Episode 112: Postpartum OCD, Intrusive Thoughts & Learning to Trust Yourself with Jenna Overbaugh

0:00RUCT Shinai Welcome back to Noan Toldes, the podcast that tells the truth about parenting and talks about

1:05book making peace with a noisy mind is coming out in February of 2027. So we're going to be like book twins. I'm so excited. I know that's what we talked about. I'm so excited. Thank you so much for joining. This is such a hot topic right now kind of in the discussions around perinatal and postpartum mental health. I'm sure you've gotten a lot of questions about the Lindsay Clancy and just things that are going on in the news cycle in general over the last several weeks. So I'm really excited to tackle this topic with you. It's not something that I've talked about on this podcast before, but I think so many people listening are going to resonate. So I just really appreciate you making the time to be here with us. Absolutely. Thank you so much. And I am coming as the therapist who can help you make sense of intrusive thoughts and anxiety as it relates to sleep and all of that. But I'm also coming as a mom. I haven't eight year old. And part of the reason why I only have one is because his sleep was so terrible. And it was one of the most

2:07difficult aspects of parenting for me. He was, I mean, what do you even call it, right? Like a terrible sleeper or we just really struggled with it. But I've been there personally too. I get it and it brings back even in some preparation for this. I'm trying to remember all the things that I struggled with. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, it was really hard. It's really, really hard. And so I want to I'm happy to speak to that too. And if you're listening to this, hopefully you find something that gives you some peace by the end of the episode. For sure. And I love that you're so open about that. I hear this from parents all the time because well, I have an eight year old too. And he was also a terrible sleeper or I guess he was what I thought then was a terrible sleeper. I struggled with it so much at the time. Now I look back maybe with like rose colored glasses. I'm like, Oh, probably wasn't that bad. But at the time, it felt really all consuming. Can you talk a little bit about what it felt like for you? It just felt like this is something that no one ever told me about when you're a new mom, especially all throughout pregnancy, all throughout,

3:07you know, getting older and getting married and all that stuff, all you hear about is how beautiful parenting is and how it's such a great journey. And you're going to love it so much. And then suddenly they're here. And it's like this hidden chapter in a book that no one talked about. Like suddenly you've opened this trap door where now, yeah, yeah, it's normal to only see about an hour and a night. And oh, yeah, you know, a two hour stretch. That's good, mama. And oh, just wait until the three month sleeper, grushing, just wait until teething. And it's like, my gosh, why were you telling me that this was so amazing this whole time? And you were hiding this from me. I felt totally beside myself. And you know, we I saw a post today on Instagram about how like, you know, you all the things that make you you get totally rocked whenever you're a parent, right? Like I was one of those people I loved to take care of my health. I was on a schedule. I loved waking up, waking up at a certain time and working out and reading before bed

4:07and not having my phone beside me for bed and going to bed, getting a full eight to 10 hours, like that's just completely out the window. You have this other person that you need to be responsible for and take care of. And it's all uncertain, which is something that we'll talk about a lot when it comes to OCD and anxiety. It's all uncertain. You don't know how they're going to sleep tonight. You don't know how it's going to go tomorrow. I remember feeling such dread when it came time to put my son down for bed because it was like I was gearing up for war. Like, I know what to expect. I would get so unreasonably anxious at night. I call that the sundown scaries or the sunset scaries because it was and all of my babies were fall babies or winter babies. And so it would get dark at like 430. And I would just from the point that I would start seeing the light change. I would be an anxious mess. Especially with my first, particularly with my first. And we can talk a little bit more about that. I think to what makes it so hard, especially when it's your first and you just don't have necessarily the same perspective.

5:08But it's that by directional relationship that we have with sleep and anxiety, right? Like, the less we sleep, the more prone to anxiety or other mood disorders we are. But then the more we worry and ruminate about how sleep is going to go, the harder it is to actually fall asleep. Did you experience any of that postpartum? 100% and sleep deprivation and anxiety, as you said, they feed each other in both directions. And we're also met with this difficulty of like our baby is asleep. And this is the first time that many of us have been able to turn our brains off. The house is quiet. And we should be able to relax, but we can't relax. And our brain isn't turning off because we're fearing bedtime and we're dreading it. And one concept that really rang true to me was this like it's called experiential anxiety. It's anxiety about being anxious. Where you're just not really anxious about really anything bad happening. You're just anxious about the experience of being anxious. And that just having a word for that was really helpful for me. So I really struggled with, you know, I kind of want to stay up and enjoy, you know,

6:13that I have a little bit of time to have my brain off. But then he's up within the next hour. You know, then I'm kind of doing this inventory throughout the day too. It was like as soon as I put him down, I would get stuck in this mental review and this inventory of all the things that I could have done wrong or of all the ways that I was messing up my son's development and all the ways that I had failed. And of course, whenever going to be able to sleep under those conditions, right? So yeah, it really truly does. And like so many other parents listening, I'm sure they resonate too. If I'm not, if I haven't been well-rested, especially for many consecutive days, I am such a bear. I'm such a bear. Like, and that's just human. That's not, that's just a human thing. We are not supposed to be interrupted with our sleep like that. There's a reason why sleep deprivation is literally a torture method. Yeah, that always gives me some peace to just remember that. We are not supposed to be going that long without consecutive good sleep. And so, aside from

7:13everything else that we talk about, as it relates to OCD and anxiety, it is so important to just do what you can to get good sleep, whether that is, you know, hopefully if you have the support, being able to incorporate family members and partners, it is so incredibly crucial to try to get good sleep as much as possible. It's so true. I just wrote a sub-stock about protecting maternal sleep in the first or in the fourth trimester because it is so important and it's so much easier said than done. And I think so many of us like I was such a control freak in a type A before I had kids. And now I'm, they've kind of beaten me down. I'm like probably a type C now because you have to let go of certain point. Yeah, whatever. But with my first, I was so obsessed with like doing everything myself. And nope, I'm going to exclusively breastfeed like we're not doing bottles and and so much of this, these beliefs that I had about like what it actually took to be a good mom and the control that I wanted to have over it really made me made it hard to accept help or to ask for help. And I think the control piece is so huge, especially with the first. I've only ever had one. And so I have heard also from other parents that like as you have two or three or four,

8:19you know, you kind of have to surrender. You have, you have no choice but to be more flexible and to relinquish some of that control because you just don't have the physical resources, the mental resources, the financial resources at some point you just kind of throw your hands up, right? But I certainly see this pattern with first born to or only children where there is this like high stakes thing, we have to get it perfect. And you know, we just want to do everything correctly. And not just the mental monitoring that we do, but also like the the apps. I remember going crazy and driving myself crazy with all the different apps. Not just one sleep app, but like four different ones and having to log them all in case they gave me different insights and, you know, all the different monitors. And we had a little outlet foot monitor that we did. And I know it went off a bunch of times throughout the night, which definitely didn't help anybody. And it's just, it becomes a point where like, of course, we want to do things well. And of course, of course, we care. It would be weird to not care. It would be weird to not want to have some level of control.

9:25And there gets to be a certain point where being too anxious and too stressed also leads to less quote unquote performance. There's something called the Yerkees Dodson curve. And I can send you a link. People can look it up. But it's essentially this law about mental resources where if you don't care about something, if you're not anxious about it, you're not stressed about it, you're going to have really low performance in that area. It's kind of like a test, right? If you don't care about your performance in school, you're not going to study for the test. Your performance in that test isn't going to be very good. If you care too much about something and you're so anxious about it, you're also probably going to have really low performance because you're so stressed out about it, you're avoiding it, you're anxious about it, you're stressed, your focus isn't there. The reality is in order to have good performance in this scenario, you know, be good enough responsible and good enough control with our families and with our children. We want to care, but we can't care that we can't be so rigid and so inflexible because our sleep is going to be impacted,

10:29our mental health is going to be impacted. So it's okay and it's normal to want to care about these things, but there definitely is a tipping point where you're being obsessive about the apps, you're being overly controlling and overly rigid about the sleep schedules and how perfect everything has to be. Too much information, like all the amounts of Facebook groups that I was in and that I see so many other women in, they're getting so much reassurance and we're just not meant to have this much information at our fingertips. We're not meant to have so much information about how other people parent and just lead to so much anxiety and this feeling that we can't win and we're constantly doing something wrong, even if we're doing actually a pretty good job. I completely agree, I think it's so much harder to be a parent now, even then when I first became a mom almost nine years ago because just of this sheer amount of, and it's a double edged sword, right? Like sometimes you get really amazing information and you get to relate to somebody else going through something similar, but then there's that other side where it's just too much and I'm sure that people who are prone to things like anxiety or OCD can just ruminate on those things even more and I want to

11:34talk a little bit more about how to know the line between intrusive thoughts and anxiety and OCD and other mid-disorder. So we're going to take a quick break and talk about that when we get back. Okay, so I think lots of people who have had a baby have probably heard this term intrusive thoughts. I actually saw a threads around up the other day that got like thousands of impressions and so many comments and some of them were really funny. Like it was it was a post meant to be humorous. Like what's the craziest intrusive thought you ever had and people would say I thought that somehow my baby and I were going to be on the Titanic together and you know just all of these things that like objectively will never happen. I thought that I'm the Epstein files. Right, exactly. Well for 9-11. Exactly and like it does sound crazy and I think even if you have ever gone through it, you are aware that these intrusive thoughts are not rational but you just can't help yourself. How do you find that line though of like a normal intrusive thought when you're postpartum and something a little bit deeper like maybe OCD? Great question. So research shows time and time again

12:38that everyone experiences these intrusive thoughts, these weird scary kind of out of character, out of nowhere, either images, thoughts, ideas, they can also come in the form of urges or impulses. They're kind of these just like strange out of character, out of nowhere, intrusive mental experiences. We've determined everyone experiences them, research shows 99% of people say that they experience them. I think the 1% of people probably just aren't understanding the question or aren't being honest about it. So it's an evolutionary thing. And so I want especially new moms to understand this is evolutionary in its basis that if we think about hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the babies who weren't checked on numerous times throughout the night that they were breathing or that they hadn't done X, Y and Z, the moms didn't have those thoughts or didn't check on them. They ended up probably not not surviving. And so survival is over time we can see how this safety behavior

13:38and this rigid control can kind of evolve. And you know, we're not living in those times anymore. We don't have to continue checking on our children every 20 minutes the way that we did hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but our brains haven't caught up. And so that's where the intrusive thoughts do have a place. They are meant to kind of alert us. And they usually alert us of what's important to us. So it's really important for people to understand that these intrusive thoughts usually come in the form and latch on to what it is that you care most about. And especially with parenting, it's kind of a triple whammy, OCD and intrusive thoughts and anxiety really latch on to these three conditions. One, what you care the most about. So you know, we sit with uncertainty all the time. We sit with uncertainty that if we get in the car, we might die in that car accident, but we don't really think about it because we have to drive. Right. We have all right, some level of uncertainty. But when it comes to our babies, we care about them more than anything in the world. Like, absolutely not. I'm going to go and check my baby to make sure they're still breathing, right?

14:38Second, OCD typically latches on to what we feel most responsible for. So there's this aspect of hyper responsibility. And of course, with parents, who's more responsible for that child and their safety than the parent, especially when the primary caregiver is usually the mom, not always, but of course most of the time, right? And so that's why new moms especially will struggle with it. There's this aspect of hyper responsibility. And then sometimes things that are just uncertain in nature. And no matter how we spin it, we don't have 100% certainty that our babies are going to be alive. We don't have 100% certainty that our babies are going to make it. And so we have to understand just the nature of why these thoughts come up. Of course, it's the perfect petri dish, especially when you've just had a baby. And so knowing that they're normal, however, there does obviously come a point where it tips into disordered territory. The vast majority of individuals can experience these thoughts and kind of look at it and be like, where the heck did that come from? That's so weird. And they can write it on a thread's thread, right? They can just kind of

15:43look at it and say WTF was that, where the heck did that come from? And then they kind of toss it and they move on to the next thought almost as if they were conveyor belt thoughts, right? Just move on to the next one. They keep moving with their day. But with people who have a genetic tendency or genetic predisposition to anxiety or obsessive compulsiveness, they tend to get fused to these thoughts. They tend to interpret these thoughts wrongly as being significant somehow. So, oh my gosh, what was wrong with me? Why did I have that thought? Does having that thought mean that I want that to happen? My gosh, I'm so responsible for this. I have to do something about it or else I can't possibly just let it go. They also tend to judge the thought. So like, oh my gosh, that's such a bad thought or oh my gosh, that's such an awful perverted nasty thought as opposed to just having this kind of neutral valence about it. Like that's strange. And we move on. And so if you find yourself misinterpreting these thoughts as being important, as being your responsibility, as meaning something

16:44about you, that's obviously going to cause some anxiety. No one wants to have an intrusive thought, get fused to it, assume that it's the end all be all and it's their responsibility to do something about. Of course, they're going to get anxious about it. So then what do we do with that anxiety? We tend to try to get rid of it somehow. And that's where the compulsions come in. That's where it really starts to get disordered. And so that's us having a disordered relationship with those intrusive thoughts. We're trying to get rid of them. We're trying to make sense of the nonsensical. We're trying to get 100% certainty about things we cannot be 100% certain about. And so those compulsions can be physical like checking that your baby is still breathing, checking the temperature. It can be, you know, fearfulness of going down the stairs. And so you avoid the stairs. But it's really important that people know too that you can also do these compulsions or these rituals in an unobservable fashion. So a lot of times people say that they swear they have OCD, but they don't,

17:44they don't wash their hands. They don't check things. They don't seek for reassurance from their partner, but they're constantly ruminating. They're constantly trying to figure out the thought or analyze it. Or as I said previously, they're taking this mental inventory of the day. They're analyzing things. They're trying to figure it out, even just simply paying attention to these thoughts can kind of shine a spotlight on them. And you can brace yourself for them. And so that's how you would know that it's tipping over into the disordered territory when it's starting to make you really distrust. It's leading to some impairment in your day to day life. And according to the DSM, which is our diagnostic manual that we use to diagnose these conditions, people say that it should take up to an hour a day if not more for it to qualify as OCD. But of course, a lot of these things are hard to quantify. How do you quantify hours spent avoiding something? Right? How do you quantify hours or times spent ruminating at night by yourself when your baby is sleeping? And so I would just say, you know, there's a spectrum. Absolutely. It can start as this very normal

18:48evolutionary, healthy, functional experience. But when you're starting to draw significance to the thought, you're starting to feel fused to the thought. It's starting to feel more real. And when you start to find yourself doing these compulsions, either in your head or with your body in the external world, that's when things are starting to shift into more disordered territory. Okay, that's a really helpful distinction. And I think it's like we were saying before, it's so hard for new moms today because so much of this like rumination and ritualization around sleep in particular, let's just use that as the example. Tracking sleep is so normalized counting minutes awake or counting minutes asleep like all of the wake windows and naps schedules and stuff like that is so normalized, checking on your babies, breathing or checking on their wearable monitor or wearable device, checking their AI monitor a million times to see what it's going to give you. Like so many of these things are so normalized. And it's almost like it makes you feel like you're

19:50only a good mom and you're only doing a good job if you are spending hours of your day obsessing about these things and making sure that your baby's getting enough sleep and tracking it and worrying about how much they're going to get or how much they're not going to get and all of that. I guess my question is how do you know when it's a healthy amount of that or not? And where is that tipping point do you think? That is one of the telltale kind of anomalies when it comes to people of anxiety and OCD. If it is one thing that people who struggle with anxiety and OCD want, it's usually some type of precise guide map. Let's go completely off theme here. That way people sometimes understand it a little bit better. But for the longest time, if we were working with someone who had say contamination OCD, one of the more common manifestations of OCD, fearfulness of germs and getting sick and they're washing their hands, a lot of times people would ask me, you know, like how do I tell that I'm washing my hands too much? Like when is it normal to wash your hands? Is it normal to not wash their hands? And there's really no such thing as normal, right? Like you

20:54might have one answer. I might have a different answer. If we were to pull 100 people anonymously, we might get different answers all over the place. And so we only really, when it came to COVID, when COVID happened, it was like, oh my gosh, I finally have like this one trusted source to give them. I finally have something to tell people. And it was the CDC guidelines. It was you need to have this one trusted source that you're following. And whatever the CDC guidelines say, right? Not what the CDC guidelines say and then what your mom says and then what your intuition says and then what your therapist says and then what your friend's uncle says, like you have one trusted source. And even if it doesn't feel perfect, even if you kind of question it every once in a while, you trust that source, right? But that's we don't have that. We don't have that for parenting. We don't have like one trusted source that we can put all of our trust into and put all of our confidence in all of our faith into. We have this article about sleep and this app about sleep. And so I wish that we did have kind of one trusted source that even if it doesn't feel 100%

21:58perfect and it doesn't like guarantee safety or, you know, calm 100%. We still have this this thing. And that's kind of the scary part of it. It being life. It being parenting is that there is no precise guide map. There is no like check boxes, at least none that we can sustain, right? Like we can't possibly sustain all these things. We can't possibly follow all of the recommendations perfectly without also sacrificing something else like our mental health or sleep, right? Like they're like, I gotta give. And so I think what's really important for people to understand is like it's okay to kind of like throw your hands up and surrender a little bit. Like you're not going to be able to do all of the safety precautions perfectly every single day forever for every single kid in all contexts. And also do all the right food and also do all the right school strategies and after school support like you we just can't do it. And there's something really sad about that. And it's also very it brings me peace. It brings me yeah. The one statement that

23:04really helped me so much as a mom was like that there's no perfect or right way to do it. It's whatever way works for you and your family. And I loved that because I was trying so hard to do it perfectly. I was trying so hard to check all the boxes and but I just I I couldn't I could not do it. And it was really reassuring in a good way for me to remember like there's no perfect way to do this. I'm going to do the best that I possibly can without also destroying my mental health. And at some point like I just got to trust and have faith and have confidence that I'm doing the best that I possibly can. I do think that that's a really good distinction for people who might be struggling with this is there's a difference between being certain about something like certainty we're never going to be certain about it. We're never going to be able to be certain at least not the way their anxiety wants us to be. We're never going to be able to be certain about the sleep or certain about the safety or certain about xyz. But we can have faith and we can have confidence

24:05and we can have trust. But those things are I think in and of themselves a little bit uncertain. So yeah, I think it's one of the hardest parts of parenting is just letting go of the fact that like you can't control for everything and you can't be perfect at everything and that is so hard for anyone. But it sounds like it's especially hard for people who have anxiety and OCD. And while you were talking about that, I was just thinking like, wow, parenting just there's just so many things that parenting brings up that must be so hard for someone with OCD. Like the sleep we've obviously already talked about, but you also were just talking about sickness and contamination. Like that also, I mean, kids are disgusting. They're constantly getting dirty. They're constantly getting sick. Like they must speak to you all the time. They don't allow you to like really sit and like plan or prepare. And I mean, one thing that is so challenging probably for anybody who is struggling with this is like, no matter what you do, you could follow all the rules, right? You could follow all the safety

25:07rules when it comes to sleep. You could follow all the right sleep training rituals and guidelines and specifications. You could do all of that. You could do all you could do it all perfectly. What every single article says, and they still might not sleep. And they still wake up and that's mind bubbling. It's mind bubbling. And you know, you could have your baby have the perfect night sleep. But then your sleep isn't good, right? Like I was dealing with I was caring for my 14-year-old dog and we used to we would have to wake up every two hours for him for the longest time. For the past week, I haven't been able to sleep because my body is so used to waking up every two hours to do it anymore because we had to put him down. But it's like, oh my gosh, I can finally sleep. But I'm not sleeping. And it's kicking me mad and I do think one thing that probably keeps moms up at night is this fear of like, oh my gosh, if I don't sleep, I'm going to be a rec tomorrow. Yes. If I don't sleep, I'm going to be miserable for work tomorrow. If I don't sleep, I'm going to

26:11be anxious tomorrow. If I don't get good sleep, X, Y, Z, I think that is normal, right? Like, of course, we all want to prioritize sleep. And of course, we all are better with good sleep. And I think that when we get too rigid and too overly controlling and too anxious about our sleep, we start to try to sleep. Yeah. Right. Like, I'm just trying so hard to go to sleep and I can't sleep and I'm trying so hard to relax. Trying to do anything is inherently not relaxing. Right. Right. So true. Yeah. My son granted he's eight, but he will say that all the time, like, I'm trying to go to bed and I can't fall asleep. I'm trying to fall asleep. And it's like, dude, trying is effortful. Effortful is inconsistent. And so I think something that we also need to make peace with is like, I can't try to sleep. I can put myself in the best possible position to sleep. And my job is to rest my body. My job is to not be on my phone. My job is not to be like walking around because

27:11you can't do those things and sleep at the same time. Right. Like, my job is to put myself and put my body, put my mind in the best possible position for sleep. But ultimately, it's out of your control beyond that. And so this trying to sleep, this effortful trying to control something that is ultimately uncontrollable really gets women. And I think that, well, that paired with, I mean, I see this all the time. That paired with the obsession with tracking is such a horrible combination because you're looking at the clock. You're doing all of this math in the middle of the night about how many times you've been woken up, how many hours you're going to be getting all together. And then it's that, what is it called? Like the the paradox, the insomnia paradox where the worse you imagine your night sleep based on how many hours you got or how many times you looked at the clock or something, the worse you feel the next day, even if objectively you didn't sleep any worse than a different night where you didn't see all of the hours on the clock. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a really good suggestion too. Like I would suggest if someone out there is trying to like meticulously control their sleep because they're so in the throes of their newborn

28:17sleep or their child sleep, like that is one thing that we can try. It's not going to be easy, but I would say to try to relinquish control of like the obsessive calculating of your own sleep. If you are on your phone and doing something that's incompatible with sleep and that we all know inhibits sleep being on our phone so that we can try to follow, like I mean, that's just a big red flag. Right. Right. So I would say something in that moment, if it was one of my clients and we were working on that together, we would try to work really hard on, you know, we're not going to try to follow sleep. We're not going to try. It's going to be like, it's going to be like, it's going to be like gripping on the sand, right? The more that you try to control it, it actually gets further and further from you. So we actually have to take a more relaxed approach, even though it feels very paradoxical, we're going to instead your only job is to put yourself in the best position for sleep. What does that mean? It means not being on your phone, not calculating and doing these elaborate math problems, which is obviously counterintuitive to sleep and, you know, having a little bit

29:22of faith, trust and confidence that, you know, I'm not certain that I'll get good sleep tonight, but I'm doing what I can, which is in my control. And I'm going to hope and have faith that I have good sleep tonight. And if not tomorrow, I'll let myself solve those problems if and when they come up. But my responsibility right now is to put myself in the best position possible for sleep, not to try to sleep, but to put my body and my mind in the best position possible to sleep. And that's all that we can do. The rest is set of our control. Completely agree. I love that advice. We are going to take one quick break. And then when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about treatment for OCD. We'll be right back. So, Jenna, I'm curious if someone's listening to this and they're like, that's me. That sounds like me. I guess my question is, where do you go for support? Because I think what some people don't realize about OCD too is that it's not something that you necessarily have. All of your life right like it can come on. Or maybe you just start to notice it

30:23more becomes more acute or more intense after you have a baby, right? Correct. So as I've mentioned, we all have those intrusive thoughts. The intrusive thoughts are not going to go away. Of course, we can try through these treatment strategies. We can try to make them less vivid, less controlling, less obvious in your life, less troublesome in your life. But I try to tell my clients, it's kind of like a cold, right? It's kind of like a cold or a headache. There's nothing that we can do to really get rid of that forever. And of course, they're unpleasant, but really what our job is is to make you increase your capacity for it. Increase your capacity to experience these very normal, very human experiences and change your relationship to them. Because again, it's not the intrusive thoughts that are the problem. I know it feels that way. But if that were the case, everyone who experiences intrusive thoughts would also struggle with OCD. And that's not true. What is the problem is your reaction to the thought and how you relate to the thought. And so we can't

31:23get rid of the intrusive thought. No more than we can get rid of sadness, no more than we can get rid of a cold or a headache. But we do our best to try to relate differently to that. So that when we experience these naturally occurring human experiences that are objectively unpleasant, we can still move forward and not compound our suffering. And so what that looks like is, you know, working with someone who understands evidence-based treatment for OCD and what that is is going to be exposure and response prevention. It's also known as ERP. And so what that basically entails is through a very specialized format. You're working with a therapist to understand that you basically do three things. You push yourself outside of your comfort zone. You reduce what are these compulsions or these safety behaviors. And we can talk about what some of those might be. But then you also work on reducing avoidance. And so as it relates to sleep specifically, it's also very important that people realize that OCD doesn't just come in this form of washing your hands or fear of germs or needing everything to be perfectly aligned in your cupboard. Those manifestations can happen,

32:27but they can also come, you can obsess and compulse over anything. You can certainly be obsessive and compulsive about sleep. You can be obsessive and compulsive about your child's development, your child's sleep. But does it really, it's limited only to your imagination? It's more so about like, whoa, I'm feeling really anxious about this. I feel like I have to do all these things, these compulsions to try to get rid of it or feel better about it. And I'm stuck in the cycle that just won't stop. So whether it is, you know, all of the obsessive and compulsive tracking of the apps, whether it is constantly checking monitors, right? Whether it is constantly going through these Facebook groups and seeking out just to see if anyone has your exact experiences and you're seeking for something desperately, the googling of things. I mean, I would get so into Google, it's one of those experiences where you like Google your baby's sleep and all the links are purple. Like because you've read them all, you've seen it all. Yeah. It's like, oh my gosh, thank you for the reminder that I've literally been down this rabbit hole already and there's nothing new.

33:29Well, now people are just ruminating on with chat GPT, which is huge and even scarier, even scarier, because it'll just validate all of your worries, right? Yeah. And it's there and it's quick. And that's what is so reinforcing about these compulsions because it's there and it's quick and you feel anxious and then you can suddenly like outsource it to something, right? It's so dangerous and so reinforcing and that's why it feels good for like four seconds. But unfortunately, it just makes everything worse because then you have another thought. You have another, you know, obsession, you have another thing that makes you anxious and you go right back to the thing. And again, it feels good for five minutes. But then it's I think I saw you say maybe somewhere that like reassurance is it kind of feeds OCD, which I don't know if I'd ever heard it said in the way you said it. And I'm not quoting you correctly right now. But can you talk a little bit about that reinsurance because I think so many of us, I mean, if it's not chat GPT, it's maybe like asking, like you said, a Facebook group of a million times if something's okay or asking our partner if

34:31they think something's okay, what is the the thing with reassurance and OCD cycles? One hundred percent. So the idea is anything could be compulsive, anything could be dysfunctional. And so there's really not like a comprehensive compulsion list. You'll find Google and of course, they're helpful. But anything could be compulsive. What I would want people to ask themselves to to determine, oh my gosh, is this related to my anxiety? Is this compulsive? Ask themselves WTF, what's the function? What's the function behind going on chat GPT? What's the function behind asking your partner XYZ? What's the function of going on to Google again? Are you doing it because I don't know, I just learned about this new thing and I'm curious. Or is it like I need to know this? I have read it before, but I'm not 100% sure. And if I don't figure it out now, I'm literally not going to be able to move on with my day. I have to know now or else. Usually it's the second, right? And so when

35:32it's that, when it's done with that urgency and it's done desperately like that, any behavior, again, whether it's the obsessive tracking of the apps, like I have to write this down right now and I can't figure it about it and it has to be perfect. And oh my gosh, if I am one minute off of my tracking, then it's all gone to hell, right? Like if it's that, that's a problem. That's a sign that this is directly related and feeding into your OCD. It is directly feeding the beast as you will. And so we have to try to start to target that. And so that's how that works. And so that reassurance, I mean, reassurance in general can be very functional. I am a therapist. I do this, I've done this since 2008. I wouldn't say that I meet criteria for OCD anymore, but you bet my son the other day, he was eight, he's eight years old. He was mowing the lawn for the first time just like getting used to it. And I have this intrusive fat, like, oh my gosh, what if he like gets swept under the lawn mower and he's just like chopped into a bunch of little pieces. And I ask my husband, like, is he going to be okay? Like, are you sure that he's going to be okay? Are you

36:34are you 100% sure that he's safe doing this? And my husband knows my tricks. He's also an OCD therapist who he's like, I don't know, I guess we'll see. I mean, what is it going to help me to say, like, oh, yeah, he's fine. It would help for two seconds. And I would be out there wondering about it again. Right. And when you start to get into that repetitive cycle, it feels like this bottomless bag. And so there's a difference between seeking support. Like, I will definitely still ask my husband sometimes like, dude, I'm just having a really bad day. Like, can you just like, love me? Can you just like remind me that I'm going to be okay? And of course, there's that. But then there's this one time my son through one of those tomogotchi's, he was like, we got him a tomogotchi years ago. And it started to be obnoxious as they are. And I think he like got frustrated and threw it against the wall. And I was like, oh my gosh, what if he grows up to be a sociopath? Like, what if he's going to grow up and have like this, in this like mental health condition, he's going to be a

37:36sociopath, he can't even take care of a tomogotchi. What if he does that to his kids? What if that's my fault? And I mean, you can't, yeah, ridiculousness of it, right? And a lot of times, we're asking for reassurance about things that don't have answers. We're asking reassurance about things that we already kind of know the answer to, but we just want to be a little bit more sure. I think one other helpful way that will help conceptualize this for people is OCD is called in other countries that's actually called the doubt disorder. It's actually called the doubt disorder. And a lot of other professionals have called it like a glitch in the good enough system, which I think is so incredibly helpful because that's what so much of this is, right? Like the sleep, oh, it's not good enough sleep or you know, like it's not enough to just have one app that I'm tracking everything on. I have to do this and that one article that I read that's not good enough. I need another article to kind of compound that and that one reassurance that I got from this Facebook group, it's not enough

38:36and so I need more and that not enoughness, where it just, it's like it, the goal post always moves. That's really indicative of of something else that might be going on, but it's totally addressable. Yeah, and it will come in the form of pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. So what that might look like is, you know, if you would, typically, you know, not want your partner, even though your partner is very willing to handle the diaper changes in the middle of the night, or your partner is very willing to take over a bottle of feed in the middle of the night, even though it's like really grind in your control gears and you don't want to maybe push yourself outside of your comfort zone and let them do that one time a night. Well, like it's going to be good in general to break this OCD cycle for you to get outside of your comfort zone. There's no way out of it otherwise. So that's an example of pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. We also talked about reducing compulsions, reducing these safety behaviors. What that might look like is if you would typically, you know, have four tracking apps on your

39:38phone for sleep, maybe delete them and have one. You know, even if it doesn't feel perfect, right? And you know, another example might be if you check your monitor, maybe 20 times in between the time where you finally lay down to rest, you read your book, but you're checking it 20 times, and you after every page you read, you have to look at your monitor, maybe go two pages of reading your book before you check the monitor, maybe go 10 pages, maybe go a whole chapter, like it's start to reduce those behaviors somehow, even if you can't resist them completely. Ask yourself how you can kind of like turn the dial back on some of those behaviors. If you go in and check your baby repeatedly at night, maybe start to make some limits, like I'm only going to do that at three times tonight instead of five or whatever. As long as you're going in the direction of trying to challenge this thing and go against it. And then finally, the last one, as we talked about, is reducing avoidance. And so let's say that you would avoid, I don't know what something that someone might avoid, maybe you're avoiding, well, I used to avoid just like leaving the house because I was worried

40:40that it would mess up our nap schedule. And again, if that's a preference for you, this is another good thing. Like if that works for you, and you're totally that person who's like totally fine to like being out and like, you don't need to leave and you're not impaired and you're totally fine, just saying in the, that's great for you. I love that for you. And I just want you to be happy. Like I want you to feel like you're rocking this motherhood thing. That's not working for you. And you're like, Oh my God, like I need to get out of the house. I need to get out of the house, but I'm so scared. I'm petrified that it's going to mess up a sleep schedule. And if a sleep schedule is messed up, then I'm not going to be able to sleep. And if I'm not able to sleep, then I'm going to be miserable tomorrow. And if I'm miserable spiraling, right, I'm the snap. And I might hook him, right? Like that's how we got to start to get out of that. We got to start to get out of that. And so maybe even if it's not avoiding, maybe if it's not going out and like screwing up the, the sleep routine 100%. What would it look like to mess? Right? Like what would it look like to go

41:43for if they're normally down at one? Maybe challenge yourself to stay out, go for a walk until one 10. It's all in the name of like, okay, how can I stop giving these ridiculous shackles exactly what it wants when it wants it? How can we work? How can we work against it? And kind of it's, there's a little bit of defiance to it. You have to again, you don't want to give OCD exactly what it wants when it wants it because the goal post is always going to move. Your world is just going to get smaller and smaller. And again, if it's working for you and it works for you to be checking your monitor all the time and it works for you to wake up and check your baby every 30 minutes, that's great. And if it's not working for you, we need to start to break that pattern and we do that by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone, reducing these safety behaviors and reducing those compulsions and ultimately reducing avoidance. Right. So how can someone, I mean, it sounds like some of this is very doable just on your own. Like once you learn the tools you talked about, maybe they pick up a book or pick up your book when it's out. That sounds all pretty doable. So how does

42:48somebody know when it tips into like really needing support from a therapist or do you recommend therapy regardless? There is something called the stepped care model, the stepped care approach. And so people can look that up. They use then universities. They're using it all over. The idea is that we want to give people the most potent, the most effective treatment that they need as possible without reducing or like using unnecessary resources, time, money, whatever. And so some people are going to be just fine learning about this on their own, trying to employ some self-help things on their own. And it's going to be very helpful for them. Just things that they might have read on social media, things that they've learned from this podcast, maybe a self-help book here and there. That's all going to be wonderful for a lot of people. There might be some people who try it. And then they struggle or they uncover things. Maybe they tried to push themselves outside of their comfort zone, but it backfired because there is some nuance to this work, right. And so they could then go and see their specialists, their therapists. I would just want somebody to make sure that

43:52they're working with someone who understands and specializes in OCD. Unfortunately, anyone can say that they specialize in OCD and they may, they may not. But it would be really important for me if it was someone that I love that they work with someone who specializes in OCD and that that person specializes specifically in exposure and response prevention. I love exposure and response prevention. That's a gold standard treatment. It is the most well researched. It's been around for decades. And there are also other strategies. It's not just exposure and response prevention. There are some other strategies that definitely can help and help you feel better alongside that main intervention. But would you say that it's important also for that provider to be experienced in the paranatal period? Or is there really not that much difference between postpartum OCD and regular OCD? I think so. I personally think so. I would say absolutely. If we could get someone who understands postpartum and being a mom and maybe they were there themselves and at least they even if they haven't been there themselves, they can at least understand and appreciate that it's

44:54not just as simple as like don't check your monitor, right. Not as simple as like, oh yeah, you're having thoughts of throwing your baby off the balcony. It's not that simple. Yeah, and I would want them to specialize in OCD and exposure and response prevention. That would be the best case scenario. Unfortunately, I think it would for a lot of people come down to logistics. It would come down to who's available and they're in their you know area. If they're taking insurance, we think about wait lists. Of course, that would be my absolute best case scenario that someone was specializing in both postpartum for international does have a really great system where you know, if you are specializing in these areas, you can kind of filter through and weed through. But unfortunately, I think it would come down to logistics for people just thinking about whether insurance is taken or wait list or therapist fits. So very important though, OCD, especially if this is really resonated with someone, this is not going to be something that gets better just through deep breathing exercises or challenging your thoughts. You said earlier in this episode like, you know, you try to

45:58that a lot of times these things don't make sense. Unfortunately, if you don't specialize in OCD, a lot of a therapist's natural reaction is to try to challenge that thinking with rational thing. And they'll try to challenge the thought or do like decatastrophizing or help you realize that the probability of this bad thing happening. It's not logical. Yeah, it doesn't respond to it because it's like trying to convince someone that the sky isn't blue because you can feel so strongly about this. You can feel so strong in your convictions about the need to have everything be perfect and the need for that control and the really true real feeling that like if I and again, the spiral, if I miss nap time, then he's going to be messed up. And if he's messed up, I'm not going to be able to sleep. And if I'm not able to sleep, then I'm going to be miserable. And if I'm miserable, I might snap and hurt my family. Like it can spiral. And it doesn't there's no amount of logic in and of itself that will really fix that. Right. Well, if anything, just make you feel silly because at some point you do know that it's rational, but you can't logic your way out of an

47:02illogical thought. Yeah, it just works like that. So there's always going to be one more but what if? Like you might say to me, well, you've never hurt your baby, right? You have four other kids. You've never hurt your baby. Why would you think that you'd hurt this one? I would say that's complete crap. Like I, I still feel like I would hurt this baby. What are you talking? It doesn't matter to me what you just said. So that would be my ideal situation, but there are also other more intensive levels of care. I think sometimes people mistake that therapy or mental health services is either hardcore, inpatient care hospital. I'm away from my family and it's like a dangerous situation for me or I just see a therapist once or twice a week in their office. And that's not true either. There's varying levels of care in between that. So if you feel like one or two times a week with a therapist isn't enough, there's also systems called intensive outpatient, which is usually IOP. It's like a part-time job. You go and you are in a system or a structure, a kind of group format for three or four hours a day. It's very structured. You get more intensive treatment

48:03than just one on one with a therapist once or twice a week. There's also partial hospitalization, which is like a full-time job. So like eight hours a day for five days a week, but you still come home for dinner, you still sleep in your own bed, you still get to see your family. And then there's also residential, which is where I work for 10 years. So that's where you know, you're not at imminent risk of hurting yourself or others. It's not just for stabilization purposes, but you live there. You are there 24-7 and you are getting care from a psychiatrist, a therapist, mental health technicians, and a nurse and everyone. And that was a really big privilege to work on that unit, because we're working with a lot of moms there. And I mean, you really just see the intensive care that people sometimes need, but very helpful for people to understand. There are so many great options out there. And if you can do this on your own, that's wonderful. And if you need more, that also is available for you too. Okay, that's really helpful, because my last question was going to kind of be, you just answered it a little bit, I think, but you might want to add, because my last question was going to be, how does this ever reach like a dangerous level? Like does the,

49:07do the intrusive thoughts or the compulsions do those ever reach a level where it is possible that a mom would hurt her baby or herself or would that then be getting into a different territory? And so research actually shows, this is very important. I'm so glad that you asked. Research shows, because a lot of the fear is like, oh my gosh, I had this fear or that like, I could snap into my baby, especially in the context of sleep, right? I gosh, like I just yelled at my baby, I just lost my temper with my baby. Like, what does that mean about me? Could I snap? Like, can I be trusted around them? Usually these, especially in the, in the context of OCD, these are unwanted thoughts. These are thoughts that bring people to their needs. These are thoughts that they are just terrified of. They feel so ashamed of. They want to do anything possible. They will rearrange their entire lives around making sure their babies are safe. And that they I mean, I've worked with women who did not hold their baby for six months because they were terrified. Like if they did, like, I would have this image of hurting them and I can't do that. Like,

50:09or I might drop them. Like, we will set ourselves on fire before we do anything to hurt our babies, especially in the context of OCD. And so research shows, too. They've actually done research to take these, these moms who have these unwanted, they're called ego-distonic. Ego-distonic means it conflict, conflicts with your character. That's why there's so much of them. They're conflicting with your character. These are not of your own accord. You're not conjuring up these thoughts. They're just happening to you, but it also makes you feel like, well, why am I having them? Like, that's weird. So they're ego-distonic people, new moms in particular, who endorse having these unwanted harm thoughts. They're actually no more likely than people who don't have these thoughts to actually act on them. So they're at no more risk than the average population to harm their babies. And some studies even say that they're at less of a risk. And I always tell my clients, like I would rather, if knowing all the thousands of people that I've worked with who have OCD and who have these thoughts, if I had a choice of who to give my newborn toots for babysitting or who to watch my

51:13eight year old to for babysitting, if I had a choice between a random stranger and somebody who has OCD, even ego-distonic unwanted harm thoughts, it's going to be with the person who has unwanted ego-distonic harm thoughts every single time because that person is terrified. That person is terrified and they're so careful. And they have thought about all the consequences and they have thought about all the dangers and that's all they can think about. And so I hope that brings some peace for them too. It's really important, especially in light of the Lindsey Clancy case and everything, just because you have these intrusive thoughts, it doesn't mean that you want to do it. In fact, the reason why they're so intrusive means that they conflict with your values. These are ego-distonic. And so I mean, we can definitely, having OCD doesn't mean that you can't also have depression, that you can't also have these other conditions that they, in and of themselves, as a distinct condition, can deteriorate to such a degree that, sure, I mean bad things could

52:13happen, but when it comes to OCD in particular, it's not that those thoughts would cause anything bad to happen. And like I said, as far as the research goes, these individuals who have these thoughts are at no more of a risk than the average population. If anything, they're at a lower risk because they're so avoidant and so hesitant and so careful. Okay, that is really reassuring. I know we spoke about reassurance not being good for people with OCD, but we will reassure that. I would be reassuring if you were thinking about it and like, okay, I just want to be sure, right? Totally. Exactly. Okay, well, this has been such an enlightening conversation. I know it's going to help so many people out there. Where can everybody learn more about you and your work and where can they find your book when it's out? What's going on with that process? Yes, so as you mentioned, my book coming out in February, 2027, I'm so happy to be booked to end with you. How did it happen so fast? Oh my gosh, so fast in the corner. But yeah, it's called making peace with a noisy mind. It'll be available in February. I can't wait for everyone to have it. But I'm mostly on Instagram, just Jenna dot overbot. It'll also have a website, Jenna overbot lbc.com

53:17with tons of resources, lots of free downloads, free videos. If you want to learn more about this, way more in depth here. And I also have been loving substack lately. I'm at the noisy mind on substack. I just get to go way more in depth there and work my brain a little bit more than I get to on Instagram. So that's right. Okay, perfect. We will link all of that and it cannot wait for your book. Thank you so so much for being here and have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Thank you.