Question about compulsions: Hi guys! I’m brand-new here and just uncovered this world of ROCD. This might sound silly, but I’m trying to figure out if your phone can be a compulsion? I find when I’m triggered or anxious with thoughts, I’ll spend hours cycling through social media, almost like I’m trying to distract myself or find an answer or look for a sign or comfort? It just makes me feel worse because literally hours will go by and I’ve done nothing and feel terrible. When I’m not particularity anxious, I can go hours without checking my phone and it’s no problem. Can this be a compulsion? Or am I just being lazy? Thanks!

Hey, over here! A word about distraction Many readers may have heard that distraction is a good thing because it takes your mind off of the OCD. Or you may have a heard that it’s a bad thing because it functions as compulsive avoidance of your obsessions, ultimately making them worse. Both of these things can be true or untrue depending on intention. Distraction is just anything that interferes in your ability to give full attention to anything else. To use distraction as an intervention with unwanted thoughts in OCD, the benefits and drawbacks are rooted in whatever message the brain is likely to receive from the shift in attention. Is the brain being informed that thoughts are unimportant such that attention can be lifted from them with ease and dropped on something else? Or is the brain going to get the message that thoughts are so terribly important, we can’t bare to be in their presence for even a moment without distraction? Bad distraction In the course of exposure, you become very uncomfortable. To get away from the uncomfortable feeling, you might distract yourself with a video game you’ve played a thousand times that helps you shut off your thoughts. This is what I would call “bad distraction” because it sabotages the exposure therapy (by not allowing you to feel the discomfort and learn from it) and because the attention is being placed in a dead zone and not on something that promotes growth or represents a meaningful value. It is escape. Now let me be clear, escape is not the enemy all the time. We all have a right to check out from time to time. But in the midst of an exposure is not a helpful time for this. Better distraction Imagine you’ve just been triggered and the way you are accustomed to responding to triggers is to engage in an elaborate mental ritual that involves reviewing all of your memories associated with the trigger, imagining fictional scenarios where you respond a specific way to your trigger, chanting thoughts that neutralize your fears, or any or all of the above. In other words, the train of your mind is headed to Compulsion Station and you need to get off. Though it is widely agreed that “thought stopping” or trying not to have or not have certain thoughts, is ineffective, derailing a mental ritual is fair game. Ritual-stopping is not thought-stopping. I sometimes refer to this as running interference. If you can’t think, you can’t complete a mental ritual, and if you abandon a mental ritual before it produces any satisfaction, you’re doing ERP. You’ll know it’s ERP because it will feel flippant or irresponsible to suddenly stop devoting your attention to the ritual and devote it to something else. To effectively drive a wedge between you and the ritual, you can push the mind to attend to something that requires focus and is incompatible with ritualizing. A good example is to try to remember the sound of a 56k modem connecting to the internet (a what? said the reader born in the 1990s). Or, feel free to recollect the lyrics to Peter Cetera’s The Glory of Love, which is infinitely worse than Rickrolling yourself (look it up). The point is, you can’t focus on these things and complete your rituals at the same time, and, once disengaged from the ritual, you can work on resting your attention more mindfully on the present moment. I call this “better” distraction, rather than “best” because this kind of distraction has no real value of its own and is just a tool for disengaging from rituals. Used excessively, it opens a susceptible thinker up to potentially using this tool as a compulsion itself. Good distraction If we understand distraction as something that is interfering in focus, “good” distraction is probably not even a kind of distraction so much as a kind of self-direction. In other words, running to something of value instead of running from something scary. One of the greatest challenges obsessive thinkers have is coping with unstructured time. Without a specific present to return to, mindfully stepping back from obsessions doesn’t make much sense. A highly trained and skilled meditator may be able to rest his attention on the feeling of his feet on the ground, but most people find this uninspiring. So good distraction is filling your life (not to the brim) with things that you value already or have the potential to add value. Good examples are hobbies that leave products behind, such as writing music, painting, or building something. Non-compulsive cleaning or exercising can be good, but they may lack the mental invitation to truly latch the attention securely. Watching movies and television can be a great distraction if the thing being watched is something that will feed your artistic heart, teach you something, or at least give you the opportunity to float a fan theory by your friends. Mindless reruns of shows that provide you nothing but noise and leave you feeling empty inside will not serve this function. So best distraction is when we are mindful of our OCD enough to know that it could use some competition and then to self-compassionately provide ourselves with something worth attending to. Don’t be perfect Be beautifully imperfect. It’s harder but it pays better. There is no one right way to respond to thoughts. And if there were, to use it every time would quickly turn it into another “wrong” way, a compulsion. The endgame here is being able to see thoughts as thoughts, not threats. You can entertain them, but only if you wish to entertain. You can expose to them, but only if you want to do the work in that moment. You don’t always have to. You can allow and accept them exactly as they are, but only if you can do so without bullying yourself (“Accept! Accept!!”). If you carry with you a big toolbox for OCD, you can develop the self-confidence needed to reach in there with eyes closed, pull out whatever you connect with in that moment, and use it to navigate OCD in that moment alone. Mastery over OCD is not about being right all the time. It’s about versatility. Jon Hershfield, MFT

I’ve realised that I do this aswell as it brings me some sort of comfort if I am anxious

Yep, that can be an avoidance tactic.

I do the same thing

It definitely can be. I can spend hours on social media trying to comfort myself or reassure myself. I have ROCD, too, and when I obsess or fixate on an idea, social media is an easy place to look for reassurance. Of course, any reassurance is temporary so I try to use social media as little as possible because it does not stop the intrusive thoughts.

It can definitely be a compulsion or an avoidance-seeking behavior for some people. For me it is part of my need to know obsessions and my fear of uncertainty.