I have a very mild OCD. For example, right now one of the keycaps on my laptop’s keyboard is broken, if I press it too hard, it will fly away and I’ll have to look for the metallic spring that was underneath it. So, every minute or so I feel compelled to focus my sight on that key and to touch/press it slightly to check if everything’s alright with it. Another example: when I’m walking outside alone, I regularly look at my shoes to check if my shoelaces are still tied (when I was a child, I usually tied my shoelaces incorrectly and they got untied quite often). From time to time, maybe every 10 minutes or so, I hum a simple melody, one of the few I have, under my nose. Sometimes when I sit at my laptop and my slippers are lying on the floor somewhere nearby, every few minutes I feel compelled to look at them to check if they’re still there. I think I often blink extra hard or extra long to make sure that everything is alright with my eyes, or something like that. When cooking food, I wash my hands between various actions more often than is really necessary. All of this doesn’t really bother me too much. For all these examples except the handwashing, the only downside is that if someone notices this about me, they will correctly infer that my nervous system is a bit weird. Maybe I have other mild compulsions that actually mess with my life? I don’t know. I don’t really have a sense of panic when any of this happens or when I ignore the urge. Just a slight discomfort. So, any advice for me?
I also would like to discuss your methods of dealing with OCD. First, let me note that I predict that your current methods won’t work well forever and that problems will return, maybe transformed into slightly different problems. So, anyway, about the example with eye contact with beautiful women. It is not in fact the case that any amount of eye contact with women in any situation is optimal. I think in some cases it is actually significantly suboptimal—sometimes it can scare them, or weird them out, or send them or someone else a wrong signal, etc. I think for a healthy person, they would just learn intuitively when and how to do it and when not to do it. But, as I understood, your OCD-managing methods basically allow any amound of eye contact in any situation. That seems really really crude. As I understood, you basically decided “ok, my emotions and instinctive reactions regarding eye contact with beautiful women don’t work at all, so it’s better to ignore them completely”. Well, I think that’s very suboptimal compared to if you had healthy emotions and instinctive reactions and listened to them. Because sometimes in some situations, the instinctive desire to avert the gaze is actually right. So, what are your thoughts and your plans regarding this? And in general, you label thoughts as “worrying” or “threat monitoring”, etc. and then ignore them. Ok, for clear cut situations like beeping, where on a rational level it’s obvious that there is actually no threat, that seems good. But what about less clear cut situations? I mean, I except that at some point you’ll have dealt with all such low hanging fruit with really super obviously suboptimal behaviour. But then you’ll probably want to deal with less obviously suboptimal behaviour, where the sense of anxiety or panic or whatever might actually be right or at least might be pointing in the right direction. What then?
I have a very mild OCD. For example, right now one of the keycaps on my laptop’s keyboard is broken, if I press it too hard, it will fly away and I’ll have to look for the metallic spring that was underneath it. So, every minute or so I feel compelled to focus my sight on that key and to touch/press it slightly to check if everything’s alright with it. Another example: when I’m walking outside alone, I regularly look at my shoes to check if my shoelaces are still tied (when I was a child, I usually tied my shoelaces incorrectly and they got untied quite often). From time to time, maybe every 10 minutes or so, I hum a simple melody, one of the few I have, under my nose. Sometimes when I sit at my laptop and my slippers are lying on the floor somewhere nearby, every few minutes I feel compelled to look at them to check if they’re still there. I think I often blink extra hard or extra long to make sure that everything is alright with my eyes, or something like that. When cooking food, I wash my hands between various actions more often than is really necessary. All of this doesn’t really bother me too much. For all these examples except the handwashing, the only downside is that if someone notices this about me, they will correctly infer that my nervous system is a bit weird. Maybe I have other mild compulsions that actually mess with my life? I don’t know. I don’t really have a sense of panic when any of this happens or when I ignore the urge. Just a slight discomfort. So, any advice for me?
I also would like to discuss your methods of dealing with OCD. First, let me note that I predict that your current methods won’t work well forever and that problems will return, maybe transformed into slightly different problems. So, anyway, about the example with eye contact with beautiful women. It is not in fact the case that any amount of eye contact with women in any situation is optimal. I think in some cases it is actually significantly suboptimal—sometimes it can scare them, or weird them out, or send them or someone else a wrong signal, etc. I think for a healthy person, they would just learn intuitively when and how to do it and when not to do it. But, as I understood, your OCD-managing methods basically allow any amound of eye contact in any situation. That seems really really crude. As I understood, you basically decided “ok, my emotions and instinctive reactions regarding eye contact with beautiful women don’t work at all, so it’s better to ignore them completely”. Well, I think that’s very suboptimal compared to if you had healthy emotions and instinctive reactions and listened to them. Because sometimes in some situations, the instinctive desire to avert the gaze is actually right. So, what are your thoughts and your plans regarding this? And in general, you label thoughts as “worrying” or “threat monitoring”, etc. and then ignore them. Ok, for clear cut situations like beeping, where on a rational level it’s obvious that there is actually no threat, that seems good. But what about less clear cut situations? I mean, I except that at some point you’ll have dealt with all such low hanging fruit with really super obviously suboptimal behaviour. But then you’ll probably want to deal with less obviously suboptimal behaviour, where the sense of anxiety or panic or whatever might actually be right or at least might be pointing in the right direction. What then?