Ep. 172: OCD Mindfulness Tools with Jon Hershfield
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist
4.9 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2021
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I am so happy to have Jon Hershfield on with us. Jon is an author and the Director of the Center for OCD and Anxiety at Sheppard Pratt. The second edition of his book, The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD, has just been released and his new book, The Mindfulness Workbook for Teens, is scheduled for release in March. We had a great conversation about both books and Jon shares many of the OCD mindfulness tools that he describes in his books that are used to enhance treatment.
In this interview, Jon explains why he wanted to write a book for teens and how he decided to approach the topics of mental health, OCD, and mindfulness in a way that would be relatable to teens and young adults. He discusses in more detail some of the topics in his book including how to understand your diagnosis, how to respond to intrusive thoughts, and how to incorporate meditation and mindfulness into your daily life.
Jon also shares some OCD mindfulness tools that he describes in The Mindfulness Workbook. These include thoughts are thoughts, not threats; feelings are feelings, not fact, and sensations are sensations, not mandates to act. He shares that mindfulness really involves calling things what they are.
Towards the end of this interview, we discuss Exposure and Response Prevention and the difference between habituation and inhibitory learning. He shares with us the five things we should consider when doing ERP with the goal of inhibitory learning.
This is a great interview full of so many wonderful mindfulness tools to help you manage your OCD. I hope you enjoy!
The Center for OCD and Anxiety
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ERP School, BFRB School and Mindfulness School for OCD are open for purchase. Click here for more information.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Your Anxiety Toolkit, episode number 172. |
| 0:09.9 | Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. |
| 0:12.4 | I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. |
| 0:14.6 | This podcast is fueled by three main goals. |
| 0:17.9 | The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage |
| 0:21.7 | your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. |
| 0:29.2 | And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual |
| 0:35.5 | hug, because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. |
| 0:39.0 | If that sounds good to you, let's go. |
| 0:46.1 | Hello, friends, welcome back. |
| 0:48.7 | I am so thrilled to have you here with me. |
| 0:52.7 | I'm actually really excited to share with you this episode we have on with us |
| 0:57.5 | today the amazing John Hirshfield. John Hirschfeld is the director of the Center for OCD and |
| 1:03.7 | anxiety for Shepard Pratt and he is an author. I'm sure a lot of you know him. He's been on the show |
| 1:09.7 | before. He's written some incredible of you know him. He's been on the show before. He's written some |
| 1:11.4 | incredible books about OCD. He is just about to release a new book about teens and OCD, and he's |
| 1:19.9 | just released as well the most recent second edition of the Mindfulness Workbook for OCD. |
| 1:26.1 | And I was so thrilled to have him on. We just |
| 1:29.1 | chatted and talked about the main concepts of these two really important books. Now, even though |
| 1:37.0 | we're talking about teens and the skills that you would use for teens with OCD, I actually found |
| 1:43.3 | that these are the skills that adults really enjoy using as well, |
| 1:46.8 | and he brings some really cool concepts into the conversation. |
... |
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