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The best way I could describe it to someone is this. It's like having a bad dream only to realise you're having a bad dream and waking up from it. However these can come per minute instead of per evening. It takes practise, but eventually you'll start having that bad dream and immediately clock it. It's rough, but things get better with practise.

OCD doesn’t work through logic — it works through doubt, fear, and emotion. The thoughts it creates feel incredibly real and urgent, often targeting the person’s core values or fears. Even if someone has had therapy, OCD can still convince them that “this time it’s different” or “what if it’s not really OCD.” It even makes people doubt whether they truly have OCD at all. That’s why people can fall back into compulsions or mental checking, even when they know better. Awareness helps, but the real challenge is tolerating the uncertainty that OCD creates. That’s why therapy focuses on resisting the urge to get certainty, not on solving the fear itself.

So do forgive me, I might get some of the words wrong here but I will say: one of the compulsions i spend the most time doing is ruminating. My most recent fixation it took about a week of me spiraling in the same thought pattern to realize that I was doing this compulsion all day long. What tipped me off was the feeling of not being able to stop ruminating. It started to annoy me that I couldn't think about anything else.