OCD colored glasses. This morning I woke up with a good attitude, I have been making progress with resisting my compulsions and was ready to start the day resisting more. When I open my bedroom door my cat as usual was at the door scratching to get in, next to her was sitting a piece of Poo. It must have got caught on her fur and dropped off as she was cleaning herself while waiting for me to come out of my room. I close the bedroom door, retreated to my room and felt extreme anxiety, struggle to breath, intensive crying, you know the drill. It took me half an hour to work up to starting the decontamination process I knew I would have to do because of the cat Poo. “ I don’t know where she went with the poo still on her, it might have spread over the entire house, I can’t see the poo partials that may have dropped off her, I have to decontaminate everything and then chuck out the mop, the mop bucket and my slippers after I have finished, then I can have a shower. Then and only then will I feel like I can be in my house again and move in with my day” I pulled my self together, I got the order right in my head of what I needed to do, I pre prepared my bathroom opening the shower door so I didn’t have to touch it with contaminated hands. I walked out of my bedroom to face the next 6-12 hours of decontamination. IT WASN’T POO. IT WAS A SEED POD. As soon as I knew it was a seed pod all of my anxiety evaporated instantly. I felt relief, I felt calm, I felt happy. When my brain through it was poo the world felt like it was over. When my brain new it was a seed pod I could automatically go on with my day not being effected by it. My aunty who is a trauma psychologist who also studies the brain told me I was seeing the world through an OCD filter. Just like all of the filters that we see every day that people put over there lives on instagram. Majority of what we see on social media is through a filter. It’s so easy to edit photos and post a unrealistic version of your self that you want the world to see. Suffering from OCD is permanently looking through our eyes at the world with a OCD filter. If we can start to understand our brains better we may be able to lift that filter and see world and let it effect us in a different way. A positive way. The way I was able to move on with my day because of the seed pod compared to how I could have let it debilitate me if it was cat poo. Even if it was poo. A person not living with OCD would not have suffered from a panic attack and had to endure 6-12 hours of cleaning. I’m educating myself on the brain and how it makes us think and function. I do not want to spend the rest of my life with OCD Colour glasses.

Hello everyone! This is my first post since downloading the NOCD app and wanted to share a little about my life with OCD. I was first diagnosed when I was 17 but truly started noticing there was something going on with me as early as 10. To summarize: I have the repetitive ritualistic type of OCD. Basically, I have a fear of becoming other people. I believe that if I perform an action, like turning off the sink or closing a door, or even breathing in and out while thinking about somebody, especially someone that I dislike, that eventually I will become just like that person or experience something they've been through that is negative; like health issues, personality issues, or social status decline. Simple example: I know this one dude named Richard, I worked with him in retail, and he told me about how his brother died at a young age. Now, it’s nighttime, and with that new information known about Richard, I believe, that If I take my contact out while thinking of Richard, or an image of him appears in my head while I’m taking out my contact, I believe that MY brother is going to eventually die too. What’s the solution?: I worked with another kid in retail. His name is Mikey, he was decently put together, and his brother didn’t die. So that means: Now with my contact still on my finger, I put it to my eyeball, and keep tapping at my eyeball with my contact while trying to get an image of Mikey perfectly timed, so that I can cancel out the image of Richard and save my brothers life. This is a challenge because the image of Richard, or I should say, the fear that my brother could die from this thought, is strong, and often times I have to think of other people (from other life experiences) along with Mikey just to feel confident that I got the image cancelled enough to move forward. Every day, I complete many actions and with every action comes a thought or image of some person I’ve encountered in my life that I’m either afraid of becoming or obtaining the same negative life experiences, which therefore means I also have all the othet people in my mind, at the ready, that cancel them out too. Every day I cancel people out and repeat actions disguised to the public. Sometimes it’s noticeable, but knowing how to cover your ugly side while making sure you don’t mess up your future with the wrong thought is just what I call life. I’m a man with a thousand people in his head and its been an EXHAUSTING journey. But through therapy and acceptance of myself, I have found a way to love with it. Like anything else, there are horrible days and okay days, but this is apart of me forever and im lucky to share it all with you! Can anyone relate?? Feel free to comment or reach out! - Matt

We who live with OCD are really good at one thing. We can ruminate for hours. We can even make up false memories and believe them to be true. But above all, we are good at attaching meaning to our thoughts. Where the average mind naturally shifts forward to the next thing, our minds crave certainty, and that craving drives us to assign significance to nearly every thought that passes through. Whether it is trying to make peace with a thought through rumination or trying to deny it outright through suppression, these are all what we would call compulsions. But beneath that label, they are really just reactions to the meaning we have attached. It is like a smoke alarm that goes off in the kitchen every time you make toast. The alarm is not broken. It is just hypersensitive. It reacts as if there is a fire when in reality there is no danger at all. OCD is like having that alarm wired directly into your mind. Thoughts that are harmless or uncertain set off the siren, and our compulsions are the frantic rush to put out a fire that does not exist. From birth, and more intensely for those with OCD, our minds were trained to attach meaning to every thought, feeling, and sensation. OCD, at its core, is compulsive meaning attachment: the inability to stop assigning significance to thoughts that are uncertain, unknowable, or meaningless. What I have been discovering in my own journey is this: yes, it is important to stop engaging with compulsions. But there is a deeper step too, which is learning to stop attaching meaning in the first place. Letting the thought be just a thought. Letting the toast cook without grabbing the fire extinguisher. I am not here to hand you a 10-step miracle cure. If there was one, we would all take it in a heartbeat. But I am here to share what has been working for me, and how by loosening the grip on meaning itself, I have found a surprising amount of peace.

I've started struggled with debilitating anxiety for so long it's hard to pinpoint where it stared. I've racked up a laundry list of diagnoses but always felt like nothing has really helped treatmentwise. In my recent spiral I was watching a YouTuber I've followed for years who has been very open about their experience with OCD. In the beginning of watching this person. While I had related to some things they said like specifically about anxiety, nothing ever made me think 'oh maybe I have OCD.' in fact in a way it reassur d me I didn't because my struggles seemed very different to theirs. Then they spoke about 'bad thoughts'' and the compulsion to turn them into 'good thoughts.' when they said that I felt so seen, and figured maybe I have some OCD tendencies. So I decided I would do some research into OCD and getting diagnostic criteria/ common obsessions and compulsions, and the second one on the first list was "worried about getting HIV and transmitting it to others" and it was like a switch went of in my brain and I remembered how I spent 2 years convinced a low risk sexual encounter in which protection was used definitely have me HIV, and how I constantly was looking up information about HIV, tests, prevention, clinical presentations. I got multiple STD tests and even when I started to logically understand it wasn't a real risk for me, I couldn't break the anxious cycle. The only thing that stopped I was after the time period passed where infections are detectable (2 years). And then I started putting everything in that context, months on end I spent unbelievably anxious about climate change and obsessively searching up statistics, the multiple times and admittedly stressful event occurs (job insecurity, visa applications, COVID forcing me and my partner into long distance) that would be so all consuming that every other aspect of my life feels on back burner to this one thought. How no logic, no explanation, no amount of time telling myself it is okay, it will be okay and that the outcomes of my stressors do have options/ ways forward, would stop the anxious spiral. I'm also thinking about how often, when I shared my anxiety, it was met with such response as "everyone is anxious about some things" or "well that is a stressful event so some anxiety is normal." I know that no one meant anything bad but this, but it also contributed to the shame and doubt to a degree, I didn't know how to explain how I felt, that is wasn't just anxious thoughts every so often, that is was a constant barrage from the moment I'm awake to the point I exhausted myself enough to sleep. Sharing this felt especially hard considering that it wasn't logical to feel how I was feeling. I don't know what I want to achieve with this post but the more i heard about people's specific experiences and personal obsessions and compulsions helped me to recognise those patterns in my own life so maybe just talking about it is helpful