People ask me all the time if some of their thoughts are related to OCD and a lot of times they are not. Fears are not OCD. OCD thoughts are only when you perform either mental or physical rituals. When you take an umbrella with you so that you don't get your new suit wet is not OCD. Taking it everywhere you go because you think that something bad will happen if you get wet is OCD.

So how can we apply this? How can we use the tactic of recognition? When you are questioning whether a thought is an OCD thought, ask yourself this, "Do I feel like I have to perform a rituals because I feel like something bad will happen?" If you can answer yes, then it is OCD.

The second part is what about the OCD thoughts that we don't even know we have? You can ask yourself this, "Do I perform any rituals or do anything that most people don't do?" Odds are you may be able to isolate a few things that you did that you did not even think about and then you can start working on those things. These are simpler to work on because you are not as bothered. Getting little victories under your belt is very powerful in helping you to curb your OCD.

The second thing that you want to do is to plan times when you are going to attack these different OCD's. Work on one at a time. This is the most effective and it will help you to get the flow for how things should go as far as beating your OCD. You will learn valuable skills. Start facing a less difficult ritual at first and then you will be stronger to deal with the harder ones later. Learning more about obsessive compulsive disorder will make you more brave to it. When you have more knowledge about something, you have more bravery concerning it.

The third thing that you can do is to start to replace your obsessions with healthy ones. Like providing for your family, working on your hobby. When you replace your old OCD habits with new healthy habits, this will help you to maintain your freedom from OCD for good. It's very implortant to find things that you are passionate about and beating obsessive compulsive disorder will be much easier than you think!

Take action: Today what you want to do is to go over all of the things that we have talked about today in this article and realize that knowing something is useless unless you can use it. So now that you know this information, you need to teach yourself to use it and you will be on the road to becoming OCD free in no time!