Episode 26: Mental Health and Sleep Part 2: Managing OCD

Show notes:

Every year during the second week of October, people come together to raise awareness and understanding of obsessive compulsive disorder. As part of our commitment to sleep health here at Sleepopolis, we’re honored to take part in OCD Awareness Week this October by releasing this special episode, our second in a series on mental health, to better understand what life is like for people affected by OCD: how to recognize it, how to cope with it, and how to get the best sleep possible if you’re affected by it. To help shed light on this topic, we’ve invited two very special guests. 

Episode-related links:

How Does Anxiety Affect Your Sleep?
The Super Elaborate Sleep Routine of an Influencer With “Horrible Insomnia”
The Real Link Between Mental Health and Sleep

Transcript:

Dr. Shelby: How are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? I’m Dr. Shelby Harris, Director of Sleep Health at Sleepopolis, and this is Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby. Today, we’re talking about OCD with Lauren Rosen and Dr. Rachel Gerstein. 

But first, do you collect sleep shirts? You know those typically oversized, soft, and comfortable t-shirts known as sleep shirts? They’re becoming more popular at bedtime. They can often feature funny or unusual graphics and are never worn out in public. In a video with over 11 million views, my gosh, TikToker Mae shows off her personal sleep shirt collection, which includes tees with an alpha male unicorn, deep cut sci fi references, and a breathtaking collage of Pedro Pascal.

And though they’re definitely silly, sleep shirts may also be ideal for optimal sleep. Lightweight fabrics like cotton, they can help regulate your body temperature and provide exceptional breathability, believe it or not, as well as comfort. So as long as your shirt is clean and comfortable, I say it’s a great choice for a good night’s sleep.

What do you think about that, Lauren? Dr. Rachel? Do you have any go to sleep shirts at your house? 

Lauren Rosen: You know, I want one now. I haven’t been using sleep shirts. I feel like I’ve been missing out. 

DS: What about you, Dr. Rachel? 

Dr. Rachel Gerstein: I have a shirt from 2008 that’s older than my children. I don’t know how many times I’ve washed it.

It is the softest, softest cotton, and I just feel cozy every time I put it on. I’ve never thought to sleep in it though, and now I may try . 

DS: If you like Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, take a second right now to write us a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems simple, but it helps reach a lot more people to get them the rest that they deserve.

And if you’re tired of hitting snooze, hit subscribe instead. A new episode of science backed sleep tips is available every other Wednesday on YouTube and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Every year during the second week of October, people come together to raise awareness and understanding of obsessive compulsive disorder. As part of our commitment to sleep health here at Sleepopolis, we’re honored to take part in OCD Awareness Week this October by releasing this special episode – our second in a series on mental health – to better understand what life is like for people affected by OCD: how to recognize it, how to cope with it, and how to get the best sleep possible if you’re affected by it. To help shed light on this topic, we’ve invited two very special guests. 

Joining us from New York is Dr. Rachel Gerstein, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy for anxiety, depression, and related conditions, including OCD, PTSD, and social anxiety. Treating adolescents and adults through her practice, Mount Kisco CBT. Dr. Rachel also specializes in working with parents of children with special needs. 

Joining us from California is Lauren Rosen, licensed marriage and family therapist. Lauren is the Director of the Center for the Obsessive Mind, an outpatient psychotherapy practice that provides evidence based care for anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, depression, and PTSD.

Lauren is also the co-host of Purely OCD, one of NOCD’s 2024 top 10 must-listen OCD podcasts. Dr. Rachel, Lauren. Thank you both for being here to help raise awareness and understanding during OCD Awareness Week. And welcome to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby. 

DR: Thanks for having us. 

LR: Hi. 

DS: So, Lauren, I understand you’ve struggled with OCD yourself. Could you tell us a little bit about the symptoms and maybe some of the warning signs you experienced leading up to your diagnosis? What was it like for you overall? 

LR: It actually started very young for me, which is not atypical. We see generally two onset periods and one is in that, like, childhood time frame. So for context, I had a fear of death and of dying – something that I would now in retrospect call existential OCD, but I didn’t have that language for it as a child. I was, I was about seven. 

DS: Oh, wow. 

LR: Yeah. There are kids who start younger and at the time there was even less awareness about OCD than there is now. And so, these stereotypes, the hand washing, the door checking – which absolutely happen within the context of OCD – were I think what most people thought of a new OCD as. And so, I had all of these fears. My mom and dad kept taking me to therapists. Nobody knew what was going on. And what would happen was in the evenings, right before bed, I would get really triggered and I would ask my mother for so much reassurance about what was going to happen.

Was I going to be okay? What if I didn’t like the afterlife? Well, eternity is a really long time, so maybe I’m unhappy and all of that, right? So all of these questions, which of course my dear mother and my father, like, couldn’t answer. And that’s the thing about a lot of these questions: There’s not a definitive answer. Right?

That’s what OCD is – it’s this emphasis on uncertainty. That’s really the central point. And so I say, interestingly enough, right, because it was in, like, as I was trying to fall asleep that it was so pronounced for me. 

So in terms of things that people might look for that they might not otherwise think of as OCD, repetitive thoughts about things that are upsetting: So we call them intrusive thoughts, which is just unwanted thoughts that pop into your mind. Anxiety, fear. Sometimes we see guilt and disgust coming up in OCD as well. There are a lot of different sort of manifestations and then responding through these repetitive behaviors, whether that’s door checking or locking or what have you.

Which is more visible or reassurance seeking or mental behaviors as well. All done with the intent of trying to get rid of that feeling that came up as a result of those thoughts. 

DS: So as a seven year old, the asking your parents at bedtime, those kind of questions about what will it be like, what’s the, like, all that existential stuff. Was that, would you would say, like, in the reassurance-seeking kind of bucket? 

LR: Yes. 100 percent. 

DS: In that moment, would you say it was helping you to feel better? I mean, it was a while ago, but do you think that was the kind of purpose that it was serving for you? 

LR: Yeah, absolutely. That was – I mean, as you can imagine, though, it didn’t work very well. And this is the problem with compulsions in OCD is that they don’t work in the long term. Sometimes they work in the short term. And I think that it’s fair to say that sometimes in the short term, they would work for me. And sometimes they wouldn’t. And I’d be weeping, you know, trying, like, trying to navigate this, this uncertainty. And my mother and father would be like, we don’t know what to do, you know, they’d just sit with me. 

DS: So then what happened? So they were looking for treatment or? 

LR: They were looking for treatment. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was 24. 

DS: Wow. Okay. 

LR: Yeah. So the reality is that I went to see a therapist. I did not get diagnosed with OCD, but she helped me to accept uncertainty.

I, like, I guess just by the nature of her general training, by asking me what, you know, what was life like 10 years ago. And, of course, I couldn’t answer that. I was, like, I wasn’t here. And she’s like, but you were okay then. I was, like, yeah, I guess. You know, and so therefore, and that made good sense to me and I was willing to drop it and that’s, yeah, my life got infinitely better in that respect. Now I had different iterations over the years and like I said, I got diagnosed at 24, so it you know, spiked up again and manifested in different ways I think throughout my life, but at least in that instance it did resolve.

DS: Yeah. 

LR: Yeah 

DS: Dr. Rachel, does this line up with what you’ve seen from your patients in your own practice? 

DR: Absolutely. And in particular, Lauren, what you were saying about the time from age of onset to age of diagnosis, that’s 14 years. We see this with OCD that compared to other anxiety disorders or depression, there is a very, very long period of duration from symptom onset until diagnosis.

And sometimes OCD symptoms can wax and wane, but very, very infrequently, I’ve never seen OCD go away completely without accurate diagnosis and treatment. 

DS: Why do you think that there is such a lag in presentation to diagnosis? 

DR: I think there are a couple of factors. One is OCD is so tricky. I call it anxiety on steroids. So it can morph, it can change. I think I’m pretty good at predicting it, but I’ve seen OCD change in ways that I never would have predicted. And this is my expertise. Another is there is such a shame, a stigma associated with OCD and no kid, let alone adult, wants to feel different from their peers. So I don’t know how you felt Lauren, but a lot of my patients kept OCD thoughts or behaviors to themselves for long, long stretches of time in childhood and didn’t reveal to their parents or to a pediatrician or to – maybe even they were in therapy – to a therapist about thoughts they were having or behaviors they were doing or urges or things they felt compelled to do. And it’s not going to be possible to diagnose someone if they’re keeping all of that to themselves. 

And then I think at least the third reason is we don’t have a lot of people that are aware of OCD, that are OCD experts and that can diagnose OCD. We really need to increase the number of well trained clinicians that we have to diagnose and to treat. And also I think pediatricians might be some of the first line of defense here. And pediatricians have so much going on. They are not, you know, specifically well trained in diagnosing childhood OCD. I think that could be another reason too. But it is a big problem because the longer OCD goes undiagnosed and untreated, the harder it’s going to be to treat and the more suffering people go through and their families go through. 

DS: What about other symptoms that we might not have touched on that Lauren may not have mentioned? Are there more unusual ones that people would want to keep an eye out for?

DR: I could go on for the whole podcast about different OCD symptoms, but one that came to mind that’s another pretty classic or typical childhood, one that Lauren didn’t mention, is confessing. 

So a lot of times kids will confess things. They will confess, oh, I cursed today on the playground, or I didn’t ask Jane to play with me when I was playing with Tommy. And confessing to parents, it can happen at night, when things are quieter and kids are kind of reflecting on the day. It can happen at other times too. And this can be a symptom in adults with OCD as well.

There are other classic symptoms like hand washing or checking or other repetitive behaviors but there’s really an entire host of OCD symptoms related to mental rituals that are harder for someone else to spot, but the way that I sometimes spot them in my patients is perhaps a freeze response. Like if we’re in the middle of a conversation or talking through something and there’s a bit of a freeze or a pause, it could be that they’re ritualizing.

One of the most popular or one of the most common mental rituals would be like a replaying of events, either of a conversation or of events that happened. And that takes time. It’s very hard to participate in the present moment in conversation while you’re also kind of replaying events in your head. There’s reassurance. I could go on and on. 

DS: Lauren, when would you say, okay, we’re playing something in my head, for example, like Dr. Rachel was saying, versus it becoming obsessive or a compulsion that might then become problematic that you might want to seek help? Like, when do you know that it’s tipped over the edge?

LR: For me, the focal point I’d say that this is true for me clinically as well as personally is that I like acceptance and commitment therapy, which is an evidence based treatment for OCD. It’s used in conjunction with exposure and response prevention, which is considered the gold standard. Anyway, all of that background to say that one of the things I love about ACT is the delineation between helpful and unhelpful behaviors.

DS: Okay. 

LR: I’m more interested for myself and for my clients as to when it becomes functionally problematic. And if it’s – to Dr. Rachel’s point about being able to connect with people in the present moment – if it’s interfering at that level, then yeah, like I’m going to want to navigate whatever thoughts are popping into my head differently.

One thing I want to also acknowledge, because I think it’s a little tricky, is this difference between the initial automatic thought that pops into your mind and the response to that thought mentally, which is where this idea of mental rituals or mental compulsions comes in that Dr. Rachel was just talking about.

The reason that’s important is because one is completely out of our control, and if we try to resist it, it’s going to make it worse. On the other side of things, the mental behavior part is absolutely within our control, and we have the ability to disengage and come back to whatever it is that we’re doing in the present moment.

DS: Yeah. 

LR: Yeah.

DR: I just want to say one other thing just to piggyback on what Lauren said. There’s a really powerful study done along these lines where they had a group of people with OCD, a group of people without OCD, and they gave them a really long questionnaire of all different types of disturbing, intrusive thoughts. And they said, have you ever experienced these thoughts? So they actually found both groups of people had the same experience of having all different types of intrusive thoughts. People without OCD have them all the time. 

The difference between these two groups was how they responded to the intrusive thoughts. So, you know, along with what Lauren was saying, that’s where the OCD piece comes in is the response to the intrusive thoughts. 

DS: So it’s not having it. It’s what you do once you have it is the key. 

DR: Exactly. 

DS: Okay. 

LR: Yes. 

DS: The thing that I see a lot in my practice is OCD related to sleep. What would be some specific challenges you’ve seen then in your practice when it comes to OCD and sleep?

DR: You know, I can think about this in, in two different ways. There could be a whole group of people that have OCD with content related to sleep. So people that are obsessing about their sleep, people are obsessing about the quality, the quantity, the specifications of sleep, the nighttime routine. And on the other hand, people that have different content areas unrelated to sleep, but what I often see in my practice too, is as people get tired, as it gets closer to bedtime, people have a very hard time resisting rituals. 

DS: Yeah. 

DR: And it’s much easier at that time for people to give in to OCD. So those are the two ways I see it. And in some ways I’ve modified exposure and response prevention treatment for people. If they need to work on some rituals surrounding bedtime, if it’s too hard for them to do at bedtime, when they’re exhausted at the end of a long day, we actually modify that to have them work on some of the rituals earlier in the day when they have more energy, perhaps when they can fight OCD a little bit more, they have more motivation, and then work towards the harder thing of fighting the ritual and then doing the exposure before bedtime.

DS: This is for either of you, like, the thing that I have noticed, I’ve noticed it for a while, but with the advent of social media and this, like the wellness stuff for sleep, going from, you know, sleep disorders to now like optimizing perfection, being the goal every single day, it’s like gone in the opposite direction. I am seeing people coming to me after maybe they’ll have like a night of bad sleep, here and there, not even coming close to the criteria for insomnia, but they’re so worried about it. And they have these very elaborate. pre-sleep routines. And the idea is that if I don’t do these things, I won’t get a good night’s sleep.

Do you see this more and more in your practice? Because the thing that I’m doing a lot of times is I’m actually breaking all the sleep hygiene rules. I’ll be like, you know what, we’re going to have you in bed with a phone in your hand and I’ll do all these things. And it can really make some people very anxious. But I think it’s that perfection is part of the problem. Are you seeing this? And how are you dealing with that aspect? 

DR: Yeah, there was just this article in the New York Times recently about sleep maxers. Which, wow, that term really, it says it all. 

DS: Yep. 

LR: It does. 

DR: But that’s, that’s exactly it. And you just described – what a great exposure for someone who has perfectionistic, you know, ideas about sleep is to break all the rules. And, like, let’s see, let’s see what happens. And let’s see if you can tolerate it. And let’s see how you exist in the world without having a perfect night’s sleep. I think that’s a great exposure. And I think for all of these rules, whether it’s sleep hygiene rules, or even ERP rules, I don’t even want to do a perfect ERP treatment with somebody.

LR: Right. 

DR: I want things to be imperfect because life is imperfect. Let’s try to mess it up a little bit. We cannot be too rigid about these rules. Otherwise it’s so easy, whether you have an OCD diagnosis or not, to fall into these traps of perfectionism. And I think the media, and social media in particular, plays into it as well.

DS: Are you seeing people with trackers and any of that sort of stuff? Like the rings, the watches? 

DR: Yes. Oura, I think I saw someone recently with Oura, was tracking sleep and heart rate. And so I see a lot of health anxiety, which I actually, I conceptualize as a type of OCD. And those devices absolutely play into health anxiety, right?

Constant monitoring of your body sensations, alerts when things are a little bit different. And it’s really the total opposite of how we would do exposure and response prevention for someone with health anxiety, or ACT for someone with health anxiety. 

LR: Yeah, it’s interesting because whether we’re talking about health anxiety, OCD on the one hand or this mental health anxiety OCD on the other, right? And this is what you’re speaking to. And I don’t envy the lay person who’s going on to social media and is bombarded by all of this information and who do you take seriously and who’s maybe not got the best information and then on top of it, the implementation of that information is just as important.

And if we come at anything with rigidity, it’s going to interfere. And of course, this is something that I talk about with people with anxiety related to sleep all the time. It’s like, you can’t force yourself to sleep, right? You can’t type-A your way to success with OCD. You have to, like, you can create the causes and conditions that are likely to result in sleep.

DS: Yeah. 

LR: But trying to make everything work and getting rigid about it is really antithetical to that. 

DS: Yeah 

LR: But I think what Dr. Rachel said too about not even doing treatment, right? I think really this idea of supporting flexibility no matter what, because [we see] people come into the room and go, okay well, how do I do this exposure perfectly so that I don’t feel anxious anymore and it’s like, whoa okay, that’s not that’s not what we’re here to do. Right? Like we’re here to help you learn how to be with anxiety in a way that doesn’t totally derail your life. 

DS: And what I often say to patients is, I’ll say, perfection is the enemy of good when it comes to sleep. Perfection – 

LR: Yes. 

DS: You can do everything perfect, whatever that means, and still not have a great night of sleep. You can’t – you can set the stage, but you can’t expect it to happen every single night. 

So let’s talk about treatment options for OCD. So, Dr. Rachel, you were alluding, you were talking about ERP, like, let’s talk to the public and tell them a little bit more about it. How effective are they? Let’s do a rundown of it.

DR: Sure. So as Lauren said, exposure and response prevention is the gold standard for treatment for OCD. And I would say that treatment probably started in the 80s and 90s. And we have some newer, we call them third wave treatments, like acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness based therapies, dialectical behavior therapy that can be used either to kind of supercharge ERP, to motivate people to engage in ERP because ERP is a, it’s a hard treatment.

It’s not just sitting and chit chatting about your day. It’s a facing your fears treatment. And, you know, as Lauren was saying, I love to use these treatments. I think they’re a really great add-on to exposure and response prevention. I think it helps people kind of stick with the hard work a little bit longer and it gives people a why.

And if I’m asking you, whether you have OCD or not, to fight your fears and to face something scary, I think having a why really helps here. And so we can bring in your values, you know, what’s important to you, what’s the kind of, tell me about the kind of person you want to be. And we can bring in making commitments to changing behaviors that can be helpful.

Exposure and response prevention is slowly and gradually facing your fears related to your OCD content area. And it can be behaviorally: So perhaps it’s touching a doorknob without washing your hands and going about your day and eating with your hands and touching your face and touching your body. And it can be imaginally: It can be writing a story about driving on the highway and you hit somebody with your car and what happens next and what fear consequences might come of that. 

So we try to hit both behaviorally and imaginally with exposures and we go slow and the person with OCD controls the pace. Some of my patients really need to go very, very slowly and other patients are super motivated and want to go a little bit quicker.

DS: Okay, so it’s breaking that connection of what that reinforcement does at night. So you’re really trying not to…for example, with the sleep stuff, like we were talking about with Lauren earlier, like asking for reassurance, what would be like an example of, like, response prevention or exposure response prevention for something like that?

DR: So when Lauren was a kid and the example that she used, it might be her saying, you know, I don’t know what the afterlife going to be like, what if I don’t like it? And her parents might say, you know, I really don’t know what it’s going to be like. And that’s something that we all sit with is not knowing.

DS: Okay. 

DR: And so that’s not giving her the reassurance, that’s breaking – that’s the ritual prevention and it’s modeling sitting with uncertainty and it’s encouraging the person with OCD to sit with uncertainty as well. 

DS: Okay. Anything with sleep at night, any changes other than we talked about the iPad in the bed, anything specific that you’ve recommended to people over the years who might be a little bit too rigid or having trouble with getting to bed by a certain time because they’re having whatever rituals they’re doing?

DR: So I have a patient who really struggled with a lot of rituals about putting pajamas on right before bed. And the first thing I asked was great, let’s change your ritual right before bed when you’re getting into bed. And that was way too hard for her. I didn’t get any commitment and she tried it and she was unsuccessful.

We moved it up five hours. So instead of trying to do the exposure and response prevention at 10 o’clock at night, we had her try it at 5 o’clock. And so we had her try to get into her pajamas without the rituals, taking the risk. And maybe she got into her pajamas the wrong way, or maybe something bad was going to happen because she put the shirt on before the pants on and doing it earlier in the day; one, so that she was able to get to sleep on time because she was doing fewer rituals before bed and two, so that she could face her fears and over time would habituate to them and would be less nervous to then face her fears before bedtime and could do the exposure without the ritual before bed as well as get to bed on time.

DS: Great example. And then, like, even ones like, I have patients over the years who will say, I have to check my front door, make sure it’s locked five times, or I have to check to make sure my kid’s home, or the alarm. Sometimes we’ll just change the number of times that they’re used to checking. So, like, even – 

DR: – or even the order.

DS: The order. Exactly. 

DR: Anything. Change anything about it. 

DS: Change anything. Do something different to bring on a little bit of anxiety, which is kind of the key ingredient here. 

Lauren, what about medications? Are there, is there a role for medications with OCD? Have you seen patients respond? 

LR: Yes. In terms of the research, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are considered the first line with OCD treatment and are used in conjunction usually with exposure and response prevention and they are very effective. Actually, both treatments are highly effective for people with OCD. 

DS: So there are options. 

LR: There are absolutely options and there are, you know, if the SSRIs don’t work for you. There are plenty of other medications that a psychiatrist can work with you to try. And there are actually new medications that are still being tested. They’re in trials, clinical trials now. So yeah, so plenty on that front. Absolutely. 

DS: Great. And sometimes medication can help you start doing some of the behavioral treatments like EXRP. Like sometimes it gives you that kickstart. 

LR: Absolutely. And honestly, one of the interesting parts of medication is it’s almost it gives people the space to be able to – from my vantage point – practice mindfulness a little bit more easily or readily with thoughts. So to see like, oh, I’m having a thought versus being basically – living as though the thought is reality without even questioning it, like, oh my gosh I’m I could be a bad person if you take that seriously and you know you just run with that versus saying like oh, I’m having the thought that I could be a bad person. Oh, I’m feeling anxious. It opens the door to responding in a more deliberate way that’s not going to overtake your life. 

DS: Gives you more space. 

LR: Absolutely. 

DS: So OCD is referenced far too often in pop culture everywhere. I mean, like people will just throw it out in a statement in movies, TV, everywhere, but it’s not always, at least from my perspective, and I’m sure you guys agree, it’s not always so accurately discussed.

Dr. Rachel, like what kind of myths do you think are out there that you’d like to dispel when it comes to OCD? Just so that people don’t so flippantly discuss it like that? 

DR: I think we sometimes in pop culture see OCD used as an adjective. I’m so OCD meaning I’m careful or I’m organized. Or I’m clean or I’m rigid and that is often not the case and certainly not what OCD means.

The last conference I attended before COVID was an IOCDF, International OCD Foundation, conference and they made t shirts with this slogan, OCD is not an adjective. It was the artwork behind all the poster presentations. It was fantastic and I loved it and I really, I, would like to get that message out. I think that’s really important. 

LR: I think it’s a huge one. And I think actually contributes to that 14 to 17 year lapse between initial onset of symptoms and proper diagnosis, frankly, because people think it’s a preference or it’s a tidiness thing. 

In terms of other misconceptions, as I mentioned earlier, with the mental compulsions, and this is actually something I’m very passionate about, I’m writing a book about it as we speak; that understanding that OCD can actually look a lot like anxiety. Right? That, as Rachel said, it’s anxiety on steroids. But it really is a continuum from generalized anxiety to OCD versus, you know, this very specific vision of it as we’re talking about. So I think having the understanding that you can not be doing behaviors and that that can still very much be OCD. You know, the amount of people that I see who are constantly ruminating about some question or other that is every bit as detrimental as getting caught at the sink, washing your hands until they’re raw. 

DS: Okay. 

LR: Right? Like that interferes just as much. But to Dr. Rachel’s earlier point, it’s invisible so people can live their lives in a seemingly normal way and nobody knows. And there’s not a lot of rhetoric in our culture at large about mental behaviors. And so I think having a better understanding of that can hopefully contribute to people seeing OCD in different iterations. 

DS: Because it’s OCD Awareness Week, we want to try and highlight some of the different resources that are out there for caregivers, for individuals with OCD. Dr. Rachel, is there anything that you would want to recommend, whether it’s an organization, an online community, a book? What are some of your favorite resources? 

DR: Yeah, so I have a couple. One I just mentioned is the International OCD Foundation, IOCDF. org, fantastic website. They have a find a therapist directory where they verify therapist credentials in having expertise in treating OCD. They have tons of information for professionals, for OCD sufferers themselves, for loved ones of people with OCD. 

Secondly, the OCD stories podcast I’ve found to be a really fantastic podcast run by Stu, who is a OCD clinician, also someone that suffers with OCD. He interviews OCD experts, big names in the field, and he interviews people with OCD and they tell their story. And I recommend this podcast. to my patients all the time and they have found it to be really supportive and really validating. 

DS: Thank you. And Lauren, what about you? Any favorite resources?

LR: I mean, those are among them most definitely. And I’d say in addition, Kimberly Quinlan has a great podcast called My Anxiety Toolkit. That’s another good resource. Obviously, there are people on social media that talk about OCD and different clinicians. Alegra Kastens has a pretty, uh, sizable following. And like I said, Kimberly Quinlan, she’s on there. I really like Drew Linsalata. Who’s actually working toward becoming a therapist, but has been a long time advocate.

And so he’s The Anxious Truth, the.anxious.truth. 

DS: Oh. 

LR: Yeah. He’s fabulous. And he’s got a podcast actually, called The Anxious Truth. There are so many wonderful folks out there who are talking about this stuff and who can support in the journey. 

I also think in terms of IOCDF, there are lots of local affiliates as well. So if you’re interested in getting more involved on an in person level, yes, there are the conferences, but they’re once yearly, so looking for local affiliates too. 

DS: So there’s lots of resources out there. 

LR: Lots. 

DS: Which is great. 

LR: Yeah. So Dr. Rachel, Lauren, we always like to end with a segment called Something to Sleep On. It’s one last point you want to share with anyone looking to change their sleep habits. So when it comes to OCD and sleep, which is what I suspect a lot of people are probably listening and interested in, do you have any final thoughts for the audience? Maybe something to sleep on? 

DR: Yeah, based on some of the things we were just talking about, I think it’s great to follow some sleep hygiene rules, and can you practice being flexible?

You might be on a vacation and forget your eye mask, and can you practice sleeping without your eye mask one night, or you might forget your earplugs one night, can you practice sleeping without your earplugs?

DS: I like that. 

DR: But flexibility is so helpful. 

DS: Maybe not having the 15 pound weighted blanket everywhere you have to go.

It’s like 

DR: Hard to travel with that. 

LR: That’ll really take up the suitcase, right? I, yeah, actually, my initial inclination was to say, can you get a good enough night’s sleep, right? And I think that that’s down to that flexibility is that we don’t have to do anything perfectly. In fact, we can’t do anything perfectly.

So to the extent that we can just do our utmost, try our best, but not, you know, aggressively. What was that, sleep maxers? Yeah, no, don’t max anything. I don’t know about that. Like, just sleep good enough. 

DS: Good enough is the goal. 

LR: Exactly. 

DS: Five nights a week, I always say. 

LR: I like that. 

DS: So Lauren, Dr. Rachel, thank you very, very much for being here and this really is such an important topic and such a great opportunity to connect and share some really useful information for OCD Awareness Week. I had a really great time and I think this is going to help a lot of people. So thank you both. Really. Thank you again. 

DR: Thanks for having us. 

LR: Thanks for having me. 

DS: Thanks for listening to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, a Sleepopolis original podcast. Remember, if you’re tired of hitting snooze, hit subscribe or follow right now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening.

And for even more sleep tips, visit sleepopolis.com and my instagram page @sleepdocshelby. Today’s episode was produced by Ready Freddie Media. Our Senior Director of Content is Alana Nunez. Our Head of Content is Molly Stout and I’m Dr. Shelby Harris. Until next time, sleep well.