Need some advice here. I never go to therapy and was on Zoloft for a few years. I was able to push myself through anxiety and did well in college despite all those worries. Now I am working as a translator in a large company. My OCD has ups and downs and is getting better over time. But now, I am in the down period and I took 3 weeks off work. My job is stressful but I managed to handle it. Recently, I don’t really want to stay in the company cuz my anxiety is high when I am working. When I am in the company, I worry a lot. (For example, I worry I can’t focus or I can’t do my work). Lot of stuff are in my head and I don’t feel good. I am afraid things are getting worse. Deep in my heart, I prefer to stay at home. But then, I will lose my income. And I feel I am getting weak if I resign. Should I resign?

I need some advice on this, I was diagnosed with OCD a few years ago and I managed to be free for a few years by don’t giving attention to the thoughts and by giving my full attention to the outside life and not was going on inside my head. After stressful event OCD is back and again I feel that is something else. I am currently for the first time on CBT therapy but I am still on the early stages. My therapist told me that changing my attention to something else when the OCD is at its full blown is good technique but eventually I will need to face the thoughts and try to challenge them. The problem is that the moment I turn inside it’s like I have a train of thoughts that self doubt everything. When I am on this state I cannot challenge anything on the opposite I doubt that I have OCD and I try to understand if my symptoms suggest that I have something else and the fear and anxiety gets worse. I fear that I have something else and that I am a bad person. My big problem is when I am working. I work in an office and I need to sit in front of pc for 7-8 hours. The moment I start working these thoughts kick in and I feel that I cannot find any escape. I cannot do something else to turn my attention somewhere else and find my self doubting and searching was going on with me. And slowly slowly I get so scared that I come to face where I pass something like an anxiety attack. Is there any technique that it can help me to avoid what is happening to me, do no reach the levels of anxiety attack. I try to hear loud music, to concentrate on the pc but it didn’t work. I feel like I am trap somewhere that I need to sit still and just suffer with the thoughts until I reach the level of the full blown anxiety attack. Thank you for listening, any advice is well appreciated.

Hey everyone! I’m new to this app, but not new when it comes to OCD treatments. A few years ago I had to leave school/ my job in order to work on my mental health which was hard but needed. Mentally things have more or less gotten better OCD wise but I still really struggle with protectionism. I started a new job within the past 6 months that is challenging, but I enjoy enough to hopefully stay at for a few years. As of the past two weeks I have been really struggling with ruminating over my performance at work. I have been trying really hard to learn all the moving parts of the job, but because of lack of mentoring and constant little hiccups I have been stressing. Currently I have been overwhelmed/ overthinking so much that I have been messing up my work and it seems like my coworkers are pretty annoyed by constantly having to correct me. It’s honestly my worst fear as a perfectionist to feel like a burden. My intrusive thoughts as of late is that they are going to think I don’t care or try hard enough, that they talk bad about me to each other, and that they are going to fire me. Has anyone else experienced this type of OCD perfectionism that affects there performance within school or work and if so is there anything that you did in order to help recenter yourself in the moment to stop your brain from running in circles?

I only recently was diagnosed with OCD and have started my journey which I am proud of, but am struggling with finding balance because of the dissonance between my work responsibilities and ERP. I have been attracted to the career I am in because I care about doing right by others, and I have a passion for helping leaders create a healthy environment for the people on their teams. I also of course like clear expectations, writing and following rules, so educating on policies and procedures is a strong suit. Unfortunately, I am just recently learning that a big theme for my OCD includes moral scrupulosity and it has opened my eyes to see why I have struggled so much mentally the past year. I work in HR as a team relations specialist which means I make recommendations on how managers should address issues with their teams, i investigate employee concerns or allegations, and also advocate for team members when they are being treated unfairly. Additionally my job involves doing nonstop documentation of the content of every call we have, every email received and sent to us etc. we then have to save them as files and write notes summarizing each file or piece of correspondence and key information from it. (There is very much the mindset of there being no such thing as too much documentation at my company) I have noticed that since taking this job a little over a year ago, I have not been ok. I love the work I do and the good moments where I feel like I helped someone. I also love that the company and managers put so much weight on doing the right things, but the expectations put on those of us in the roles also feeds my OCD and reinforces my compulsions like getting reassurance that my thinking is right, ruminating, or checking and rechecking. It also gives strength to the arguments OCD makes to me about needing to analyze excessively to make sure I am not missing anything, or that I am not mistakenly engaging in cognitive biases and factoring them into my recommendations. Since I have a large influence over how situations with team members are handled my OCD emphasizes this and convinces me that if I do not do my job adequately or make a compelling argument, I am doing a disservice to the team members I support.....but so does the HR leadership at the company. It is consistently emphasized that we are expected to be the ultimate moral voice in every circumstances and that we are responsible for remaining 100% objective in guiding leaders on what to do to ensure all risks are assessed, taken into account and avoided in addition to us making sure leaders are doing right by their teams. Many of the others in my role like myself also keep spreadsheets during investigations we conduct that documents all perspectives in situations of people we interviewed, track definitive evidence, and analyze all factors/ devils advocate arguments to ensure appropriate steps are taken to address and that every situation is handled fairly. I'm finding that even though I tend to be behind on work because of my just right struggles with documenting and investigations, I am seen as a star performer in my role because I am hyper-empathetic, scrupulous, and risk aversive. Unfortunately, those same qualities makes my OCD obsessions and compulsions stronger. Not sure if there is anything I can really do at this point because finding a new job isn't an option right now, I just needed to get this off my chest and see if anyone has experienced similar where they found themselves in a spot where their work responsibilities were at odds with their recovery or made it more challenging to use ERP tools.