy and through a huge amount of reading at home, I learnt over and over again that thoughts are simply thoughts. They should come and go like the clouds passing overhead. In the same way that the clouds do not belong to the planet earth, our thoughts do not belong to us. Our minds are simply vehicles in which they travel.

However, problems often arise because most of us have no idea how to control our vehicles, let alone fix them when they go wrong. Our brains are the most complex, least understood organs of our body. We have absolutely no idea what is going on in there the majority of the time. Even my psychiatrist who has spent the majority of his life learning about the brain and dealing with people whose brains have failed them, has no idea how or why it works in a certain way. When I asked him why I developed OCD he gave me a list of possible reasons none of them being certain. When I asked him how my medication is able to stop my persistant obsessive thoughts his answer began with, ‘well nobody really knows why, but…’ and this is a man who has over 50 years experience in this field. If he doesn’t know how this complex machine really works, how the heck are we ?

Let me use the pink elephant experiment to show how little control we have of our brains. To do this experiment you need to stop reading what I have written and to set the timer on your phone for 5 minutes. Close your eyes and think of anything at all, anything you want, you decide. It can be silly or serious, happy or sad, but whatever you do, do NOT think of a PINK ELEPHANT. So close your eyes, set the timer and do it, and remember NO PINK ELEPHANTS.

Hard ? Impossible for most of us, if not all of us. We have absolutely no control over what our minds do and even though we try our best not to think of an elephant, am sure it popped into your head soon after your timer was set. This is the closest you can probably get to understanding what it is like to have OCD. You just need to replace the pink elephant with an image of contamination or death or some other upsetting and you are close to understanding the obession side of OCD.

The pink elephant experiment shows us how the brain has a life of its own. Most of us are living in a state of absurdity, believing pretty much anything our minds tell. We convince ourselves that we have thought things through and we know how things are or how something actually is. Yet the reality is very different. So if most us are living in this kind of ‘reality’ with very little understanding or control over our thoughts,  aren’t we all heading for disaster ?

Well hopefully not. Thankfully, there are some people who have realised that modern day living is much pretty much based on repeated, recycled, regurgitated thoughts which have very little to do with reality. In fact this realisation is not new. It is an ancient principle which forms the basis of much of eastern philosophy. So how do we live another way ? Is there a way for us to know or understand our brains better ? If scientists and doctors do not yet fully understand the workings of the brain, then how can we ? So the answer is to not try and understand or even to control the brain, but to co-exist with it in a very different way. Working with the brain in this way allows thoughts to flow easier, allowing for creativity and clarity. More importantly, it encourages the one thing we should all be striving for; wellness.

It’s hard to believe that I have OCD. I am far from the stereotypical OCD sufferer. I am messy and struggle to stay organised. If you were to take a look at our wardrobes, you’d think that Lionel was the one with OCD and not me. His clothes are folded and perfectly arranged. Mine you’ll find screwed up in a ball somewhere in the dark dusty corners of my cupboard.
So this is pretty much where the problems understanding OCD begin. There are so many misconceptions surrounding this illness, that unless you have the typical germ-fearing obessions and handwashing compulsions, most of us wouldnt recognise OCD if it hit us on the head. And that’s exactly what happened to me.
Sometimes when I talk to people about OCD I often start by saying what it is not. For me, OCD is definitely not alphabetically arranging or sorting in size. It is not being a neat freak or a germophobe. It isn’t collecing, cleaning or colour coding. I don’t wash my hands repeatedly or switch lights on and off 57 times before going to bed. And yet, some people with OCD do do this. But this is not all they do, this I guess you could say is the tip of the iceberg. For underneath the relatively calm, but perhaps strange surface of compulsions and behaviours, lies the true chaotic nature of OCD.
The true face of OCD can’t be seen, for it is buried deeply in the mind of its victim. I have compared it in the past to a monster whose claws dug into my brain and would not let go. I have also used the metaphor of having thoughts infesting my mind in the same way ants infest a house on a hot summer’s day ; completely running wild multiplying at such a rate, I was powerless to stop them. When my OCD was slowing down (at its worst it moves rapidly, morphing from obsession to obsession) I compared it to a nasty weed growing inside me ; unpleasant, unsightly, annoying and pretty hard to get rid of. Now, after 3 years of therapy and medication I see it as a pretty neutral creature, sleeping deeply, but am fully aware of its potential to be woken again.
When I was very unwell, if you had opened a window to my mind, you would have been exposed to a fast moving, reel of pictures ; throw in some dramatic Casualty scenes along with some gruesome Steven King and you’ll come close to what was going on in my head. I had an overwhelming fear that everyone around me, from my little baby to complete strangers, was at risk of getting hurt and in the most terrifying way possible.I spent most of my days avoiding knives and hot drinks and busy roads and anything which could possibly cause harm to Mathew (I have a pretty good imagination so this is pretty much everything and anything). Trips home to Wales were hard as the rivers would always be bulging with water and there were puddles everywhere and I feared Mathew would end up face down in one of them.
This was MY OCD, not alphabetically arranging, but trying to save my baby from the dangerous world he’d been born into. I was trapped in a very dark, frightening place, on my own, with no way out. And the problem with my OCD was that nobody EVER talks about it, so when it did come along and hit me on the head, I put it down to sleep deprivation and new mum nerves.
Another problem with my OCD and other people’s OCD is that it is shameful. Who wants to tell people that they feel they are going crazy? Who wants to say that they have violent images appearing in their head at the most random of times? The stigma is huge. For two years I told nobody, not even my boyfriend. Even in therapy, I lied. It took me a long time to trust my psychiatrist enough to tell him how I really felt. I believed that by telling him my thoughts, I’d be hospitalised or have my baby taken away. But mothers with anxiety or OCD, whatever the nature of their thoughts, do NOT get their babies taken away and this should never be a concern.
My psychiatrist explained the difference between postnatal psychosis (which can often lead to a child getting hurt) and postnatal anxiety/OCD. With psychosis, mothers are so unwell they become deluded, often having strange beliefs which they think are true. With postnatal anxiety, mothers are extremely upset and fearful of their thoughts and do everything to fight them. We are less likely to hurt our babies than a mother who is well because we go to extreme lengths to protect our children.
My therapist also explained to me about ‘sticky’ thoughts. He told me how thoughts should just come and go like a gently flowing river; something I already knew from my years of yoga practice.
He explained how with an OCD sufferer, a thought or thoughts get ‘lodged’ into the brain. The thoughts get stuck because we do not let them go, we label them as bad and analyze them intensly. The lodged thought is often the most abhorent, unacceptable thought that the person can imagine. A priest for example may have unwanted blasphemous thoughts, a teacher may fear they will molest one of their students, a loving parent may begin to fear that they will contaminate or hurt their child somehow. It is often the most precious and important thing in a person’s life which becomes the focus of this disorder.
These sticky thoughts are often referred to as intrusive thoughts.. They are intrusive because they interrupt our daily lives and often upset us. We do not want them and try and push them away. Yet the more we push them away, the more they stay. So how do we deal with such thoughts? How do OCD sufferers and non-OCD sufferers learn how to avoid overthinking and over analyzing? In my next post, am going to talk about the pink elephant experiment or as psychologists call it, the ironic process theory. Hopefully it will help explain how thoughts work and how thoughts are simply thoughts with nothing else attached to them.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton