When you focus your attention on a specific task, your brain will keep throwing at you the same task over an over due to the reward system with which it operates. That's why when you make the focus of your life to get rid of anxiety, your brain will keep throwing more anxious scenarios to solve. Thus, people constantly locked on answering questions and getting rid of the anxiety are bound to undergo more of the same endlessly.

What is the reward here tho? Temporarily relieving the anxiety?

Everything we do as humans, absolutely everything has as its core end 'a feeling'. Work, family, relationships, they all ultimately chase a feeling, which is not necessarily bad - we need to get rid of the feeling of hunger in order to keep living and functioning. However, since we as humans function upon this principle, when we feel something overwhelming such as the 'fight or flight response from the amygdala' (a.k.a. anxiety), our primal animal instinct is to look for any type of immediate relief through any means. People with anxiety disorders like us (hence the name - the amygdala is 'out of order') are constantly feeling threatened by meaningless input - from there solving meaningless input becomes a major focus of our attention (behaviour) and through that we signal to our brain that its task from now on is to keep looking for potential danger. Every time we try to solve the puzzle by doing compulsions we get a bit of dopamine and relief - sometimes it lasts a couple of minutes and sometimes hours or days. However, the feeling was so overwhelmingly good that the brain wants to repeat it and repeat it in an endless loop, not that different from what happens to drug addicts. It is not an exaggeration, there are actually studies that point to that. The solution? A recovery program involves (first step) cutting all compulsions(dope) and facing the withdrawal.

The correlation between ocd and addiction may in fact be a strong one. But why does the brain chase something that causes us so much grief before the dopamine release. With regards to addiction, the dopamine is instant, your brain does not put itself thru turmoil first, unless of course there is withdrawal or something associated with the attempt to get "high." Just my thoughts.

The brain does not chase the 'painful' stuff - in fact, the brain is wired to reject pain and pursue pleasure. The ones seeking the painful part (the compulsion) is 'us' by choice. Here is where all opinions split and where many people fall out of the path. The 'compulsions' sometimes are so engrained in the loop that we think they are automatic but they are not. We do in fact have control of them. Now, in answer to your question "Why would WE ever choose something painful for ourselves?" This is the million dollar question and it has more than one reason as an answer. 1) When we hit the f&f response by the amygdala bypasses the prefrontal cortex which helps with reasoning. We just can't contact it. 2) Since we can't access that part of the brain which is based on 'experience', therefore memory, we fall pray of the same lie over and over again such as: "This is the last one". 3) Because the promise of relief, no matter how brief, surpasses any potential for suffering - our brains are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, remember? --- One of my main compulsions was self-punishment (I had no idea it was a compulsion since I had been doing it all of my life). Why would someone self-punish? you might ask. Because it is still a relief from uncertainty - "I'll punish myself just in case". People who do self-harm do it as a means to 'justify' the pain of their trauma, which is not self-evident in its origin.