The past year I’ve been dealing with OCD about free will, consciousness, and instincts. The latter two stem from the free will problem, but basically I’ve been having anxiety and OCD about having no control over my life on a biological basis. It all started because I watched a YouTube video called “Why we Don’t have Free Will and why that’s OK” from a health channel called “What I’ve Learned” about a year ago. After the video, I started panicking and thinking what if I have no control over my life? What I really am just a product of my environment and I have no freedom? I went and scoured the Internet for counters to these questions and actually found some really good stuff, but my search for answers kept leading me to other topics that threatened the idea of free will. This is where consciousness and instincts OCD come into play. From this research, I found out some scientists say that a lot of our actions are unconscious, but luckily however I did more research and found out that a growing number of psychologists don’t think the unconscious mind actually does not even exist. As for instincts, it all started because I saw a Quora questions that asked “Why is human instinct generally considered to be overriden?” I thought I would get more answers about how human have free will, but instead the top answer was the complete opposite. That answer to this question talked about how humans always act on instinct and that the reasons we give ourselves for acting a certain way are always an illusion. He claims to have done 20+ years of research on human instincts to further his business. The guy doesn’t have a bio degree or anything. I want to be suspicious about these thoughts, but I STILL think about the possibility of him being right about how humans might not be as free as we think. All my research and counterpoints to my own existential crises are nice to know, but I still haven’t been able to shake the thoughts “What if all these people are right? What if we really have less control than we think?” One thing I try to still tell myself is that pretty much everything we know is not a certainty. There is so much uncertainty in the world, and we shouldn’t try to find certainty all the time. I want to just live my life without thinking about all these existential things and just enjoy it. Please let me know if any of you have had similar thoughts or experiences. I’d love to hear your tips, tricks, and anything that can help. Thank you, and have a great day, wherever you are.

Where do I begin with this…….. so my OCD has been around since childhood and has had many themes over the years. I only realised I have it just over 2 years ago. I’ve tried many things to help it not be such a monster and thought I had a good grip on it for a length of time until now! Some of my strategies have been acceptance, change of perception of thoughts and sometimes on hard days just telling myself that no matter what, I have to be brave and go out and live life. In the last few months I’ve developed none OCD related anxiety as well and so have been looking at ways to help with that. Sunday morning I was just casually scrolling TikTok and a video only about 30 seconds long or so comes up, seemingly a therapist of some kind, straight away the video began something like “you cannot replace a thought with another thought” along the lines of “you can’t THINK your way out anxiety” I don’t know the full context of the video it wasn’t long enough, I don’t know who the therapist was I didn’t look but now purely because of that one sentence my OCD has gripped onto it so badly and is trying to tear down some of my strategies because I have used changing my thought patterns a lot to help me, self compassion etc but now because of that video I’m struggling! I’m not looking for answers but I am just really upset and it feels like I’m in an impossible grip of OCD again

This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.

My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.