S3E2 Muslim Doctor Explains OCD, Intrusive Thoughts, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

It's mental health with me Dr. tk Harris. Welcome.

Let's talk about obsessions, compulsions, and worse worse,

extremely troublesome. But with modern treatments, which are very straightforward, they can be made to reduce, and we can make peace with them. So in this video, we'll understand where they come from. Notice I say make peace with them, because it's not about making them go away, although that might happen. But more often, people find a way to live with them so that they don't bother me.

If you remember from the last video, the brain always has thoughts going on. And a lot of the thoughts, especially the unexpected ones arise from the nuts. Let's go back to the original picture of the nuts to remind ourselves of its functions.

As you can see, it's got a number of inclinations, but it thinks emotionally, irrationally. And it's concerned with fairly basic things like protection, danger, safety, security, bonding. Now, those things are hardwired within us Alhamdulillah we have to live with them because they are there to serve a good purpose. But occasionally, they can get out of control.

When that happens, we become preoccupied with something. For example, religious, we can divide the West West into these three areas were shipping, washing, and wordiness. You might not think that you've done your Salah perfectly, so you keep repeating it, you might not think that you have done will do properly. So you keep washing or making sure that there is no debt. You might not be sure that you feel worthy that you're a good or a bad person. So you might carry on doing do are or simply have very unpleasant thoughts recurring in your mind about whether you are blessed, or sinful.

Remember that these things come from a good place. And it should be some reassurance to you that actually what that means is you're a very conscientious person. Most people with obsessions and compulsions. They come with a great sense of idealism, and a great sense of perfectionism that perfectionism is a problem. It's one of what we call a cognitive error. Cognitive errors are the kinds of things where we fall into a certain trap. And we start believing our thoughts. And when we start believing our thoughts, we think they're facts, and we confuse the two. And then we start to reason, emotions or emotional thoughts. When that happens, we're starting to lose because you cannot

reason with enough. It's very powerful. It's very quick. And it came with a good reason.

If you go back to the last video, we talked about the weather or an unwanted guest, think about a storm heading towards you. It can be good or bad. Think about a guest coming to your door. They come with good reason. They might, they might come with a warning to say Look out, there are burglars in the neighborhood. And they might and they might be very difficult to get rid of. You can't reason with them. They might keep saying there's a burglar, there's a burglar, there's a burglar and you will not be able to get rid of them. Because they are convinced you become convinced. Or you try to do something to escape them, you deny that they're there? Or you try to reason with them by saying

oh, well, there isn't a burglar, but they are stronger than you and they'll keep saying it. So what do you do? First of all, you extend a hand of acceptance, accept that these things are going to be there.

The next thing you do is understand how we approach these sorts of thoughts and behaviors. And as a Muslim, and the way in which we do that is by approaching it in terms of the Muslim mind. It's three components, the nuts, the heart and the intellect. The knifes is the emotional side, the way to deal with it is to accept it and to find a way to come it. We'll talk about how to do that. It involves basically a deep meditative acceptance and dealing with your physical body.

The second is the intellect and the intellect is very good at questioning things, but it's not very good at winning arguments with enough So instead what we do with the intellect is we test the assumptions of the knifes if it's saying that something bad will happen, we gently test we can strike a deal with enough so that we don't find ourselves always losing out arguments. And thirdly, the heart the true self. And there are several methods which we will describe as to how we use the deen and our wisdom and our rules of conduct to make these things diminish. But for now, go back to a couple of videos. Go back to series one where we talked about the knifes and how it behaves and

Power and seek the video on how to be a mindful geezer. That is a way in which you can calm the nerves. Another way to calm the nerves is to entertain it. Go and find the video where I've just uploaded a whole bunch of people laughing. That will also help you to calm your nerves. We'll talk more about these things in the next video. Keep with me and have faith have faith in yourself and have faith in Allah because these things can be conquered and you can live with them. One more thing. Medicine also works and I'll describe those a bit more as well.

stay faithful and hang on and I will keep helping you in sha Allah wa Salaam