- Date posted
- 5y
- Date posted
- 5y
Hey friend! Common symptom in OCD, particularly if your theme revolves around health OCD. I have the same theme currently, and I’ve dealt with your particular issue in the past—although now it’s morphed into something else. The best part is I was having hyponopomic hallucinations upon waking up during that time as well. Like with all other obsessions, the answer is ERP therapy. For me, that meant exposures where I’d stare at images that cause visual hallucinations, or I’d set up screens to flash things in my periphery at random. Eventually, I stopped caring and focusing on it at all.
- Date posted
- 5y
My main concern is how do I know that if is 100% my OCD. I sometimes sense movement in the corner of my eye and that my be because after some recent experience with seeing spiders moving in my peripheral vision I associate that experience with everything now. A stain on the carpet sticks out to me and I’m scared that it will move before I realize that it’s just a stain with my own eyes and that is whats driving me crazy. I don’t know if this is a form of hallucinations but my peripheral vision seems to heighten my whole environment to a degree that wasn’t there before and I don’t know how to manage it.
- Date posted
- 5y
@midnightlight You can’t know it’s 100% just OCD. Not anymore than you can be 100% certain something bad won’t happen. The risk of being in a car accident is exponentially higher than the risk of developing psychosis, yet we still ride in cars every day. The same is true here. It’s just your OCD has latched on to this particular thought/awareness and you’re hyper-focused on it.
- Date posted
- 5y
@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Is seeing spots crawl in my peripheral vision part of being hyper aware?
- Date posted
- 5y
I am terribly sorry you feel this way, I also have this issue with my OCD. To be honest, I am glad I found someone else with it as that provides assurance nothing is wrong. I talked to my therapist about it, the visual field is quite tricky. Our visual mistakes things for other things all the time, especially out of the periphery. You must first ACCEPT that you’re anxious about this. Rather than being afraid of the things you may see, know that everytime it occurs it’s an OCD thing/typical occurance with your visual field.
- Date posted
- 5y
I totally agree with both replies above. You said "how do I diagnose this". To me, that question appears misguided. Perhaps you can change it to "how can I respond to this effectively?"
Related posts
- Date posted
- 23w
My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.
- Date posted
- 23w
It started when I became an adult, and started receiving my mental health diagnosis. I hyper fixated on each and every action I did and how it could be related to my diagnosis’s. It then lead to fixation to my physical health — making appointments and seeing every specialist I can to rule out every possibility. I currently have been suffering with obstructive sleep. I woke up the past few days with severe pain from the lack of sleep whilst believing I was oversleeping. Luckily my fit watch tracks my sleep cycle and it turns out I am not receiving any sleep. I had an extreme panic attack — bursting into tears on the phone with my mom wondering what this case might be. She told me it could be sleep apnea and that a simple sleep study could figure this out. However, knowing my family history I made appointments to every specialist I can to make sure it is nothing serious. The unknown of health can be scary to me. Watching my mother suffer with her physical health chronically since I was a child lead me to be very conscious and aware of how my body is functioning. This morning was one of the worst moments of physical pain. I should just take one step at a time with the sleep doctor instead of taking measures to see every specialist that could pertain with this issue. However, that is very hard to me. I don’t want to ever wake up in the pain I was this morning. Does anyone else suffer with health-related OCD? And if so, how do you find a sense of ease during moments like I expressed?
- Date posted
- 21w
I started dealing with OCD when I became fixated on health issues, particularly the fear of contracting a life-threatening disease. If I experienced any kind of medical symptom, no matter how small, that even remotely hinted at something potentially fatal, it would drive me crazy, and I couldn’t stop obsessing over it. Then one day, I started having intrusive thoughts about accidentally hitting someone with my car, and I would end up driving in circles to check if I had. Eventually, I found myself overwhelmed by a flood of new obsessive thoughts and compulsions. One day, while I was at the park, a squirrel came near me, and for some reason, I felt like it attacked me. I Googled it and learned that squirrels could carry rabies, which spiraled me into a deep fear of rabies. I became consumed with the thought I received a bite from a squirrel, raccoon, or bat any time I’m in areas that trigger me. It started off only being inside then transferred to even being in my own home. This made me obsess over every physical sensation in my body, compulsively checking to make sure nothing was wrong. One compulsion that I hated the most would to be putting rubbing alcohol on me to make sure that I had no open wounds. Every day feels like I’m walking around in a fog of anxiety, constantly worrying that I won’t even make it to old age. Sometimes, it gets so overwhelming that I just want it all to end. It stresses me so bad at times to where my brain feels like I’ve been studying all day.
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