My OCD and health anxiety have joined forces recently making it almost impossible to not do compulsions because I’m so scared of what’s going to happen.
I think I have had OCD all my life, I was able diagnose my self with it as a kid, because I grew up watching my mum suffer from it. She gave me a great understanding of how it worked and for most my life when ever the symptoms showed up in myself I was able to deal with it. If I got an intrusive though or an urge to do a compulsion I was able to tell my self it was ok and my thoughts wouldn’t harm me. I basically told myself to stop being ‘stupid’ and got on with my day.
That was until the last few months where my OCD has been gradually getting worse. It seems to get worse if my anxiety gets worse. If my anxiety is better then the OCD is almost none existent. I think my anxiety is getting worse because I’m a month away from graduating college and getting my first job which terrifies me for many reasons (I have severe social anxiety) I think my OCD is a way for my brain to control things while other parts of my life that I can’t control are fast approaching.
My OCD is focused on checking and what I have been dealing with recently is a lot of rewinding tv shows and rereading things I’ve read. I have to rewind tv shows and make sure I hear every single word the characters are saying, even sometimes repeating it back. I hate this because tv was the one thing that distracted me from anxiety and now I’ve resulted to not watching because I keep getting thoughts like “if you don’t rewind you will go blind” and it’s horrible. It’s the same with reading, I don’t read books but I have found my self rereading the same web page for half an hour making sure I was reading every word correctly because again some specific bad thing will happen to me if I don’t.
The bad thing is normally related to something I have heard. Someone dies of a brain tumour on a tv show - the next few days My OCD will be focused around this. I read something about sepsis - the next few days it will be focused around getting sepsis and losing an arm.
I have been told not to do the compulsion and when I realise nothing bad happens this will make me less anxious, but my OCD tells me it might not happen today, tomorrow, in a week or even a year it could be at any point in my life. So I can’t stop worrying about it. Not really sure why I posted or what I’m looking for here...just support I guess and to get this off my chest an realise how crazy it all sounds.
I was also browsing OCD forum a few days ago an saw some one mention precognition (seeing the future, not sure if I spelt it right or have the right word) so this has made my OCD worse because I’m now convinced it’s some kind of ‘gift’ to see and prevent the future rather than something actually wrong with me. (Crazy I know)
Over the weekend I had some what of an existential crisis where I spent the whole weekend depressed about the fact we can literally die at any second. I felt hopeless but in that time my OCD actually completely went away, for almost 2 days, and didn’t realise how blissful it was. I want to get back there but at the moment I can’t afford to get help, and honestly I don’t want to take medication, because there’s so many things that scare me about that.
Reply With Quote