- Date posted
- 19h
Does anyone else have OCD themes like these?
Hi everyone. I’m wondering if anyone here has experienced something similar. I have OCD/anxiety symptoms, and recently I’ve noticed several recurring patterns that seem quite different on the surface, but may have something in common. 1. Noise sensitivity / hyperawareness Certain sounds, such as neighbors talking, sounds from upstairs, or someone watching TV, can trigger a chain of thoughts. It’s not necessarily just the sound itself that bothers me. My mind starts imagining future situations: “What if I move to another apartment and have noisy neighbors?” or “What if something changes in my current environment and I start having noise problems?” Sometimes I become very focused on whether my environment might change and whether I might encounter noise in the future. 2. Feeling guilty or uneasy about using free or cheap resources This is a particularly strange one for me. When I use a free or very cheap service, I sometimes feel that I need to understand how the company makes money before I can feel comfortable using it. For example, if I use a free keyboard/input method and I can’t figure out how it makes enough money to operate, I start feeling uneasy. I may wonder whether the service will disappear someday, whether the company is not putting enough effort into the free version, or whether I am somehow taking advantage of them. Similarly, when using WeChat, I can start thinking about how much server infrastructure all those messages and groups must cost. Then I may worry about whether the company could eventually fail, causing me to lose important chat history. I can spend a lot of time researching the business model, server costs, revenue sources, etc. If I can’t reach a satisfying explanation, I have difficulty feeling at ease while using the service. 3. Perfectionism / needing to have the whole plan figured out When I want to start doing something, I often feel that I need to understand and plan the whole process beforehand. If I start without having the entire structure figured out, I may work for a while and then suddenly feel that everything I did earlier was wrong or poorly designed. Then I want to rethink the whole thing and reorganize it. I’m wondering whether these could be different OCD themes with a similar underlying mechanism, such as intolerance of uncertainty, excessive responsibility, perfectionism, rumination, or mental compulsions. Does anyone else experience OCD in these kinds of less stereotypical ways? Especially the need to understand how a free/cheap service operates before feeling comfortable using it, or the constant need to anticipate possible future problems with noise/environmental changes? I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has had something similar.