Why “Trying to Feel Better” Keeps Anxiety and OCD Going
Anxiety and OCD can feel like the central problem. The panic, dread, intrusive thoughts, physical sensations, and relentless urge to “do something” about it are exhausting. When distress appears, most people instinctively try to make it stop—and they work hard to succeed.
What’s less obvious is that anxiety and OCD often become more persistent the harder someone tries to control, reduce, or eliminate the feelings and thoughts.
The Pain-Avoidance Loop
When distress shows up, the brain does what it evolved to do: protect you from pain. Here’s how the cycle usually unfolds:
- A trigger appears (a thought, image, bodily sensation, memory, or situation).
- Distress rises — including physical symptoms (tight chest, nausea, agitation) and mental reactions (“What if…?”, “This isn’t okay,” “I need to fix this now”).
- Meaning gets attached — “This is dangerous,” “This says something terrible about me,” “I might be responsible,” “I won’t be able to handle it.”
- An attempt to feel better follows — reassurance-seeking, checking, avoiding, mentally reviewing, controlling thoughts, distracting — anything aimed at reducing discomfort or regaining certainty.
- Relief arrives (even if brief).
- The brain learns: “That helped. This feeling is a problem, and escaping it works.”
Over time the whole system becomes faster and more sensitive. Triggers multiply, the sense of urgency grows, and distress appears more easily and more intensely.
Pain Isn’t Just Fear
The discomfort people are trying to escape isn’t always only fear or uncertainty. Underneath anxiety and OCD you frequently find:
- Guilt or inflated responsibility (“What if I caused harm?”)
- Moral threat (“What if this means something bad about who I am?”)
- Shame or inadequacy (“I’m not enough”)
- Fear of rejection or abandonment
- Feeling trapped or out of control
- Anger, violation, or disgust (especially common in misophonia)
When treatment focuses narrowly on reducing fear—without touching these deeper layers of emotional pain—the avoidance cycle remains intact.
Why Trying to Stop the Thought Backfires
One of the most common instinctive responses is suppression: “Don’t think it. Don’t feel it. Get rid of it.”
It makes perfect sense in the moment—but it reliably backfires.
Quick demonstration: For the next 20 seconds, do not think about a pink elephant.
Almost everyone notices the same thing: the harder you try not to think about it, the more vividly the pink elephant appears. That’s because, to ensure the thought isn’t there, your mind has to keep checking—and checking brings it right back into focus.
The exact same mechanism keeps intrusive thoughts and anxiety locked in attention. Trying to banish them teaches the brain that the thoughts are important and threatening.
Relief Becomes the Teacher
Whether it’s suppressing thoughts, seeking reassurance, checking, avoiding, or mentally reviewing, these strategies usually deliver short-term relief.
And that’s the problem.
When distress drops because of a behavior, the brain learns:
- This feeling is intolerable
- I can’t handle it
- Escaping it is necessary
Over repeated cycles:
- Thoughts become stickier
- Anxiety feels more intrusive
- Urgency intensifies
- Confidence erodes
The nervous system isn’t broken—it is learning precisely what it is being taught.
A Different Target: Changing the Response
Effective treatment does not aim to eliminate anxiety or prevent thoughts from appearing.
Instead it focuses on how you respond when the experience arrives.
In Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), often informed by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the work centers on:
- Allowing anxiety or distress to show up
- Identifying and gently reducing attempts to escape or neutralize it
- Learning, through direct experience, that the discomfort is tolerable
Sometimes the intensity decreases. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, a new, powerful learning takes root:
I can have this experience without needing to fix it.
The Bottom Line
Paradoxically, what most often keeps anxiety and OCD going is not the anxiety or the thoughts themselves—it is the habitual pattern of trying to escape them.
When the default response is always to push away, control, or neutralize, distress remains in charge.
When people learn a different way—to allow thoughts, feelings, and uncertainty to be present without immediately trying to make them disappear—the vicious cycle begins to loosen.
This does not mean getting rid of emotions. It means learning how to live with all of them without being controlled by them.
And that is what finally makes anxiety manageable again.