Mindfulness and behavioral therapy - ERP the most effective OCD treatment

Mindfulness and behavioral therapy 

You've likely heard of pavlov experiment in which he repeatedly offered food to a dog while ringing a bell. While dogs instinctually salivate in the presence of food have loves dog eventually came to salivate just at the sound of a bell, even when no food was present this learned response is a result of a process known as have LEVIAN conditioning or classical conditioning. through this process the dog salivation response became bound to the stimulus the sound of the bell. likewise in OCD, the feeling state of distress becomes bound to our unwanted thoughts. just as dogs don't instinctually salivate in response to the sound of a bell people don't naturally have an instinctual response of distress to their thoughts. 

The person with OCD involuntarily learns overtime via classical conditioning, to have a distress response in reaction to thoughts that most other people perceive as benign. the concept of conditioning was further developed by psychologist BF Skinner whose research demonstrated that we modify our behavior in response to rewards and consequences. 

A process he calls operant conditioning. People with OCD engage in compulsions in order to relieve their distress, but by relieving distress our compulsions actually lead to more compulsions. 

Because we're naturally more likely to repeat any behavior that results in a reduction of discomfort. This process is called negative reinforcement, because it involves the removal of a negative experience such as anxiety or disgust and signals the brain that the behavior responsible for this removal of distress must be repeated under the same conditions.

   

 Experience of anxiety and discomfort perhaps you in a loop of negative reinforcement you're triggering thought thus leading you to do more compulsions the next time your anxiety reappears, this loop is called the obsessive compulsive cycle. you don't decide what happens inside, you are not your brain your brain is a bodily organ and one of the things it does is generate thoughts. you may be able to dig up thoughts

And this may make you varying degrees of clever, but you didn't generate the thoughts. You collected them from the soup in your brain ,you have no say in what kinds of thoughts happen to occur and what kinds of thoughts your minds radar happens to pick up. 

If you try to control your thoughts by judging them or attempting to suppress them then you're doing the compulsion. you only get to decide what you do with your thoughts not what thoughts you have.