# Mindfulness gives you peace of mind It has probably already happened to you that, one morning, a few minutes after you left home, you suddenly wondered if you had properly closed the door. You came all the way back to check and, indeed, the door was closed. You unlocked it and locked it again, just to be safe. You left and, soon after, you wondered if you had locked it properly the second time; you came back and, again, the door was closed. Then, inevitably, you wondered what was going on with your brain. Three parts of the brain are involved here: the *orbital cortex* is responsible for detecting if you have done something correctly or not, the *cingulate gyrus* makes you feel uneasy until the mistake is corrected, and the *caudate nucleus* activates when it is corrected, allowing you to shift gears. What happened is that the caudate nucleus did not shift gears as it was supposed to; therefore, the cingulate gyrus kept on making you feel anxious. For people affected with obsessive-compulsive disorder, this is a recurring event. One way to solve this issue is to manually shift gears by initiating another constructive activity for as long as needed. Of course, it requires practice, but it has been shown to improve the patients' condition. For normal people, a simpler solution is to be mindful of the action the first time. --- ## 📚 References - [[@whativelearnedScienceHowOCD2017|Science of How OCD Works (Dealing with Brain Lock)]]