Get ye propranolol! It's boss for OCD. Common and safe anti-anxiety, I have no doubt your primary care physicians would be happy to give you a prescription. Confidence: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133500-drug-that-boosts-confidence-in-your-own-actions-may-help-ocd/ - I remember locking the door, and I feel confident about the memory - I attended an interview, and I feel confident in my own positive assessment of how well I did. I don't feel that I need to analyse whether I'm correct or not - I know I made a mistake on the test, and I feel confident about both that I did put the answer I believe I put, and that the answer I put was incorrect Information gathering: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6083454/ - I have a sore throat so I googled and concluded in 5 minutes that my symptoms are the same as strep. I feel pretty confident about this and don't feel that I need to do any more googling 'in case' it's something else/scary - my therapist told me that it's common after experiencing abuse to feel guilty/responsible/like you're unfairly making it into something it's not. I know that she is a professional and I have confidence in her statements. I don't feel a need to Google it - I know that it's unlikely that I did anything inappropriate at the bar last night, so I don't really feel like I need to memory-check about the entire evening or test how people feel about me to try to get clues - I recognise that I have the compulsive symptoms which characterise HOCD or POCD. I find it easier to accept this diagnosis, and feel less inclined to do more research to find out whether there is some way I might be an exception to the rule, or to ask other people what they think, or to seek reassurance that other people share my symptoms - I know it's very unlikely that whoever stole my phone can get past the encryption, I don't really feel the need to research whether there's some way that they could And the grand finale... fear extinction: https://www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/191908/anxiety-disorders/single-dose-propranolol-tied-selective-erasure-anxiety People with a phobia/OCD (or a memory which causes a strong emotional reaction, as with PTSD and real event OCD), expose themselves to a huge trigger- reactivating the bad memory, or scripting, or any other exposure. The exposure should be brief (a couple of minutes). They then take 40mg propranolol (oral), and go home. They *sleep*. The next day, the same triggers (the stuff in the script, or the memory, or the exposure) no longer cause any strong emotional response. The effect lasts at least 1 year. This is done with fear in the study, but works with anything else: guilt, anger, distress, etc. Your actual memory is left exactly the same as it was before, the only thing to change is your strong emotional responses to it, replaced with calm. The more more jolting the experience of NOT having your normal expected reaction to the memory is when it is first re-triggered to see if the process worked, the more permanent the effect is. Doing this to work up through the entire hierarchy could allow your brain to actually learn, in terms of FEELING not just knowing, that it's all ok. Serious implications for real event OCD and rumination in pure O, likely for everything else too. We don't always realise it, but it's always the EMOTIONS associated with our thoughts which disturb us and cause us to feel the need to resist and assert against them. If the intrusive thoughts, or the memory of your current worry theme, were to appear sometimes but never cause any actual unpleasant or upsetting emotions for you, it would become vastly easier to decide to not do compulsions in each moment, and it nukes the obsession. Even if you're quite neurotic and you wonder whether you should analyse to see if your lack of response means you're some kind of a psychopath or have damaged your brain or that you now have nothing to stop you from acting on the thoughts, that reactionary OCD theme can *also* be treated with the propranolol protocol. Once those things no longer freak you out either, that's it- no more feedback loops. You're free to just live by your values of e.g. not stabbing anyone- values which you retained 100% through the treatment. You're left with all of those thing that you usually use against your OCD when you're triggered, you feel more confident about them, and nothing which pops up to oppose them actually feels convincing. It may even feel safe to stop scanning for new themes. However- I DO NOT recommend anyone attempt this one without medical supervision, as the dose is a little higher and it's not fully proven for OCD/hierarchy systems, only for phobias.