If you’ve ever had a thought loop round and round in your mind, or felt driven to carry out checking behaviours — like checking a lock, a switch, or a message multiple times — even when part of you knows it’s not really necessary, you’ll understand how exhausting Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can be. It’s a condition that’s often misunderstood — reduced to jokes about tidiness — when in reality it can be relentless, distressing, and deeply disruptive to daily life.
I’m Jonathan Garside, an Associate of The Royal Society of Medicine and a member of The National Hypnotherapy Society, with 30 years’ experience as a clinical hypnotherapist practising in London, Singapore, Sydney and New York, now based on Regent Street.
Hypnotherapy has real, meaningful value to offer people living with OCD — particularly around the anxiety and nervous system activation that so often sits underneath obsessive thinking. I’ll be straightforward with you about where that value lies: the gold-standard, NICE-recommended treatment for OCD is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with Exposure and Response Prevention (CBT with ERP), sometimes alongside medication, and hypnotherapy works best as a powerful complement to that treatment rather than a replacement for it. Used this way, it can make a genuine difference to how manageable the whole process feels.
OCD Is More Common — and More Serious — Than Most People Think
OCD affects an estimated 750,000 people in the UK at any one time — around 1.2% of the population — with about half of all cases classed as severe. Worryingly, NHS England’s Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey found that reported OCD among 16 to 24 year-olds has more than tripled over the past decade, rising from 1.8% in 2014 to 5.7% in 2023/24. Despite this, OCD remains widely under-diagnosed, partly due to stigma and partly because people don’t recognise their own experience in the “neat and tidy” stereotype so often portrayed in the media.
If you recognise persistent, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) alongside repetitive behaviours or mental rituals aimed at reducing the anxiety they cause (compulsions), it’s worth speaking to your GP about a referral for a proper assessment. Early, correctly targeted treatment tends to lead to significantly better outcomes.
Why Intrusive Thoughts Feel So Hard to Escape
One of the cruellest features of OCD is that trying to suppress or “not think about” an intrusive thought almost always makes it louder. The mind fixates on what it’s told to ignore. This creates a cycle: an unwanted thought triggers anxiety, a compulsion (physical or mental) temporarily relieves that anxiety, and the brain quietly learns that the compulsion “worked” — reinforcing the whole loop for next time.
Layered on top of this is often a heightened, hypervigilant nervous system — a background hum of anxiety that makes every intrusive thought feel more urgent and more dangerous than it actually is. This is exactly where hypnotherapy earns its place: not in confronting the content of the thoughts directly, but in doing genuinely effective work turning down that background hum, so the anxiety driving the whole cycle has less fuel to run on.
How Hypnotherapy Can Support People With OCD
Hypnosis for intrusive thoughts works a little differently to how most people imagine — it isn’t about “erasing” a thought, but about changing your relationship to it, and it can be a powerful part of your overall recovery. Working hand-in-hand with properly delivered CBT/ERP, hypnotherapy sessions with clients managing obsessive thinking, checking behaviours and other compulsive behaviours often focus on:
- Calming baseline anxiety, so intrusive thoughts have less raw material to attach to and amplify.
- Reducing anticipatory anxiety, particularly useful for clients who are actively doing ERP work and need support tolerating the discomfort between sessions.
- Building a sense of psychological distance from thoughts, so a thought is experienced as “a thought passing through,” rather than something urgent that demands immediate action.
- Supporting sleep, since obsessive thinking often intensifies at night when the mind is otherwise unoccupied.
- Reinforcing self-compassion, as shame and self-criticism about having intrusive thoughts in the first place is one of the most common — and most unnecessary — burdens people with OCD carry.
What to Expect From a Session
You remain fully aware throughout hypnosis; it’s simply a state of deeply focused, relaxed attention, similar to the feeling of being completely absorbed in something you enjoy. We’ll begin with a thorough conversation about your specific experience of OCD — what your obsessions and compulsions look like, what treatment (if any) you’re already receiving, and where you feel additional support would help most. From there, sessions are tailored entirely to you.
A Client’s Story
“I’d been referred for CBT, but was told the waiting list was over a year — which felt unbearable when the checking was taking up hours of my day. I started working with Jonathan while I waited, and honestly, the change was bigger than I expected. Within a few sessions the constant background anxiety had eased enormously, and the checking rituals that used to control my whole evening had shrunk right down. By the time my NHS appointment finally came through, I was in a completely different place — calmer, more in control.” — H.K., Marylebone
Getting the Right Support
If you think you may have OCD and haven’t been assessed, your GP is the right starting point, and OCD-UK offers excellent, practical guidance on the condition and the NHS treatment pathway. If you’re already receiving CBT with ERP or medication, hypnotherapy can be a valuable addition to that care — working directly on the anxiety underneath your symptoms, alongside the treatment your clinical team has recommended, to help you get the most out of it.
Ready to Find Some Calm?
If intrusive thoughts or obsessive thinking are wearing you down, I’m based on Regent Street, London — a short walk from Oxford Circus. Your initial consultation can be held either in personor via Telehealth video call, whichever suits you best; therapeutic sessions themselves always take place face-to-face at the clinic. You can book an initial 30-minute consultation completely FREE of charge No pressure, no obligation — just a conversation about how hypnotherapy could support you on your journey. To find out more, visit our ADHD and Neurodivergence web page at https://thehypnosisclinic.com/services/ocd