Double Checking Will Be the Death of Me

This is something I do which helps me . Let’s say I am to get the mail . If I am checking a second time I do it deliberately slower by about a 15 second exaggeration.

This has helped me: so, you’re worried that your nursing files will not sync properly, then maybe something bad will happen to your laptop and you’ll lose all your notes? Seems like a reasonable concern, and so it makes sense to periodically check that everything is syncing correctly. But after you have checked once, you still feel like you should check “one more time,” just to be extra sure you didn’t miss anything. This is classic OCD - your brain is uncomfortable with the uncertainty around whether or not you checked correctly. Really, it’s just your brain trying to protect you from a perceived threat. This is fine, in fact it’s what our brains evolved to do - keep us safe from threats by constantly bringing to our conscious attention anything that COULD be bad for us. But you are in control of your brain. After you have checked the logical number of times you can just tell your brain: “thank you for your concern and trying to keep me safe, but I’ve already checked.” Just because you COULD check another time and that would IN THEORY give you a little bit more certainty (by the way - it won’t) doesn’t mean that you need to, but it also doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you for feeling like you should. No need to “fight” the thought - just acknowledge it as your brain trying to protect you, but realize that the higher part of your consciousness can make the decision to process that threat as a illegitimate.

I experience this with lots of things and had to work on decreasing the amount of times and delaying the checking for longer periods of time until now I do things once and resist the urge to recheck. If you’re doing erp with a therapist they can help you with this. It’s totally frustrating to be caught in that loop and spending so much time. Now I’m like, “no OCD. we’re not doing that” and I walk away and take the anxiety with me. I wish you luck. You can do this.