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I was talking with someone on Reddit this morning about their #OCD and I reminded myself of one of the biggest things that helped me get a better handle on my own OCD. By all means it wasn't a 'cure' but every day for about 3 or 4 months I would run the shower cold before I ...
Got in. The cold air filling the room started to trigger that stress response as I'm thinking "this is going to feel absolutely awful". But every day I'd build up to that 'jump' point when you make the decision to do the scary thing and step into the freezing stream of water...
Every day was just as sore as the last as the water would slap of my skin and I'd stand shivering for a few moments before I'd begin to turn the heat up and wash normally. However I noticed the time it took me to build up the courage to finally jump in reduced day by day...
Until I reached the point where although I knew it felt horrible, there was little to no stress response about jumping in, and I almost did it without a thought. This really helped me get in the mindset of "do the scary thing", and helped me conceptualise that rather than ...
Trying to remove all the anxiety I was facing from the world, I had to train myself to be braver, and better prepared to face up to the scary stuff. Starting with something small, like getting in a cold shower, was useful to help me build up to scarier things, a little bit ...
At a time. That alone was never going to 'remove' my #OCD but it was part of the foundations of the path to recovery. I'm not saying I don't get OCD flare ups and give into compulsions occasionally, but this was a huge factor in me getting to where I am now.
I did also read that cold showers can apparently lower levels of cortisol which probably also helped a lot, maybe lowering my baseline anxiety slightly so I was a little bit better prepared to face things. An added bonus was that it stopped the mirror fogging over as much 
