If you experience an excessive need to research and gather information about something how do you handle that compulsion? I find I’m doing that now with my ocd diagnosis and it’s exhausting. There’s never enough information to satisfy it . Any help would be appreciated.
I treat it like any other compulsion. Label it, identify that I'm doing a compulsion, and that I can choose to keep doing it or go on with my day. Compulsions may seem like they're all different and need different "solutions", but at their core they need the same treatment.
@dp20 All this ^ plus remembering the more you do them the stronger the need to get them gets.
Your OCD is looking to find a feeling of satisfaction that you finally have “the answer” or have researched or understand “everything”. But when you have OCD you won’t ever get that satisfied feeling and if you do, it only last temporarily before the doubt comes back in usually stronger! So accepting that is key. When I find myself feeling the urge to research which it’s normally googling and going on a deep dive, I identify this is a compulsion, close my browser and don’t research and do something else instead. If I’m questioning if it is a compulsion or not I just say to myself this might be a compulsion and I’m not going to do it. Don’t try to figure out if it is or isn’t, that can become an obsession in itself. So instead I learned it’s best to just treat it as a compulsion if you aren’t sure!
@ocdjourney The last bit is so helpful thank you; I don’t need to “figure it out”
Lately I've been obsessed with researching and reading everything about OCD as I can. I've been fixated on finding physical books, printing out studies, taking the Y-BOCS, anything I can find or get my hands on. Could researching be an obsession or something? I don't know if I'm feeding into it or if this is completely different.
I just found out I have OCD last February. I'm ashamed to say I had a really stereotypical idea of what OCD is and was very surprised to be diagnosed with it. I keep trying to learn more about OCD but every time I sit down to read something, watch a video, listen to a podcast etc... I can't stop myself from pausing just to fall into a thought spiral for hours, analyzing my brain and thought patterns and my whole childhood and past relationships and just everything. Ughhhhhhhhh. Any resources or tips for combating this, if this even made any sense lol, I have been very stuck on my brain today yikes (p.s. do you like my pfp? she's my dog, daisy. I love her very much)
Since my recent flare up, I feel like i'm now i'm now obsessing over OCD. I open Youtube to look up videos about how to live with it, I open NOCD almost immediately after waking up, I'm downloading books recommended, saving podcast episodes, joining online suport groups. I didn't notice it before but it almost feels counter productive? But I also do want to recover I don't even know what to even ground myself to at this point
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