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OCD can feel like your brain has jammed on a single channel and won’t let you change it. Jeffrey Schwartz named that experience “brain lock,” and he offers a way to loosen it.

If you’ve ever had a sudden, unbidden thought pop into your head — something disturbing, violent, sexual, or just deeply out of character — you know how unsettling that experience can be.

There’s a piece of advice that sounds completely reasonable on the surface: if a thought is bothering you, just stop thinking it. Push it out. Focus on something else. Distract yourself. And yet, if you have OCD, you’ve probably discovered the hard way that this strategy not only doesn’t work — it actually makes things significantly worse. Here’s why.

Can any skilled therapist help with OCD? Or does it make a genuine difference to work with someone who specializes in it? The answer matters more than you might expect.

OCD and anxiety get talked about together so often that many people assume they’re more or less the same thing — or that OCD is simply a more intense version of everyday worry. The two do overlap in important ways, but they’re also meaningfully different. And that distinction matters quite a bit when it comes to finding the right kind of help.

The reason so many OCD symptoms go unrecognized is that they don’t match the pop-culture image. People dismiss their own experiences, or feel too embarrassed to say anything. But identifying what’s actually happening is the first step toward real relief.