Overcome OCD With Walking Sensory Meditation

I invented this and swear by it!

In the summer of 2022 when finishing version 8 of the COVID Guide and the Healing From COVID Vaccine Side Effects guide (each one of ten ebooks free to Masterpass members here), I realized that I could be dramatically more effective if I could spend 4-6 weeks of unbroken deep work without taking any days off, and then take off all the weekends I owed myself back-to-back in a road trip.

This allowed me to go much deeper into deep work, and then also much deeper into relaxation and fun.

However, it did not come without a cost.

After finishing the first of those two ebooks, I was walking down the street and found myself worrying that I did not fully understand the mechanistic link that translated my will into a neural impulse that made me move, and that this made me vulnerable to forgetting how to do this and being unable to reconstruct it.

I immediately recognized this concern as absurd and a result of flexing my analytical brain so extremely that it overpowered everything else, reducing me to dependence on analytical acuity for things that I should just accept, like the ability to walk down the street.

I decided that the cure for this was to go deeply into the other extreme.

I went on a road trip. I banned myself from listening to podcasts. I was only allowed to listen to music, and I was only allowed to connect to the music as sensory experience. I wasn’t allowed to look up the lyrics or read about anything. I would go to museums, but only to look at the art and not to read any of the placards. I went to the ocean and banned myself from using my phone. I listened to the waves, I watched the birds in the sky. I got several deep tissue massages and told the therapist I was banned from talking or making any decisions, and to just use the session to express her creative art.

This got me back into my body and back into the sensory world and out of my analytical brain.

I had rebalanced.

But how could I take advantage of this extreme polarization without becoming so imbalanced in the first place?

I spent months trying to figure this out, and eventually invented what I call a “walking sensory meditation.”

It is quite possible that I know so little about the history and current practice of meditation that this was invented by someone else thousands of years ago.

But I personally hobbled it together from a variety of influences and tailored it to suit my needs.

Each morning during my deep work phase I start my day with a walk.

I start my walk by looking at the palms of my hands, and then the backs of my hands. Then I look down at my feet.

This allows me to focus my attention onto the physical proportions of my body in the space it occupies using my vision.

Then, I focus my attention into the feeling of my foot landing on the ground and my posterior chain activating as I step forward. This connects me to my movement in space using my sense of touch.

Then I look around and focus my eyesight on anything in my surroundings, looking at each thing for only a few steps before looking at something else, maintaining a constant switching of attention to the different things around me. This maintains my attention to the three-dimensional world around me using my sense of sight.

At any point, if I find myself thinking, I return my attention to my feet hitting the ground, my posterior chain activating, and whatever I can look at in my surroundings.

If I get the sense that I have been in thought for some period of time, I restart the entire process by looking first at my hands and then my feet.

If I feel very secure in my attention being distributed among my sight and touch without spending any time in thought, I start to place my attention on what I can hear in my surroundings, and try to connect it to what I was looking at without any “thought bridge” between the two. That is, without thinking about the connection. However, I find this to be a higher-skill activity that I am only sometimes ready for.

I have found this an extremely valuable practice for helping me stay balanced during periods of extended deep analytical work.

I believe this could be used as a model therapy for a significance subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The neurobiology of (OCD) is complex and controversial, but some of its features are as follows:

• Increased dopamine-based input of the striatum into the orbitofrontal cortex driving excessive habit formation.

• Decreased activity of the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical loop of the “salience network,” which integrates input from the five senses to exert control over cognitive function. 

• Decreased responsiveness to punishment in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which prevents the negative consequences of OCD from disincentivizing the underlying patterns.

The cerebellum also plays a role in OCD. The cerebellum is mainly thought to be involved in controlling balance and movement, especially in fine-tuning movement learning by consequence-based prediction and course-correcting. For example, helping you learn to balance better when your balance is challenged in an exercise. However, the cerebellum may fine-tune cognitive learning through prediction and course-correcting in the same way. There are case reports of OCD arising from damage to the cerebellum. Further, recent research shows that OCD in general involves poor functional connectivity between the cerebellum and the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical loop. This suggests a deficit in applying the fine-tuning function of the cerebellum to the use of sensory experience to control cognitive processes.

There is also a role of the raphe nuclei of the pons, medulla, and midbrain: these are the sources of serotonin in the brain. Limited evidence suggests the pons and midbrain may have reduced ability to transport serotonin in OCD. 

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are considered the first line of defense in mainstream OCD treatment, and likely work by increasing the responsiveness to punishment, a known role of serotonin. This allows the negative consequences of OCD to exert negative feedback on the formation and persistence of the underlying cognitive patterns.

Research in mice suggests that adenosine plays a direct role in stimulating the excessive dopamine input into habit-forming networks, and one double-blind, placebo-controlled study suggested that caffeine beneath the individual’s threshold for anxiety reduces OCD symptoms by an average of 12%.

The management of OCD in clinical practice usually involves SSRIs or the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor clomipramine along with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), as well as evaluation for and treatment of any other co-existing psychological disorders. CBT starts with the recognition that obsessions are normal in healthy individuals, and that they become pathological when an individual attaches excessive importance to them and develops maladaptive rituals to deal with them. The central methodology is exposure and response prevention, where therapist-led exposure to anxiety-producing triggers is practiced alongside preventing the use of anxiety-coping rituals and staying immersed in the experience of the trigger until the anxiety spontaneously decreases.

I think my walking sensory meditation could be a form of this in some contexts, but I think what it is actually best suited for is addressing the ability of the cerebellum to infuse the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical loop with sensory information that is used to course-correct cognitive processes.

In this sense it is very similar to the ability of exercise to improve cerebellar ataxia, a condition where the cerebellum’s ability to coordinate movement is impaired.

In other words, one of the problems in OCD is living too much in one’s head and not enough in the real world.

The fix for this is to get out of your head and into your body by intentionally immersing yourself in your physical and sensory experience of the real world and refusing to think about it.

I think this meditation is also more broadly suited for improving my sensory connection to the outside world. One of the best illustrations of how I’ve always been more in my head than in the world is a picture of me playing soccer in elementary school where everyone is looking at the ball but I am looking at the sky. I remember “he’s in his own little world” often said of me in amusement or frustration by adults around me. I have often received compliments about my propioception in my adulthood because I have generally been good at training my body. But I have never been complimented on my quick perceptions of or reactions to the things happening in physical space around me.

In the Beebian view of Jungian cognitive function analysis my introverted thinking (defining, explaining, building models and theories) is my lead function, which I use to be the hero of my own story; my extroverted intuition (pattern recognition through connecting external dots, learning new ideas) is my secondary function I use to help others; my introverted sensing (propioception, memory) is how I receive help from others; my extroverted feeling (relating) is what animates me and how I stay grounded; extroverted sensing (enjoyment, physical sensation, objective reality) is in my Jungian shadow playing the role of trickster (it really tricks me, or I just don’t trust it).

This explains why I would so easily lose trust in sensory experience as a form of knowledge and excessively trust in my own analysis even where it had no value.

In this view, the fifth decade of life is time to start integrating the shadow. So this walking sensory meditation is also a timely practice for me to master one of my lifelong weaknesses in the interest of becoming a more fully developed person.