welcome to the all the hard things blog

If you have OCD or anxiety, you know how real your fears can feel in the moment. You can logically know all of the things and have all of the evidence in the world to say otherwise, yet it still *feels* so real.

This feeling can pull us back from committing to ritual prevention, make us avoid exposures, and ultimately hold us back from living the life that we want and deserve. As a result, OCD and anxiety make our worlds smaller and smaller because we feel that everything is getting scarier and scarier. The more we avoid, the scarier things feel, and the more we avoid – and so it goes.

In this episode, I talked with Dr. Jesse Spiegel, a licensed clinical psychologist in California and New York who specializes in OCD, anxiety, and related conditions. Dr. Spiegel is also a clinical instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In this episode, we discuss.. […]