Ep. 186: 8 Tips to Manage Your BFRB
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist
4.9 • 884 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit podcast. Today, we are going to talk about BFRB's. Now, a BFRB is body-focused repetitive behavior. Many of you know, I am an Anxiety Specialist; I specialize in OCD and OCD-related disorders. Those related disorders can involve body-focused repetitive behaviors including hair pulling, skin picking, and nail-biting.
Today, I want to give you eight tips to help you manage your BFRB. This is also really helpful if you have any behavior in your life that you want to adjust and change. It is also helpful if you are a family member or a loved one of someone with a BFRB.
The eight tips we are going to discuss today are:
- Identify specifically where you're engaging in your body-focused repetitive behavior.
- Identify when you engage in your BFRB.
- Identify what emotions trigger your BFRB.
- Identify what thoughts you are having.
- Find alternative behaviors.
- Block the behavior specifically related to the body part.
- Find support.
- Practice self-compassion daily.
Above all else, I want you all to remember that you are not your BFRB. You are way more than this thing that you struggle with. You have so many other beautiful characteristics and strengths and abilities. If you can introduce a self-compassion practice, you will find immense benefit from just gently nurturing the suffering that you are feeling. This is so important for everybody, but particularly for those who are really hard on themselves.
If you get a moment, please go over to wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that be Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Podbean, and leave an honest review. Tell me how you feel about it, whether it's helping you, what you'd like to see. We are going to give away a pair of Beats headphones of your choice of color once we hit a thousand reviews!
ERP School, BFRB School and Mindfulness School for OCD are open for purchase. Click here for more information.
Additional exciting news! ERP School is now CEU approved which means that it is an accredited course for therapists and mental health professionals to take towards their continuing education credit hours. Please click here for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Your Anxiety Toolkit, episode number 186. |
| 0:10.7 | Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three |
| 0:17.7 | main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools |
| 0:21.8 | to help you manage your anxiety. |
| 0:24.2 | Second goal, to inspire you. |
| 0:26.7 | Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. |
| 0:30.0 | And number three, and I leave the best for last, |
| 0:33.0 | is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug |
| 0:37.4 | because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, |
| 0:41.4 | let's go. Welcome, welcome back. So happy to have you with me today. I do love recording. I'm not going to lie. I actually feel like |
| 1:00.2 | you probably have to hear me take that deep breath because when I sit down and I put my headphones on |
| 1:06.3 | and I speak into the microphone and I slow on down. So thank you for letting me have this space to be |
| 1:14.8 | with you and to slow down and to spend some time with you. It's really an honor. Ah, so how are you? |
| 1:22.5 | How are you? How are you doing? Let's do a little check-in together. How are you feeling? How are you |
| 1:32.8 | thinking? That's important too. How's your heart? You know, a lot of you have mentioned that you |
| 1:41.5 | have been getting vaccinated and going back to some |
| 1:45.0 | normalcy, some normalcy after a really, really difficult year of isolation. |
| 1:51.9 | I know I am. |
| 1:53.7 | My children are starting to go back to school, which was really scary and weird. |
| 1:59.0 | I'm still not back in the office, but I'm starting to sort of venture out a little |
| 2:03.5 | more than we were. So, yeah, lots and lots of changes. I just want to check in. How are you? Have you |
| 2:11.6 | asked yourself how you are today? It's important. We must do it every single day. How are you? |
... |
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