OCD and improved performance? (Study) So I was looking at some research papers about information gathering in OCD because of a user here rationalising canvassing others (with and without their type of OCD) for experiences of a symptom (enjoying an intrusive thought) which they found distressing as not being a compulsion/not part of reassurance seeking. But a few things really caught my eye! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406001/ This was an experiment run using participants with a range of diagnoses, to see how much information they would gather before making a decision in the task. They found that people with high levels of compulsiveness, whether they had OCD or not, gathered more information before making a decision, and subsequently performed *better* on the task- fewer errors, more points accumulated. In the discussion, the authors say: "The findings lead us to propose that compulsivity is a phenotypic spectrum that is characterised by an increased need for certainty." So compulsivity is needing to be absolutely sure before making a decision or making progress. For us, it could be checking a lot that we didn't say something rude before being able to get on with our day, or being sure that we aren't really a pedophile before treating our POCD. "Here we use computational modelling... of young people to demonstrate that excessive information gathering is a defining feature of an obsessive-compulsive spectrum, going beyond the clinical manifestation of OCD." That part means that people without OCD may have the same tendency to need more information to feel satisfied/complete/reassured/confident. OCD might be more of a spectrum than a clear-cut condition! The part I found really interesting was this: "increased sampling led to a better performance for subjects with high compulsivity scores in both studies, suggesting increased information gathering can be task beneficial (a feature rarely observed as consequence of a psychiatric symptom). Indeed, the fact that subjects with high compulsivity scores perform more proficiently on this task raises interesting questions, especially as indecisiveness is thought of as incapacitating." Where those people with more compulsivity collected more information before making a decision, they scored better on this task. They actually DID make better decisions. I really feel this. Whilst my OCD frankly caused 50% of the problems in my life in the first place, rumination has also, on occasion, brought me practical answers when the problem is a practical situation (an external problem/real event OCD). When it's not a practical issue, just a hypothetical proposed by my brain which is about me or about something I have no control over, it doesn't help even when I think I found a conclusion. Rumination is the internal version of information-gathering, it goes along with memory checking etc. That's what makes it so hard to give up, I think. But I know that when my OCD is bad, like a lot of other people, I ruminate well beyond that point of getting my well-reasoned, sensible answer. I question whether it really was the optimal solution. Our compulsivity goes beyond that point of getting a good answer which would satisfy other people, and throws up new doubts and questions and possibilities because we are always driven by a need to test it. I suspect we cause a lot of our own intrusive thoughts out of habit during recovery, by getting anxiety just like anyone else and responding to that by needing it to be gone, so we attach one of our obsessions to it immediately so we can have the opportunity to test. It would be so great to be able to see how much thinking and gathering information is done by other people who have just the RIGHT "decision thresholds". But of course, putting too much positive emotional weight on getting our answers right and too much negative emotional weight on making mistakes is another feature of compulsivity identified in the study.