Ride out a compulsion instead of checking
When the urge to perform a compulsion (like checking) hits, don't give in. The anxiety will spike at first, but the longer you hold without acting, the more it falls on its own. Tolerating the rising anxiety and letting it crest is how the loop weakens instead of being fed.
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A compulsion offers fast relief, and that relief is exactly what trains the brain to do it again — each time you check, the anxiety drops, and the loop is reinforced. The counterintuitive fix is to break the reinforcement by not performing the behaviour, a core idea in exposure and response prevention.
In practice: when the urge arrives, resist it and stay with the discomfort. Expect the anxiety to climb at first — that rise is the part that usually sends people back to the compulsion. But if you hold and wait, the anxiety peaks and then begins to come down on its own, because nothing catastrophic happens and the body habituates. The longer you go without giving in, the lower it settles. Repeated, this teaches the nervous system that the feared outcome doesn’t require the ritual, and the urge loses its force over time. It helps to treat this as a planned practice (and serotonin-supporting treatment plus professional guidance can sit alongside it for clinical OCD), but the move itself is simple: let the urge rise, don’t act, wait for it to fall.