In all honesty, I never thought I could recover. Ten years ago, I was pregnant with my first son and experiencing postnatal anxiety, which was spiralling into obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Every area of my life was affected, including my friendships, work and marriage. 

OCD can come in many forms, but broadly speaking it’s when you feel the need to complete a certain set of rituals or compulsions in order for everything to feel OK amid intrusive thoughts. My OCD was dubbed ‘magical thinking’ and ‘tapping and counting’. You might consider this the stereotypical OCD you see in films: clicking the light switch on and off, stepping over cracks on the floor, turning the tap handle over and over – that sort of thing. 

To give a little glimpse into my day-to-day life at this time, it was taking me roughly four hours every night to get to bed. I would start my bedtime routine at 8pm and would eventually stumble into bed around midnight. I was often late to events and eventually avoided social situations altogether because the stress of leaving the house was so overwhelming. I could recognise that rationally it didn’t make sense to tap a light switch in order to feel calmer, but somehow it felt so necessary.

This went on for years, becoming progressively worse. Looking back now, I have no idea how I got through a day, let alone how I carried on working or parenting.

In the moment, the tapping felt like a relief from stress, a way to control situations; the inconvenience of it acted almost as payment for everything staying OK. But ultimately, it became evident that this was a drastically negative spiral. The more I relied on tapping, the more controlling it became. I was trapped by the tap.

Everything came to a head when my son was three years old. I’d always viewed my OCD as something that helped me, something that kept my family safe, but one day, as we walked back home from the local village, I had a moment of bravery and walked over a drain without stepping back and forth. My son stopped me and said: “Mama, you missed one. Don’t you need to go back and forth?” In that moment the realisation that my OCD was hurting those I loved came crashing around me. Something had to change.

Not long after that, we were due to fly to California. The night before, I still hadn’t packed. I felt nauseated and I was crying. I knew that my fear of flying would push me to the brink with my OCD on this trip. When we got to the airport the next morning and the doors opened to reveal the check-in desk, I fell to the floor. I saw all the cracks on the ground and knew I couldn’t make it, so we cancelled the flight and went home.

That was the start of finding freedom.

The first thing that made a huge difference was learning about how my mind works. I met with a therapist, who explained why we have fear and what helps us manage it. He told me that anxiety evolved as a positive thing – a way for us to perceive a threat and know how to avoid danger. But sometimes, he explained, anxiety and fear can be triggered when no real threat exists. 

The start of my journey to recovery was being able to understand this; I started to recognise that my anxiety was trying to protect me, but I needed to differentiate between genuine threats and the misfiring of instinctual thoughts. 

It was only when my work put on an anti-anxiety hypnotherapy session that I was able to start putting this knowledge into action. Despite being sceptical, I went along. By the end of the 15 minutes, the anxious thoughts had slowed down. With this extra bit of space, I began to be able to sense which were ‘real’, logical thoughts and which were my anxiety piping up. 

After the session, I left work. My commute required a seven-minute walk to the train, which had previously taken me up to three hours to complete due to OCD driving me to repeat my steps. After this workshop, I walked that journey in seven minutes. I was elated. It felt like freedom. That one small win gave me the push I needed to keep trying to recover. 

Things didn’t change instantly: it was more of a ‘one step forward, three steps back’ type of thing, but with a few extra sessions, the seeds were planted and the idea of recovery started to grow. For the first time, I felt that maybe getting better could be possible.

This is where running came in. We’ve all heard that running creates endorphins – a happy hormone that boosts mood and energy. This is clearly a great benefit, but it’s not the only one. Running gave me a very similar experience to hypnotherapy: when I was running, my thoughts came in slower, giving me more time to suss out those that were driven by fear. For me, running was the one movement where my feet were outpacing my OCD. I couldn’t stop and create a compulsion because I’d already moved on through time. I was pacing my way through the stress cycle – running upwards and out of the negative spiral.

The deep breathing running encourages helped, too. As did running’s impact on my sleep pattern, which helped to improve my energy and my ability to manage stress. 

As I sit here now, I hope that anyone reading this who is struggling will know that getting better is possible and that they are not alone. There is light at the end of the tunnel, a way out of the all-consuming nature of OCD. Start walking towards that light. Talk to someone, head outside, tie up your laces and start walking, jogging and eventually running towards it.

Images: Shakira Akabusi