Every urge rises, crests, and falls — whether or not you obey it. This is a place to wait it out.
Everything above stays free, always. These add to it.
Read the welcome again · User guide · Disclaimer & terms
The Wave is a companion for the hours that are hardest to get through alone. It comes from real life rather than a textbook — from a family who lives with OCD and anxiety every day. Whatever you are carrying today, you are not the first to carry it, and you are not carrying it alone.
It follows the principles of exposure and response prevention, which means it will never answer the question your OCD is asking. That refusal is deliberate, and it's the whole point.
Pick the closest fit. It doesn't have to be exact.
Put the demand into your own words. Naming a compulsion out loud is most of the work of not performing it.
The line above is meant to feel unresolved. That's the point — it refuses the argument instead of winning it.
Calming down is not the goal — you can do the hard thing while shaking. But a body stuck in alarm can't hear anything, so start here if you need to.
Long exhales, longer than the inhale. Feet flat, name five things you can see. Panic peaks in minutes and cannot sustain itself — it always runs out of fuel. You don't have to do anything to make it stop.
Ideas, not prescriptions. Exposures work best built with a therapist, in an order you choose, repeated until they get boring.
Don't do the compulsion. Don't fix anything. Just watch the shape of it.
Set where it is right now, then start. No fixed length — run it until it eases.
hard to think about anything else
Waves keep rolling for as long as the timer runs, then fade out on their own. Headphones make it more convincing.
Postponing counts. Every minute you don't perform the compulsion is a minute your brain spends learning that the alarm was wrong. If you need to delay again after this, delay again.
If breath-holding feels bad, drop the holds and just breathe out longer than you breathe in. Slow exhales are the part that does the work.
Say each one out loud if you can. Ordinary things count — a scuff on the floor, the hum of the fridge.
Roughly one in a hundred adults has OCD in any given year — millions of people. A great many of them have had the exact thought you're most ashamed of. It's common enough to have a name in the clinical literature. You are not the exception.
And the people who get better mostly don't get there by feeling braver. They get there by doing the boring, repeated, unglamorous work of not answering it, on days that felt exactly like this one.
Written on a clear day, read on a bad one. Your own words carry further than anyone else's — and so do words a person who loves you writes here.
Careful with these: a note that answers the fear ("the door is definitely locked") becomes a reassurance ritual. Notes about who you are and what you can stand hold up better.
Write it as close to the moment as you can. Fill in what you know and skip the rest — a thin entry beats no entry.
6 — hard to think about anything else
3 — noticeable
"Did the compulsion" is a normal entry. Everyone in recovery has hundreds of them, and an honest record is worth more to your therapist than a flattering one.
What it demanded, what you did, and what happened next.
Rituals you've taken off the table, and the rule you're holding to instead. Add them when you're steady, not mid-spike.
Green means you held or delayed. Amber means you did it differently. Rose means the compulsion won that one.
Exports everything as a plain text file you can print, email, or paste into a session note.
Exposure and response prevention. You approach what the fear points at, and then you don't perform the ritual — not while gritting your teeth waiting for relief, but long enough that your brain quietly updates its estimate. The anxiety drops on its own. It always does; the compulsion just keeps stealing the credit.
The exposure is the easy half to explain. The response prevention is the half that works.
The older model said exposure works because anxiety habituates — it drops if you stay long enough. Newer work on inhibitory learning says that is not really the mechanism. Plenty of people habituate and do not improve; others improve without habituating at all.
What seems to matter more is expectancy violation: writing down what you believe will happen, then finding out it does not. The session ends when the prediction is disconfirmed, not when you feel better. Surprise is the active ingredient, which is why easy exposures teach so little.
It also matters that you learn the feeling is survivable, not just that the situation is safe. Anxiety, disgust and guilt are not faults to be fixed.
This is why the wave timer asks what you are afraid will happen before you start, and what you learned when you finish. The approach is promising rather than proven, and its own authors say it is not yet a replacement for standard ERP — which is why both are here. See the IOCDF article by Jonathan Abramowitz, PhD.
Mental review. Replaying the conversation. Praying until it feels right. Checking whether you still feel anxious. Googling. Asking a partner one more time. Reading this app for the eleventh time tonight. These count, and they're often the ones that keep a person stuck after years of treatment, because they never made it onto anyone's list.
SSRIs, often at higher doses and for longer than in depression, help a substantial number of people with OCD, and are frequently combined with ERP rather than used instead of it. Some people add another agent. That's a conversation for a prescriber who treats OCD specifically — and worth returning to if a past trial was short, low-dose, or twenty years ago.
List things you avoid, rate the dread from 0 to 10, and start near the bottom — not at the top. Repeat each rung until it's dull, then climb.
The International OCD Foundation keeps a directory of therapists, intensive programs, and residential facilities at iocdf.org/help, filterable by specialty and credential.
Questions worth asking a prospective therapist: Do you use exposure and response prevention, specifically? What proportion of your caseload is OCD? Will you leave the office to do an exposure if that's what it takes? Vagueness about ERP, or discouragement about medication, are both reasons to keep looking.
Talk therapy that analyzes the content of obsessions — why this fear, what it means about you — tends to make OCD worse rather than better. It's an understandable trap, and a common one.
This page is for a partner, parent, or friend. It's the part of OCD that no one warns families about.
Answering "are you sure it's clean?", doing the checking for her, rearranging the household around what's safe to touch — these come from love, and they are the single strongest predictor of a poor outcome in OCD. Each answer buys a few minutes of calm and raises tomorrow's price. Most families are deep in it before anyone names it.
Withdraw accommodation gradually, agreed in advance and in writing, ideally with their therapist — not suddenly in the middle of a spike. Announced ahead of time it's a plan; done mid-crisis it's a betrayal.
Years of this is a long time to be the steady one. Family programs exist — the IOCDF directory lists support groups for relatives, and SPACE is a structured treatment aimed at family accommodation that works through the family member rather than the patient. Your own therapist is not a luxury here.
Two things can be true at once: they are not their OCD, and living alongside their OCD has cost you something real. You're allowed to say the second part out loud somewhere.
Every crisis tool in this app is free and always will be. Nothing that helps you get through a spike will ever sit behind a payment screen. Plus adds the things that help between them.
Seven days free. Nothing is charged until the trial ends, and cancelling during it costs you nothing.
Payment is handled entirely by Stripe. Card details never touch this app, and nothing you write in the app is ever sent to them.
By subscribing you agree to the terms of use. The Wave is an educational and self-help tool, not medical treatment, and it is not a substitute for professional care.
If the price is the thing standing in your way, write to hello@ocdwave.com. We would rather you had it.
Written words get thin when it's loud. A voice doesn't. Record yourself on a steady day, or hand the phone to someone who loves you and let them say it.
Tap to record
Say the thing you'd want to hear at four in the morning.
Recordings are stored on this device only. They are never uploaded.
All generated live, so nothing loops and nothing needs a connection.
Nothing playing.
Everything here is calculated from your ban book, on this device.
This section is for the person supporting someone with OCD. It's built around the one thing that changes outcomes most: reducing accommodation without reducing love.
Log a request for reassurance or a ritual you were asked to join. Over weeks this shows whether accommodation is actually coming down.
Write the exact wording you both settled on, so you're not improvising at midnight.
Agree it in advance, in writing, ideally with their therapist. Announced ahead of time it's a plan you made together. Done suddenly mid-spike it lands as a betrayal, and you'll both pay for it for weeks.
Pick one accommodation at a time. Name the date it changes. Say what you'll do instead, out loud, before it happens.
Being the steady one for years is its own kind of exhausting, and there's rarely anywhere to put that down. Two things are true at once: they are not their OCD, and living alongside it has cost you something real. You're allowed to say the second part out loud somewhere.
The IOCDF lists support groups for family members at iocdf.org/help. SPACE is a structured treatment that works through the family member rather than the patient, and it exists precisely because accommodation is so hard to unwind alone. Your own therapist is not a luxury here.
Your ban book, bans, notes and settings live in this browser. Clearing site data would take them with it, so keep a copy somewhere.
Everything except voice recordings, in one file you can keep in cloud storage or email to yourself.
Cloud sync needs an account, and accounts need a server. That part isn't switched on yet. Until it is, the backup file above moves everything between devices: download on one, restore on the other.