Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three,

and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, because experiencing

anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go. If you want to learn how to stop engaging in mental compulsions, this is going to be the

episode for you.

Today we have Lauren Rosen, who is an OCD specialist, and we are going to talk you through

the very start to end process on how you can stop engaging in mental compulsions for OCD and hopefully get your

presence and your joy in life back because mental compulsions can take up so much energy.

Thank you, Lauren, for being here.

I'm so glad to be here and to nerd out on this topic with you and to really get into the

nitty gritty of it.

So thank you for having me.

I think what's so cool about this is there wasn't that long ago that people didn't even know

mental compulsions was a compulsion. In fact, we thought OCD was just jumping over cracks and

washing our hands and so forth. And I feel like you'll have now written a book, which will be out any day now.

So I have all the links to that in the show notes. But you've written a book which is going to

bring such awareness to this topic. I'm so excited. I think it's probably one of the most common

questions I get asked as a clinician and as a content creator. So yay, I'm so happy you're here.

Thank you. Yeah. No, it is wild that, isn't it? In writing the book, one of the things that I

looked at, I believe it's Stanley Rockman who wrote a book called Treating Obsessions. I hope I'm

not misremembering that, but something akin to that, right? And it was talking about

mental compulsions in effect, but the field has come a long way and even, you know, a short few

decades in terms of understanding. And it's hard because we don't really as a society talk about

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