There have been a small number of things in my life that I can truly say changed its course. Going to my first International OCD Foundation conference was one. That’s where, after trying on and off for decades to tame the monster that was my mind, I first learned there was an evidence-based treatment for OCD called exposure and response prevention, or ERP. Doing ERP was another, because it gave me a way to stop organizing my life around OCD’s demands and begin reclaiming the life I wanted.
And a few months ago, I came across a book that’s changed the way I experience both my recovery and my everyday life: The Gap and the Gain. In this post, I’m going to share how I’ve been applying the authors’ advice in my day-to-day life, and how these small changes can have a big impact on your life and your OCD recovery.
What are the Gap and the Gain?
In their book The Gap and The Gain, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy describe two very different ways of measuring our lives. They write, “You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal” (p. xxiii).
The problem with an ideal is that it keeps moving, as I illustrate with this quote from my memoir:
“I knew I was only as good as my last success, which had a shelf life. Like fruit left ripening on the vine, success had a short window in which it could be enjoyed before it—and my self-worth—started to decay.”
Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life, p. 88
In the Gap, you accomplish something, and there’s immediately something else you could accomplish. You make progress, and your brain notices how much further you could still go. You reach one goal, and another one appears right behind it.
The Gain uses a different measuring stick. As the authors write, “Being in the GAIN means you measure yourself backward, against where you were before” (p. xxvii).
Instead of measuring the distance between where you are and some ideal version of where you think you should be, you look backward and notice how far you’ve come.
When I read this, I immediately thought about OCD, because those of us with OCD can be experts in the Gap. Our brains are remarkably talented at finding gaps everywhere: in how our recovery is going, how well we did ERP today, how much anxiety we experienced, how productive we were, how well we handled a conversation, what kind of parent or partner we were, and what kind of person we believe we’re supposed to be.
There’s almost always another way we could have done something better.
And even after we’ve done ERP and gotten much better, we can continue living this way. OCD may have far less control over our lives, but we can still spend our days measuring ourselves against some ever-changing standard we can never quite reach. No matter what we do, it never seems to measure up.
Reading The Gap and The Gain helped me recognize how much of this I was still doing. So I started following several of the authors’ suggestions, and I’ve been practicing them for more than a month now. The combination has made a surprisingly large difference in how I see my days, my accomplishments, my recovery, and myself.
1. Write down three wins every day
Every night, I write down three wins from the day. At first, this was harder than I expected because I realized that I’d spent much of my life defining a “win” using someone else’s measuring stick. A win meant accomplishing something impressive, receiving praise, getting recognition, or reaching some external marker of success.
That’s the measuring system I described in Fred. My latest success could make me feel worthwhile for a little while, but the feeling expired. Then I needed another achievement to replace it.
Now I define wins very differently. A win can mean that I handled something a little better than I would have handled it before.
Sometimes that’s an outcome win, meaning I completed something I wanted to accomplish. Writing this blog post is an outcome win.
But many of my most meaningful wins are process wins, because they reflect how I’m learning to move through my life differently.
For example, I recently had some administrative tasks take much longer than I’d expected. In the past, I could have spent the rest of the day thinking about how much I hated administrative work, how irritating it was that everything took so long, and how behind I now was.
Instead, I accepted that the tasks had taken longer, adjusted my schedule, and moved on. That was a win because I responded to the situation differently than I would have before.
Your wins might be related to OCD and ERP, or they might have nothing to do with OCD at all. You might write, “I did my ERP today,” which is an outcome win. You might write, “When I got triggered, I transformed it into an opportunity to practice,” which is a process win. Or you might write, “I treated myself much more kindly today,” another process win.
The point isn’t to come up with three impressive accomplishments. It’s to train yourself to notice progress you might otherwise overlook.
2. Write down three goals for the next day
After I write down my three wins, I write down three goals for the next day. The authors recommend doing this because it helps frame the next day before it begins, so when you wake up, you already know where you’re heading.
Like my wins, my goals can be either process-oriented or outcome-oriented. Today my partner is having a medical procedure, so one of the goals I wrote down last night was to support him. That’s a process goal because there isn’t a box I can neatly check to prove I did it perfectly. Another goal was to write this blog post, which is much more outcome-oriented.
I tend to include both kinds of goals, but I often favor process goals because OCD loves accomplishments it can check off a list. My Optimization OCD can get very excited about completing things, especially if completion offers the promise of finally feeling caught up or finished.
But I’ve found that how I do things often matters more than how many things I get done.
I continue to work on approaching tasks flexibly, taking things as they come, incorporating rest breaks, and focusing on enjoying the process instead of racing toward an outcome. So my goals often reflect that. A goal might be to approach a frustrating task with more flexibility, take breaks before I’m completely depleted, or stay present with something I used to rush through because I wanted it over with.
Those goals may not look particularly impressive on a to-do list. For me, they represent meaningful progress.
3. Define what success means to you
The third idea has probably been the most powerful for me. Sullivan and Hardy write, “Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against” (p. 39).
For much of my life, my measuring stick was praise and accolades from other people. As I wrote in Fred, I believed I was only as good as my latest success. That meant I was measuring my worth against something I couldn’t control. But that didn’t stop me from working myself to exhaustion trying to control it.
There was always another achievement I could pursue, another person I could try to impress, another way I could prove that I was doing well enough. Even when I succeeded, the feeling never lasted very long because I was still living in the Gap.
Now I use a very different measuring stick. I pay much more attention to whether I was able to be present with what I was doing and whether I could mostly enjoy the experience of my day, even when the day itself wasn’t particularly exciting.
It’s an especially meaningful win when I can do that while I’m doing things I used to loathe, such as administrative work or chores. No one gives accolades for paying the credit card bill or scooping out the litter box, so those kinds of tasks never registered as success under my old system.
Now they can.
I also count it as progress when I can have a good day even when I’m tired, frustrated, anxious, or simply not feeling the way I wish I felt. I’m continuing to work on accepting that I won’t always feel how I want to feel, and that doesn’t prevent me from participating in my life.
Don’t let OCD turn the Gain into a compulsion
There’s one important caveat I want to add for those of us with OCD. We’re very capable of turning almost anything into another thing to monitor, evaluate, or do perfectly, and the Gap and the Gain could become one of those things too.
You don’t need to start asking yourself whether your wins were good enough, whether you picked the correct three goals, whether you were “in the Gain enough” today, or whether you’re measuring your progress properly. If this practice turns into another way to grade yourself, it’s probably worth stepping back and remembering why you’re doing it.
For me, the purpose is to widen my view so I can notice progress that my old measuring system would have ignored.
Choose your own measuring stick
The combination of these three practices has taken my recovery, and my life, to another level. Each night, I spend just a few minutes writing down three wins from the day and three goals for tomorrow, while continuing to think intentionally about what I want success to mean for me.
Of course, we all have external goals we need to meet. Your boss may have expectations for your work. People and pets under your care depend on you. Bills still need to get paid, and sometimes there really are deadlines that matter.
But you can still give yourself the gift of choosing how you want to measure your progress.
For those of us with OCD, who can spend so much of our lives noticing everything that feels unfinished, imperfect, uncertain, or not good enough, learning to look back and see how far we’ve come can be a powerful shift.
The Gap will always be available if we go looking for it. But so will the Gain.
