Does anyone's OCD affect their work and driving? I work in health care, dealing daily with patients and my OCD makes me extra checky with all my tasks to ensure I'm happy even though my final answer hardly ever changes from my initial thought....even though it never felt right in the first place. It's so frustrating why it never feels right until it sort of does and then you can let it go only once all the checking has been fulfilled. I find myself re-reading my records to ensure I didn't accidentally write down the opposite to what I wanted to write even though I never have. My OCD makes it feel like it's hard to concentrate like something is obscuring my vision yet it isn't?! I'm just trying to be careful so I think anyway. I can't seem to do stuff in a relaxed manner- I hold so much importance to everything I do in work that it takes me longer to fulfil tasks compared to my colleagues. Even then I feel terrible at my job because I'm not like them. Part of the length of time it takes to do my tasks is also because I have to get over the anxiety which makes me avoidant of said tasks as well. My OCD also affects my driving it sounds so stupid to say out loud but any bump in the road or even just a 'feeling' makes me think I have hit someone and then I drive around just to check I haven't which makes it ten times worse as I'm on tender hooks when I'm checking and getting home is all I want to do yet it's not that simple. I don't know what to call my OCD but it's affecting my work and my relationship with my husband. Saying that it used to be worse and has improved from me suffering from panic attacks and not even going to work. I do see a psychologist regularly and we are trying ERP but I just don't ever seem to be able to do it fully as my OCD seems so confusing,so intricate, so natural when you're in the moment?! Can anyone help ?

im not diagnosed, but these past two days have been terrible. i constantly have this underlying feeling that i might do something that i think is gross and i feel like i can’t do anything on my own because otherwise i might do something wrong. like i feel like i constantly have to be in front of people so that i can make sure of my every action. this is so exhausting and I’m so confused. and like i keep getting terrible images and stuff replaying in my head. i also try to recall what happened but i feel like i have false event too. i used to have religious ocd and that eventually stopped completely, but now it feels like all my work getting over that was pointless. also like i feel like i might have contamination ocd but not the typical germ type. I just get terrible images and I can’t remember if those images are true or not even though they’re impossible and i feel terrible. I don’t know if i could ever get over this because even the thought of it is terrible.

Hello! I am really looking for some advice. I have been struggling with OCD for a few years now and it drastically affects my daily life. I am going to give a quick run through of my OCD, and then the current situation I am in now. So for almost 2 years now my most prominent themes of OCD have been getting sick with the stomach bug (emetaphobia) and watching someone die/ having to see large amount of blood or do CPR on someone (I just graduated nursing school). Last year I stopped eating out, wouldn’t touch any of my food with my hands, would wash my hands until they bleed every day, bleached everything I touched when I was in public etc… I would have these major panic attacks all the time and the thought of getting sick hasn’t left my head 24/7 for 2 years. I was unable to complete my nursing school clinicals due to panic attacks each time I was at the hospital afraid someone would die and get these terrible images in my head. I didn’t sleep ever, barely graduated. I did ERP after school and was able to make up the clinical days I missed. Got to a point where I was eating again, felt like I was able to get my hands clean just by washing them. I have been doing exposures every day, and have accepted that getting sick will probably happen at one point and I am okay with it as long as I am at home when it happens. So locking myself in my apartment for 48hr every time after I could have been exposed to the stomach bug is major progress for me and I have been overall doing much better. Fast forward to now: It’s time for me to start my new job on a med/surg floor in a hospital. This week I have made it through a few days of orientation with panic attacks day and night but I am doing it even though I am petrified. I don’t feel ready for this big of a step, being exposed to both of my biggest fears constantly. Today at orientation the girl sitting next to me told me she had been vomiting all day, and continued to run out of the room a vomit the rest of the day. I now am 90% sure I am going to get sick and feel as if I would rather die than continue this amount of stress and anxiety I have felt from just a few days of being on the job. This is my BIGGEST fear and it’s coming true and I don’t know if it’s worth putting myself through this every day at work to just be having constant panic attacks and be miserable. I know with OCD you have to face your fears but I have been pushing myself and trying so hard and I don’t feel like it’s worth it to work this job. I would also feel incredibly guilty for quitting on the first week, but there are a million other nursing jobs that are not in a hospital. I think this is too big of a step for me right now but I wanted to see what others think. Any advice at all is so appreciated!

It started when I became an adult, and started receiving my mental health diagnosis. I hyper fixated on each and every action I did and how it could be related to my diagnosis’s. It then lead to fixation to my physical health — making appointments and seeing every specialist I can to rule out every possibility. I currently have been suffering with obstructive sleep. I woke up the past few days with severe pain from the lack of sleep whilst believing I was oversleeping. Luckily my fit watch tracks my sleep cycle and it turns out I am not receiving any sleep. I had an extreme panic attack — bursting into tears on the phone with my mom wondering what this case might be. She told me it could be sleep apnea and that a simple sleep study could figure this out. However, knowing my family history I made appointments to every specialist I can to make sure it is nothing serious. The unknown of health can be scary to me. Watching my mother suffer with her physical health chronically since I was a child lead me to be very conscious and aware of how my body is functioning. This morning was one of the worst moments of physical pain. I should just take one step at a time with the sleep doctor instead of taking measures to see every specialist that could pertain with this issue. However, that is very hard to me. I don’t want to ever wake up in the pain I was this morning. Does anyone else suffer with health-related OCD? And if so, how do you find a sense of ease during moments like I expressed?