A few years back, I wrote “You Cannot Manifest Your OCD,” and it continues to be one of my most popular blog articles. I thought it might be interesting to talk through this notion of manifesting and Just Do Nothing.™
The Part Manifesting Gets Right
There’s nothing wrong with a vision board to help you see your goals. If manifesting has helped you genuinely move toward something meaningful, that’s great. There’s real psychology behind the idea that getting clear on what you want matters.
Knowing your “why” — your north star, your values, whatever you want to call it — is something I talk about often. When things get hard (and they will), having clarity around your “why” may help keep you from bailing. And you certainly can’t work toward a goal you haven’t articulated.
Intention? Yes. Getting specific about what you’re moving toward? Absolutely. These are real things with real weight behind them, and the manifesting world isn’t wrong to emphasize them.
The problem isn’t the destination. It’s the method for getting there.
Where Manifesting Your Thoughts Causes Trouble
The law of attraction says that thinking the right thoughts causes the right outcomes. Positive thoughts attract positive results. Negative thoughts attract negative results. Your inner world creates your outer world.
Here’s what I keep seeing in my office: this belief, when it takes root, turns your internal experience into a project you have to constantly manage. It leaves you exhausted. Plus, the thinking trap of thought-action fusion hooks people, especially those with OCD. Thought-action fusion is the belief that if I think something, it makes it more likely to happen or that it somehow reflects my moral character. That’s why manifesting negative thoughts is so terrifying.
I had a client (whom I mention in my book) who’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on life coaching, masterminds, and workshops all promising to help her “step into her power” and manifest abundance. She had intrusive thoughts she found distressing (a very common and treatable thing, by the way), and because she’d been taught that thoughts could manifest reality, she was terrified of her own mind.
She started doing what she called “vibe checks,” or scanning her environment, the people around her, and her own internal state before doing anything. If she felt even the slightest discomfort, she’d cancel plans. If she didn’t like the energy in a room, she left. She once walked out of a doctor’s office minutes before an appointment because the vibe wasn’t right. She wanted to find a therapist who could “just keep it positive.”
The thing she believed was protecting her had become a cage.
And this isn’t just an OCD story. This is what happens to a lot of people who take the manifesting premise to its logical conclusion, which is that if my thoughts shape my reality, then I can never afford to have a bad one.
The “good vibes only” sign goes up. The thoughts get monitored. The feelings get curated. And life starts shrinking.
Thoughts Are (Mostly) Just Thoughts
Most of the time, your thoughts are just thoughts— not predictions or verdicts on your character, and not previews of your future if you don’t act on them. Of course, some thoughts are accurate. When our emotions are intense, however, they’re usually just thoughts. Who hasn’t thought something when they’re super angry or scared that they’d never think about when the emotions were less intense?
Trying to resist thoughts can often cause more trouble. There’s something called Ironic Process Theory, or the White Bear Effect, and it basically says the harder you try not to think about something, the more you think about it.
Try it right now. Don’t think about a red apple. Don’t think about how firm the skin is, how it would crunch.
See?
Trying to suppress or curate your thoughts doesn’t make them go away. It makes them louder and stickier. The more energy you pour into monitoring your inner state, the more your inner state becomes all you can see.
When my client finally committed to treatment — after a year and another $10,000 spent on interventions that didn’t work — the thing that changed everything wasn’t learning to think better. It was learning to let her thoughts be there while continuing to live. She learned to treat uncomfortable thoughts like junk mail. When they show up, you notice them, knowing you don’t have to open them.
A year after treatment, she emailed me to say she’d never felt better. Oh, and she got rid of the “Good Vibes Only” word art. (If you’ve read my book, you know how I feel about these phrases.)
The OCD thought loop she’d been stuck in for years didn’t resolve because she fixed her thinking. It resolved because she stopped treating her thoughts and feelings as emergencies.
What Does Just Do Nothing Have to Do With Manifesting?
Just Do Nothing isn’t anti-intention. It’s actually pro-action.
The JDN process is actually compatible with the part of manifesting that works — get clear on where you want to go, know your why, know what matters, and keep it front and center.
What JDN pushes back on is the idea that you need your thoughts and feelings to be in the right place before you can take a step. That your inner state has to be curated, managed, optimized before you’re allowed to move.
You don’t. You can’t, actually, not reliably. Your brain wasn’t designed for that level of control, and the attempt to achieve it tends to create the very anxiety you’re often trying to avoid.
The JDN paradox is that when you do nothing with challenging thoughts and feelings — you don’t fight them, fix them, or wait for them to change — you can do the behavior you set out to do. The discomfort doesn’t have to leave the room for you to act.
You can be uncomfortable and still move.
Behavior changes perception much faster than the other way around. I’ve seen this over and over again. People wait to feel ready, feel motivated, feel aligned, and the waiting is what keeps them stuck. They do the thing, they find out they can handle it, and the perception shifts. That’s the sequence that actually works.
What to Do Instead
Get clear on what you want. That part is worth keeping from the manifesting toolbox. Ask yourself where you want to be, and get specific.
Then ask, “what’s the smallest next step I can take toward that, right now, regardless of how I feel?”
Not the step that requires you to feel confident. Not the one you’ll take once the anxiety settles. The one you can take with the anxiety right there alongside you.
Acknowledge what’s in your head. Let it be there. And keep moving.
It’s usually not glamorous. It doesn’t photograph well, but it’s what actually builds the life you’re trying to manifest.
