DON’T GOOGLE! It will just give your OCD ideas. People survived before Google. All their worst fears didn’t come true just because they didn’t Google it. Even if you found that bit of reassurance, it will never be enough.

Ugh, Reddit is the worst. Talk about giving your OCD ideas lol. And the worst is when you’ve googled so much that you’ve already seen everything and the reassurance doesn’t do anything anymore. I’m glad you were able to cut it out. I’m still working on it, but it’s definitely not as bad as it used to be. I lived on google when it first started.

@JON2147512 Yeah, reddit is even worse than google, when I was having a rough time with SO-OCD, you can image how much triggering stuff I found there that made me feel like everything will fall apart. At least I read about the NOCD App in reddit for the first time, but that was about the only good thing that came of it. It is hard to entirely resist googling if you're triggered by something and the urge is really strong. Be kind to yourself if it does not always work and just try to stop or delay ("If the urge is still as strong in two days, them I will go on Google" - you probably will have forgotten what even felt so urgent) as soon as you notice what you are doing.

@Shoeshifter Exactly. You realize that you are looking for a certainty that can’t be found on google. If anything google will make you more uncertain about everything, even things your common sense knows is true.

Uuugh, I remember the purple links, been there, too! It is hard to resist if the urge is so strong but it is the only way out

I swear if I never googled I would have had maybe 3 or 4 OCD themes tops. Because of google I’ve cycled through about 20

Maybe every time you google draw a tick mark on a piece of paper. I might start doing the same.

@JON2147512 Tracking the time you spend googling and ruminating might also help? And trying to slowly reduce this time day by day until you come down to zero

@Shoeshifter Yes, tracking the time helps me tremendously as long as I maintain discipline and actually do it.

@JON2147512 Yeah, I also struggle with keeping up the discipline, especially when I am doing good and only ruminate for a few minutes a day or so, I don't track it because it also helps me to shift my focus away from OCD and to real life but it would surely be good to keep it up even if I don't ruminate a lot..

@Shoeshifter Yeah I do the same. One thing I did was set reminders on my phone every 3 hours. That way I could forget about OCD and still remember to track. Or you could get someone to remind you and hold you accountable