Things to Keep In Mind if You Have OCD

While there’s a plethora of information surrounding anxiety disorders, most of them revolve around general anxiety disorder. On the other end of the spectrum is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. OCD is a mental disorder involving intrusive, anxiety-inducing thoughts (obsessions). Sometimes, to pacify these obsessions, the individual may engage in repetitive behaviours or actions, called compulsions. 

OCD can be an extremely stressful experience. It traps you in a vicious cycle of obsessions and compulsions. It almost feels impossible to escape, lest the anxiety-inducing thoughts come true. When left unaddressed, OCD can severely affect your daily life. 

Treatment can help address certain maladaptive beliefs that OCD is accompanied by. It is important to psychoeducate yourself about these beliefs, so you can work towards feeling better. 

Thoughts associated with OCD

Some of the thoughts associated with OCD are as follows: 

1. Inflated sense of responsibility: This means that you may push yourself to be hyper-responsible. You could have a sense of inflated responsibility about your thoughts, where you believe it’s your duty to prevent any harm to yourself and others. Due to this, you will hold yourself responsible for preventing these intrusive thoughts from occurring by engaging in compulsive acts of behaviour. 

This may occur when you assume that if you have any influence over an event, then it is your complete responsibility to prevent that event. It is critical to know that you never intend to cause any harm to yourself or others, OCD causes such thoughts to occur. 

2. Overimportance of thoughts: You may value your thoughts excessively. The mere presence of an intrusive thought does not mean you need to give it importance. A thought is not necessarily the same as an action, especially if there is no intention or behaviour to support it. Similarly, your thoughts are not morally right or wrong; they are only thoughts. You may feel that if you think obsessively about When something is, it increases the possibility of it becoming reality. Thoughts do not equate to behaviour, and neither do they increase the likelihood of an action occurring.

The frequency of obsession is also reduced by reducing the strength of the belief that an obsessive thought is important. Therapy will help with the same. 

3. Beliefs about controlling your thoughts: You may try to control your thoughts. When the content of a thought is distressing, you may try to distract yourself, guilt yourself, or beat yourself up for overthinking it. In OCD, you may engage in compulsive actions to stop thinking about the same thing again and again.

For example, if someone obsessively thinks about how clean their environment is, the nature of their thoughts could range from how dirty the objects they touch are to how they are endangering the lives of others by not being cleaner. When such thoughts occur repeatedly, they are very distressing. So, to stop the content of the thoughts from actually happening, they may try to engage in compulsive actions like frequently washing their hands, using sanitisers, and cleaning everything before they use it multiple times. 

Thus, when a thought is given importance, and its content is taken to be true, you may want to protect yourself by trying to control these thoughts. By attempting to control intrusive thoughts, clients often intend to try to control the consequences as well. 

Controlling your thoughts is very counterproductive in reducing both obsessions and compulsions. By forcing yourself to not think of something, you increase its importance in your headspace and end up obsessing over it even more.

4. Overestimate threats: With OCD, you may overestimate how threatening an intrusive thought is. You may also perceive a threat even if there is no actual threat. This could make day-to-day tasks very distressing and very difficult to accomplish. 

5. Intolerance of Uncertainty: OCD can make you second-guess your decision-making skills. You may take longer to comprehend a situation, reconfirm information multiple times, and be wary and doubtful about your choices. This is due to the beliefs that arise from uncertain situations. 

Uncertainty may distress you. You may find it difficult to tolerate ambiguous situations because they may cause you to question your own thoughts. You may doubt everything you’ve done. To manage this distress, one may engage in compulsive behaviours. 

6. Perfectionism: Perfectionism is strongly tied to obsessions and compulsions such as rechecking, doubting yourself, and ensuring there are no mistakes in the compulsive rituals. 

A compulsive ritual is an action or behaviour that can help convince you that the dangerous obsessive thoughts won’t come true. They are very closely tied to the nature of your thoughts. They create a vicious cycle where the obsessions are worsened by the compulsions, and the person feels more and more distressed. 

By believing in a perfect version of a ritual, you convince yourself that you can achieve a state of safety. In reality, perfect is an abstract concept. There is no way to achieve perfection. This also means that if the compulsive ritual hasn’t been done perfectly, you need to do it again and again until you’re convinced that you are no longer in danger.

These beliefs are often ingrained into the very nature of the obsessive-compulsive disorder. When these become core beliefs, they start to interrupt your daily life and make it very distressing. OCD can be managed with the right treatment with the help of mental health professional. A multifaceted treatment plan of therapy, medication, and community support can help an individual cope with distress and slowly gain more control over compulsions. Over time, you can learn how to manage the OCD symptoms more and more, and live a happy, fulfilling lifestyle. 

References

Frost, R., & Steketee, G. (1997). Perfectionism in obsessive-compulsive disorder patients. Behavioural Research Therapy, 291-296.

Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group. (1997). Cognitive assessment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 667-681.

Tolin, D., Abrahamovitz, J., Brigidi, B., & Foa, E. (2003). Intolerance of uncertainty in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of anxiety disorder, 233-242.