146. One Step to Make a Change

Episode 146. What is your one step to making a change in your life?

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, a licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you. With practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes, because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at kerrybach. com slash podcast. Let’s talk about how people usually approach changes, making changes in their life. Typically goes with some all or nothing thinking, and you know we’ve all been guilty of this. Like, I have to do all the things all at once, I have to change everything, have a completely new life by Friday, I’m gonna reach for my entire schedule, I’m actually gonna get up early and I’m gonna eat right, exercise, throw out all the carbs. Have no sugar in the house, run a mile, read that entire book that I’ve been wanting to read, and spend five straight hours organizing my house.

Does that sound completely unrealistic when I say it back to you, but any of you find that familiar? I know that I’ve been in that space before where I want to do so much, and I want to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time. When we’re looking at making changes in our lives, we have to start small.

What happens when we see a huge task or huge area that we need to change, like our physical health or our mental health, the tendency is to feel overwhelmed and then frozen when it comes to making changes, so we end up doing nothing. Honestly, this has just happened to me recently in a couple areas, which partially was why I thought about doing this episode.

I was feeling really stuck trying to lose weight and had made some dietary changes. I was doing walking workouts, Pilates, different YouTube workouts that I found on a regular basis and I was like, okay, well, I’m in this rhythm of working out, I’m trying to watch what I eat, trying to eat more protein, less carbs, but not be super strict or religious about it.

And I went to the doctor and said, this weight loss thing is just really not going anywhere. I’m trying. I’m making the efforts. Here’s what I’m doing. And she said, I think you need to change your workouts. I was like, duh, why didn’t I think of that? I mean, I’ve been working out for years. Like, I understand the concepts of how this works, but it was something that I needed somebody else to say to me, like, make things a little bit harder on yourself because you’ve gotten used to what you’re doing and it’s a little too easy for you and your body’s not being stretched as much. So I decided, how am I going to motivate myself to work out, first of all, with something a little harder? And the best that I could come up with was let’s make it fun.

Let’s make it something that I want to do. So I got a miniature trampoline, partially because I’ve been watching my daughter jump on hers, and that looks super fun. But hers is a kid’s size, so I would break it if I got on it. I got a miniature trampoline. And I also thought back to what were some of the workouts that I really enjoyed when I was going to group exercise classes.

Now, it’s been quite a while, like pre COVID, since I’ve been to any group exercise classes. But there was a step class that I did when I lived in Colorado. And the gym I went to had, like, over a hundred classes a week. It was amazing. Never found anywhere else quite like that. But they had this step class on Monday nights that they got rid of because there were only about five of us in there and replaced it with some horrid boot camp class where the guy literally wore an army hat and yelled at people.

I thought, that looks terrible, I don’t want to do that. Side note. Back when I was in my twenties at this time and I was doing this step workout, which makes me sound just like an old person, old soul, I guess, but I thought, you know what? I’m going to get a step. I’m going to buy a step and I am going to do some step workouts at home.

So I found some online. I really enjoy it. It’s may not be everybody’s thing, but I enjoy it because it actually makes me have to think while I’m working out. And the thinking part makes me forget how much I’m actually sweating and feeling like I’m gonna die because it’s hard and I’m not as agile and I don’t move quite as fast as I did when I was in my 20s.

But the point is, I was stuck. I was feeling discouraged, and I don’t know what to do. And someone else said, Hey, here’s how you can make a change. Try something different. Well, the other thing I found out about the trampoline workouts is that if you jump for 20 minutes on a trampoline, it is equivalent of running for 60 minutes.

And I thought, Hey! More bang for your buck there. I like that 20 minutes versus 60 sounds good to me now If you ever jumped on a trampoline for 20 minutes, I cannot do that much right away. It is a lot Working my way up on that but the trampoline workouts They have you jump a little bit and then sometimes you do other things like get off and do abs or lift weights or other things Like that, so they’re good.

They’re fun And the only reason that I have a regular workout routine is because I have decided to take time to get up before my family members get up. Fortunately, they are both pretty heavy sleepers, so when I’m, like, stepping up and down or bouncing around on the trampoline, they’re not waking up.

Just super nice. The only reason I am able to get up before the rest of my family and have this time early in the morning is because I made a decision to go to bed earlier. What I’m trying to show you is that each of these little changes built on each other, the going to bed earlier, if I am typically asleep by 10 p.m. at night, I’m at least in the bed by 10 p. m. at night for sure, would love to be asleep by then, and I get up somewhere around 5, 5. 30. And that gives me time to work out and get a shower and a few days a week before the family gets up. And then other days I do more meditative activities in the morning and read and things like that.

It has definitely been a process. I did not become a morning person overnight. I did not just decide to stay up till whenever and then set my alarm for 5 a. m. The process of going to bed earlier then started naturally waking up earlier and I don’t have to set an alarm. Usually my body will just be done sleeping and wake me up and that feels really, really good to me.

So I never thought that I would be that morning type of person. I’ve always liked sleep and like to just lay in the bed. But lately, it’s been just a real gift to get up before everybody else and take that time for self care and for spiritual renewal, time to pray and connect with God as well. Another area of my life I was feeling literally frozen in.

I was organizing my bonus space upstairs. I have my little office space. I did organize quite a bit of that to get it to a functional level. But I have things that I took from the attic of the old house that I never had time really to go through and sort. And a lot of it was things I needed to get rid of, trash, give away and purge declutter and I got going on that process but got to a point where it just felt so big and I was getting down to more organizational pieces of I don’t know if you’re like this at all but I have bins and I have containers and I have little like drawer divide I have all these like organizational Things, a file organizer, and I don’t always know how to get the stuff in the bins or the organizing like in a way that makes functional sense.

So realizing that since we have a much smaller attic here and I can’t put all of this stuff in the attic. I have room for it for storage in the bonus space, but just figuring out how I’m even storing it was a challenge. And I was like, I don’t think that I have the right furniture, shelving, space, organizational materials that I need, even though I have all this stuff.

And I got together with someone else who I’m going through some business and personal life coaching with. It’s like a little bit about managing your personal home life, time, and managing your business, and how those two intersect, for sure, for moms. So I went to her and said, Here’s my problem with my bonus room, and I’m pretty stuck.

And she was able to get me unstuck and say, Hey, I want you to organize everything. Just put it in piles. All the like items. I want to have part of this as my workout space up here, but I’ve been working out downstairs. She said, okay, put all of your workout stuff in one area. Put all of the things that you need to store in another area.

Make sure all of your office stuff is in the office. And I was like, okay. I can do that. I feel like that is a much more doable way to break things down for myself into smaller steps. I ended up working on it on a rainy weekend that we had where I couldn’t really go anywhere and do anything. We stayed indoors and Faith came upstairs with me to hang out, play with her stuff that’s up here.

I was able to find two more bags of items to donate and threw away one and a half bags worth of trash. It’s not 100 percent yet, but it’s getting there. At least there’s movement. There’s progress. We have to learn how to break things down into smaller steps for ourselves and then understand that the ripple effect happens after that.

So you do one thing and then you’re like, Oh, I can do that. And then you do the next thing and then you do the next step. And I just think about how God’s word says that his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. It’s so that we can see where we’re going. God guides us. But he doesn’t always give us the whole path.

Sometimes he does give us visions of the future. And it’s interesting because sometimes God will show you something like, okay, I believe the Lord wants me to do this. And I’m wrestling with one of those things right now. I’m like, okay, God, I believe that there’s some calling to do this, but I’m not really sure the middle part, like, I don’t really know how I’m going to get there, but all I really need to know is the next step.

God gives you that next step, and as you follow him in obedience, then he will give you the next step. Like the light will still be in front of you. It’s like this in movement towards behavior changes in our life. You’re not going to be able to wake up tomorrow and run a marathon. You have to figure out how to not even run your first mile, I mean, your first quarter of a mile, if you’re not a runner at all, and then your first half a mile, and then you can run three quarters of a mile, and then maybe you can run a mile, and learning that process and rhythm, I’m not a marathon runner, so I wouldn’t know, but I imagine it takes some time to become a marathon runner.

You don’t just do that. We live in such a microwave society that we want it all right now. I can flip through a bunch of videos on my phone and just swipe up if I don’t like part of it. And that’s not how change happens in our life. It’s not that quick, fast dopamine hit. Sometimes things take time to grow and nourish and develop.

I started to think about the small changes. that my clients have made or that I’ve asked clients to make in the past. And it’s been super interesting for me to go back and make this list for you, but I thought it might give some of you some ideas about what is your one step towards change. So I had a client, this was many years ago, Super high stressed, I’m very driven at work, had a lot of responsibilities, and I was trying to help this person relax because they had a lot of anxiety, and I was teaching some breathing strategies, like, okay, let’s really do some deep breathing together, focus on calming down your body, and he says to me, I don’t have time.

I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to deep breathe. I’ve got too much going on and I said, okay, okay, here’s what I want you to do. Do you think that you could just make a commitment to yourself to take three deep breaths before you get out of the car and go to work? Is that manageable for you?

Do you think you could do that? Yeah, I think I can do that. And I don’t know what he thought I was asking him to do. Maybe he thought I was asking him to deep breathe for ten minutes or something like that originally. Maybe that was why there was some pushback. But what was interesting, the ripple effect of this starting point of taking three deep breaths before going into work eventually became You know what?

I decided yesterday that I was going to leave work and go take a lunch break and I went and took my lunch break and I didn’t think about work or get caught up in any work responsibilities. Wow! That’s incredible. And then slowly starting to develop more and more work life balance and work life boundaries.

Leaving work at work. Being able to have a personal life being able to enjoy time outside of work. It took a while It was a process, but what I want you guys to know is it started with those three deep breaths before work That’s where it started. It was small. It was incremental. It was manageable It was something that he felt like he could commit to Oftentimes we try to make commitments initially that are too big And then we get frustrated when we fail, or it doesn’t go as smoothly as we wanted it to, and then we give up.

Versus saying, let me set myself up for success and pick something small and manageable that I know I can do. I’ve had several clients that my first OCD treatment was, you need to stop Googling. Some of them were very new to the OCD diagnosis and didn’t realize how the Googling was a compulsion, how that impacted them, and if they were able to not Google, or if they recognized, Hey, I didn’t Google yesterday and I ended up feeling a whole lot better versus I noticed the day that I did.

I spent a lot of time on it and really got sucked down this rabbit hole to an unhealthy place. Clients who have a really hard time being in the present moment, either because they’re disconnecting due to trauma, dissociation. Maybe they’re having a really hard time sitting with their emotions or body sensations in the moment.

I said, Hey, why don’t you just try a mindful moment? One minute of mindfulness doesn’t have to be a super long 20 minutes of meditating on something. Just give yourself one minute and see how that goes and you can always build on that but starting small Once I told someone to do five minutes of something and apparently that was too much I didn’t realize at the time.

I thought it was a manageable or workable goal for them They came back and just felt really bad like being in this place of shame. Carrie. I couldn’t do the five minutes I’m like, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal Can you do it for two minutes or three minutes? It’s okay if you can’t do five, just use that as data and back yourself up a little bit.

And then once you feel really comfortable with what you’re doing, you can stretch yourself a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And oftentimes that ripple effect can just happen gradually and naturally as you become more comfortable with changes that are happening. have encouraged clients to make all different kinds of health changes, to cut back on caffeine to reduce overall anxiety, if they’re feeling nauseous in the morning, to eat some protein for breakfast.

If clients aren’t exercising at all, I’ll often encourage them to see what they can do for a short amount of time, whether it’s a short walk or some stretching, yoga exercises, and see how they feel afterwards. In working with clients with OCD, I often see that people may be working really hard to, quote, fix their OCD.

I need to know everything right now, give me all of the coping strategies, tell me exactly what to do. I’m going to binge all your episodes, Carrie, and figure it all out and fix myself. What I’m telling my students who are in our fall ICBT learning sessions is that sometimes we have to slow down to speed up.

This is very true in terms of learning ICBT. Learning to slow down your thought process, what is actually there, getting deep dive into the obsessional story. As they slow down and they start to recognize like, Oh, this is where this obsessional doubt is coming from. Oh, this is what OCD is using as justification, but it’s really irrelevant to everything that’s going on.

As they slow down is allowing them to make momentum to make change. to recognize OCD at the first go. If you can recognize it very early before it sucks you into the story and what we call the OCD bubble, then you’re going to be able to shift a lot more easily. And if you get way down, like, and engaging in a lot of compulsions, then it’s a lot harder to get out of.

I like to use a potato chip analogy. There was a potato chip. You can’t eat just one. But, and then the more potato chips you eat, the more potato chips you want. Like with compulsions. Instead, if you’re able to catch that first potato chip and say, oh, okay, whoa, I ate the potato chip. I don’t need to eat anymore.

I’m just going to put these down and instead get a better snack for me. That’s going to be a whole lot easier than if you just sit there mindlessly eating the potato chips and next thing you know, half the bag is gone. So it’s about learning to be intentional. It’s about learning to be present and mindful.

So my question is, what’s your one step? What are you going to do today to move towards positive change in your life? I would love to hear about it. You can email me at podcast at kiribach. com. That email will be in the show notes for you. Remember to enter our review giveaway. A lot of people are not going to follow these steps, so you’ve got a good chance of winning and you’ve still got a few more days to do it.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.