Does anyone else’s OCD cause them to be hyperaware or background noises (hum of refrigerator, fan, distant traffic, etc.) and make your hearing incredibly sensitive? If so, how do you push your way through it? Mine gets to the point where I can hear all these things that the mind normally tunes out, and then I fear I am having “hallucinations” because I get thoughts about how “I mean it kind of sounds like a whistle, or this or that” and then it causes panic due to my health anxiety and fear of psychosis. My psych has said this is a part of OCD and that I’m focusing on the noises and coupling them with intrusive thoughts, but I’m curious how others have fought this and gotten through.

Hey there everyone, first I would like to say I am very grateful for every single one of you on this platform and it feels so much better knowing that I can be heard. I’ve been hyperaware of my swallowing for 1-2 month. I feel like I have so much saliva in my mouth and I have to swallow and swallow. I feel the urge to swallow even I don’t NOTHING in my mouth, so I just swallow air. This has been really overwhelming and I feel like I can be so easily latched to other body part of my part. For example, I was conscious about my blinking and breathing for a few days, and now I get so anxious when I heard a weird sound my ears make after each sentence I speak. Is this somatic ocd or health concern ocd? I am so helpless and having a hard time to shift my attention. Does anyone have any suggestions or just words of encouragement would really help me at this moment. I REALLY appreciate your help. 💗🙏 Thank you !

I have been having these fears about developing schizophrenia, it reached a point where i am starting to almost hear things or the smallest sounds and my mind tells me you're schizophrenic, and i feel this weird sensations in my ear as if someone is whispering yet i can barely hear them, the thing is i am not diagnosed yet because i never work with an OCD therapist but i study psychology so i just used what i learnt to give a meaning to my suffering, many themes of this fear have been happening before and this schizophrenia fear is the last one. I want to know what advice you can give me or ways to make my brain calm down a little bit, i also don't have and can't afford a therapist that's why i am here in the first place I also want to know more informations or experiences with this theme if anyone habe experienced it and what helped you with it I remember feeling better for a while but than i collapsed back, but i am hoping to get better soon too or anytime in the future, I don't want reassurance so make sure you be as real as you can, and thanks 🙏🏻

My OCD diagnosis is still very new, but now that I know what it is, it is clearly something I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Contamination/bugs and health have been a consistent theme since childhood, but religious/existential themes emerged during adolescence. Around that same time, there was also a good deal of trauma, and during middle school I started experiencing hallucinations. Tactile (like bugs crawling on me or biting me, an eyelash being stuck in my eye, but nothing was really there); visual (like moving shadows or things that would dart past in my periphery, and then I would just have intrusive thoughts of scary things around corners or under things); and auditory (an angry male voice that grumbles or yells indistinctly, or a high pitched noise like a microphone/speaker feedback but muffled and less sharp). Because of the religious denomination I grew up in, I initially assumed these were demons and tried to address it that way, but when I was 14 or 15, it occurred to me that those voices/sounds sounded like the way I felt, and the visual/tactile experiences happened during times of stress too — and so all of those experiences could just be seen as an expression of a fragmented part of myself. That acceptance didn’t make them go away — I still experience them now and I’m in my 30s — but it made those experiences less scary and more manageable. I also see now how these all pop up specifically when OCD obsessions are super triggered and when I’m super sleep deprived. Anyway! Since this diagnosis, and talking about the hallucinations at all, are new to me, I am wondering who else has had similar experiences. I don’t really know how much of the hallucination experience is OCD versus trauma, but it seems like this might all make sense under the “quasi-hallucination” label.