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is it normal to hear stomach noises after every time i drink water - can hearing these noises be avoided

I was so good for such a long time. I felt like I truly had a handle on things and everything was going well. Moved to a new city recently and now OCD moved with me and is taking up even more space. Being alone is hard enough! It makes me so angry that on top of the stress of readjusting to a new place, I’m having to fight off these thoughts and feelings like a wildfire. Leave me alone! I hate it. I was so happy. The world I lived in was great. Now everywhere I go I’m convinced that everyone despises me or I’m covered in diseases or whatever the hell it is at that given moment. It’s got me in this box because I feel like I can’t say anything to anyone without asking for reassurance. Now I am just filled with a burning frustration nonstop. Anger isn’t an emotion I usually experience as a result of ocd but I’ve had it. It’s so so so annoying damnit

My health anxiety has reared its ugly head again. I was doing so well for a little bit and felt like I could finally be present and enjoy my life after my Sertraline dosage increase. I guess my body has adjusted to the dosage because unfortunately, I can't think about anything else. 😔 I'm convinced I'm dying of c again and it sucks. I have a doc appointment next week and this waiting period is the worst. Anyone else taking Sertraline for health anxiety?

One of my first themes came back. I'm again really worried about developing schizophrenia. Everything about it terrifies me to my core. No one in my family has it so I know the chances of me getting it are really low but... I once read that the first symptom someone noticed was they thought bugs were crawling all over their body and now every time I think about this I get itchy and I'm so afraid this might be the start... I don't know how to help myself in this situation. Im so so so scared

One of my most severe ocd subgroups is dea()h (I can’t type it). If an image of someone who is de()d comes to mind I have to do compulsions to get rid of it. This of course all stems from the fear of dy()ng and I have this irrational fear that if I do anything at all, including breathing, with those images in my mind or actual images in front of me (like a picture or on tv) it would lead me to possibly have a higher chance of d()ing or earlier. I was wondering if anyone struggles with a similar issue, and if there was something you tell or convince yourself to help alleviate it. I had a really bad episode tonight where it was just constant image after image and I’m exhausted. Thank you!

am I the only one who gets so much nausea for the anxiety that my ocd gives me? it doesnt matter what im doing or where I am, i always have this feeling of like needing to throw up and it feels like im starting to get used to it, i have nausea right now, it used to scare me so much because I saw tiktoks saying a lot of different causes in life causing this and sent me crazy, im so scared

I would like to get an answer for this cause i want to know why this keeps happening. I compare myself with others cause i dont see others having the same problem. When they have a setback its usually because of a hard day or a big trigger, however for me its just forgetting what i have to do. A month ago i was really good, i dont say i didnt had setbacks but i saw that im going somewhere, you know the setbacks were weaker and weaker, and one day i just someone understood how emotions and thoughts works and i was able to enjoy my day while i had thoughts and emotions, but it didnt affected me. Then i was like this is so good, but im afraid i will just forget it like everytime and believe me or not, the moment i said it i felt that im slowly losing what i learned and after some time i didnt know what to do with the thoughts and emotions when before i realized it and i was living my life like that. And then i was unable to do the same thing, it was like my brain deleted it. It really feels like theres something wrong with my mind, how it foegets just like that what i did before? And now after 1 month im still struggling, the videos that used to help me and made me realize what i need to do doesnt help me, its like im watching nothing, my mind doesnt realizez this video made me understand what i need to do before, now it doesnt make me do anything. And im keep falling back to the point that my panic attacks are back, and it makes me feel so bad cause it means i did nothing, after all this work it got back and im still dont know how to deal with it. Im feeling like how i felt 2-3 years ago, like these years were nothing. Im really afraid that sometime i will get the night panic attacks again when i will be afraid that i will hurt myself or be afraid of i will unalive myself... It doesnt seems like im learning something. Look st my other posts, it seemd like im so close to recovery and im learning alot, but now if i read those i cant relate to those... its like a different person and it doesnt started slowly, like i engaged in unhealthy behaviours, it all started when i thought "i hope i wont forget this" and then i actually forgot what i learned... just like that... and now im again questioning acceptance, what to do with my emotions when i understood that and i was working on it. Im sitting in bed and i try to remember what i did when i get these bad emotions and all i can remember is when people say "you have to let yourself feel the feelings" and im letting myself but all i do is im drowning in them. After anxiety it comes anger then anxiety again and then im depressed and hopeless and then panic comes... i dont get why letting these to come helps me, it makes me drown and become depressed which will only send me to a therapist who will say accept it too... It doesnt make me learn anything it just drowns me, i dont get this acceptance and letting myself feel bad... Im just letting negative emotions take over me without trying to stop it cause now im accepting it...and it doesnt makes me realize anything.

I’ve suffered with OCD to some extent most of my life—rituals, counting, religious themes, etc. After some bad episodes of family abuse + a bad breakup + work toxicity, I developed some pretty bad OCD-related anxiety. I went through a few very bad panic attacks, and became badly depersonalized/dissacotiated. My obsessions and panic began to focus on my bodily sensations—like vertigo/dizziness, worry about floating into the sky forever, the ground falling, the ground disappearing, the ground warping/rotating, etc. I’ve been applying the 4-Step process by Jeffrey Schwartz, and it’s been very very helpful in snapping back to reality and preventing anxiety/panic cycles. So I got his book—Brain Lock. In the preface he talks about a woman who seemingly recovered after 25 years, but still has these thoughts. My question is: Will I be stuck like this forever? The very nature of my thoughts make it very difficult to live happily. I felt discouraged reading that, because it feels like I’ll always have these thoughts and be doomed to undergoing this anxiety/OCD cycle forever. Is there any hope?

I am looking for some insight to support my 8 year old autistic daughter. She has developed health concern OCD after a bout of norovirus that hit the whole family right around Christmas (the discomfort of the nausea seemed amplified by the fact that it affected the holiday, to which she is strongly attached). She has been struggling significantly with emetophobia since then, seeking constant reassurance. We have trialed an SSRI for the past two months. While the health anxiety reassurance seeking has diminished (from maybe 70% of her day being taken up by it to more like 5%), a new kind of behavior has cropped up that we, her parents, have never seen before. It goes like this: she is doing some very minor, everyday, benign activity like picking up a stuffed animal or putting on a seatbelt. She "sets a goal" for herself (her words) to do xyz in a certain way, such as pick up the stuffed animal by its fabric tag only, not touching any of the stuffed animal's fur, or putting her seatbelt on herself without touching her skin/body with her fingers while she's doing it. If she then "fails" this "goal," such as accidentally touching the fur or herself, then she starts crying, screaming, flailing, and begging us to "get this feeling out of my body." She will hit and scratch her arms and legs, because she says this "failure" leaves her limbs feeling like they are weak, fuzzy, wobbly, numb, or "wrapped in a numbing net." It takes quite awhile for her to calm down from these episodes, and we have tried a lot of things to do so: going for a car ride, me lying on top of her, taking a walk, etc. She has a lot of patterns that she makes walking on the floor (hopping and stepping in certain ways according to lines, scratches, or shapes on the floor), but none of those patterns seem to result in these same kinds of "failures" and subsequent distress. Is this OCD-- specifically Perfectionism OCD? The element of failure really stands out to her. I have been having a hard time even figuring out what is going. Any help would be so deeply appreciated-- this has been so rough on our family.

I have a phobia of a specific sickness, and although I’ve come to realize that the actual experience of it isn’t so bad, the anticipation is what really destroys me. Always wondering if and when. I just can’t stop :( does anyone know how to deal with this? I do my ERP but sometimes it’s like I go mad with the realization that my fear could really happen. I know that if it weren’t this, it would be something else. I mean, it has been, over and over again. And it’s always the same fear of anticipation. Any support or tips? Thanks.

A little bit of a bummer post today but mostly a really proud one. Yesterday was, unfortunately my last day with NOCD, due to reasons related to my health insurance, continuing to pay for services OON is not affordable, yay US healthcare 😤 But I am so thankful to my therapist, and NOCD for the spot I am in now that I haven’t been at, mentally in years. While I can identify earlier moments of events or actions possibly related to my OCD, the one that affected me most was just a few days past exactly 7 years ago. The thought that started it all for my SO OCD theme occurred while I was being intimate with my gf at the time and my head thought “I wonder what this would look like if this was a guy”… That one split second thought caused me to spiral for the rest of the day and into the next. I could not get out of my head, I was numb to the world around me and when I went to a local urgent care and they asked the question - “have you had thoughts of self harm” - I admitted I did, I didn’t want to act on them at all, but I did I was admitted to a local mental health unit of a hospital that day. I was diagnosed with GAD that day, and while I only stayed for a night, the constant thoughts and the complete feeling of numbness, that I experienced for weeks, is something I’ll never forget. I viewed myself as weak, as useless, as broken, and I did for a long long time even if sometimes I forgot about those feelings. It didn’t help that my parents are not supportive of mental health issues, although I can see now where I got mine from. I came across, what was known as HOCD at the time, now SO OCD, a few weeks later, and knew what I was experiencing was that. Even the HOCD tests that I took at the time highly suggested that, but I completely overlooks the OCD aspect. To me, SO OCD was like a cold, I caught it, and it would go away with some medication, which was what was happening. Every morning I would see how long it would be until I had a thought about my sexual orientation where I would, what felt like a moment where I would snap back into my head. It got longer week by week and so to me, I was cured. But I wasn’t. In between the moments of that time and now, I met my now wife, got married and had a child with another on the way. I had a lot of very very good moment, a lot more so than bad, but those events scarred me. While OCD tormented me quietly in other ways: - you lost weight to quickly while dieting, I think you have cancer, better try eating more just to make sure - you can’t fall asleep, what if you have this super rare illness where you’ll never be able to fall asleep again and slowly go crazy and die? - what if your newborn daughter is crying because she can see into the future and knows that you’re going to die today, it’ll probably be from that aneurysm you’re so worried about It always jabbed me with reminders and thoughts that would harken back to one of the most traumatic periods of my life: - you should kiss your friend - don’t you think it’s going to be hard to be completely straight and married to your wife for eternity, even in the afterlife - oh look a gay dude, remember how you never fully figured out if you were actually gay Those moments and thoughts always felt like a gut punch, but they would go away, until this year. If I had to make a list of triggers it would include but not be limited to: - learning that someone I had interacted with a bunch of times during those “gap” years was actually gay, and sold records which always created thoughts whenever I listened to my record player while working - seeing a documentary about Aaron Hernandez and reading his story on Wikipedia which included a snippet of him blaming him being raped as a child for his potential attraction to men, for which may or may not have happened to me (I don’t think it did but the dad of a friends house I went to a lot when I was little, was convicted of child molestation) - viewing my medicine that I would only take on and off again as the way to get the thoughts to stop - recognizing that my wife and I weren’t able to spend as much time together as we used to, which generated ROCD thoughts first The thoughts progressed more and more for weeks. I was trapped in my head, almost 24/7, trying to make the thoughts stop, reliving thoughts that just reminded me constantly of that period 7 years ago, all while I became more and more depressed, anxious and distant. Eventually, while my wife was visiting for lunch at work, I broke down crying and told her everything. I knew it was SO OCD, but was only starting to realize what OCD actually was. I came across NOCD through a YouTube video, and after trying and failing to find an in network therapist in my area, or someone in network that didn’t have wait times for months out, mainly because I couldn’t google as efficiently in my state of mind, I reached out. I was able to speak to someone so quickly and start working with a therapist just a week after Wilda Rodriguez-Barnett, I highly, highly recommend her, she’s amazing. I did the DOCS and received a score of 22. Today I leave with a DOC score of 4. With her help and ERP therapy, I have truly found so much more peace in my life that I didn’t have for years since that traumatic period. The thoughts are still there, and I know they always will be, but I know that I can handle them with the tools ERP therapy has provided me. Even the other day when I had a health concern pop up, I resisted the urge of googling which I know would’ve sent me into a spiral. I wrote a lot and I still feel like there is so much more that I can say but I’ll try to wrap up this novel of a post with this. When I started ERP therapy I was skeptical. I was hopeful it would help me but I was skeptical it would. Being exposed to my fears was not something I was looking forward to, after all, I had the life I always wanted and even more than I ever thought I would have with my wife, so what if I was actually gay. OCD wants us to live our lives in fear. It will concoct any little thing it can, whether it be a thought, feeling or urge, to plant just a seed of doubt which we water and grow ourselves until it attacks. I know these thoughts will never go away and I don’t think anyone should view OCD recovery as that, although I think we would all want to, but I do know the life I want to live right now. I know I will never be perfect in resisting my compulsions, but I feel confident that I have the tools to recognize what is going on and stopping OCD from creating the fear that it has.

Having a hard time figuring out if my physical symptoms are because of my OCD & health anxiety or if there’s something truly wrong with me. Feeling weakness and weird sensations in my arm and leg on and off for a long time now … doctors don’t know what’s wrong :(

I’ll start - Worried I was a zoophile because I enjoy eating octopus - Thought I was dying of a brain aneurism because my head hurt - Thought that because my towel touched the hand towel that my family uses that I had to wash them both so that way my family wouldn’t become attracted to me.

So my ocd has found something new to obsess over, sadly. I’m the oldest sibling and I’ve always struggled with my anger. As a kid, I would take these feelings out on my siblings whenever they made me mad and i feel terrible now just thinking about it. My brother admitted to me a while ago that he felt so sad and depressed because of how rude I was. Thinking about it now, it makes me feel so ashamed. I was so mean to him. I’ve changed and he doesn’t feel that way anymore toward me anymore and our relationship is actually so much better. I guess im just obsessing over the fact that I caused my own brother to be depressed and sad. I wasn’t even worried about this before because I’ve changed. And I’m really scared because my ocd has been terrible lately, leading to a lot of stress. What if this stress leads to health issues like heart disease?? I’m really scared. Please help me

Has anyone been on this medication before? My doctor wants to put me on this but I’ve never heard of it

Hi. I'm new here. Never been diagnosed but identify with symptoms. I want to seek a diagnosis but I'm terrified of seeking help and having the doctors think I'm just faking it or being a hypochondriac (I have a laundry list of thing I want to look into as far as diagnosis go). I just need answers and help because it's hard and after having a kid it's even harder. How did you get diagnosed? Was there medical gaslighting for you?

How can I respond to some of these intrusive thoughts without feeling like I need to fight, resist, and etc?? They’re extremely distressing and make me question myself, my reality and my health/brain. I’ve tried just distracting myself, ignoring it, and letting it scream at me. But then it comes back with scarier ones and I’m just struggling . I’d been doing good with them lately but suddenly they’re awfully intense and hard to ignore Help😞

I’ve felt like I’m in danger all day long and that something bad is about to happen to me 🙃🙃I realize this is probably just a compulsion to think about it. I ruminated and obsessed basically all day. However In therapy today I played with a food that I’m terrified that I’m allergic to! So that’s a win 😊

I really am having the last 24 hours of straight up hell. My blood sugar will not come down from 250 no matter what i do. And with my blood sugar being 450 for 8 straight hours last night, my mind is spiraling. Another fun fact that doctors never seem to touch on : when you have OCD you have more sugar in your brain, they don’t know why, so now imagine you have blood sugar control issues such as myself and your sugar is in the 400’s plus multiple times a week. A neurologist I saw in the past said there isn’t a medical term for it but from what i described (thats a whole other conversation) and the brain scans I have “sugar toxicity in the brain” which contributes to my severe obsessive compulsive disorder. I feel like I can’t catch a break guys. I am hurting so bad. Just 5 minutes ago, after my night of hell and getting piss on myself and having to clean my sheets and my bed and shower, i just went pee and it splashed up on me AGAIN. I want to SCREAM. Idk if anyone else has this (you don’t have to answer) but if I have this happen i am now “dirty”. I can now not only not touch anything i deem as “clean” in my house…but also elsewhere. So I can’t go shopping…& i needed to get some things and its my only day off. The only way id be able to go is if i took another shower and got re-ready for the day. Its already 4:30. So my entire day is ruined.

This is a very specific and unique situation that I don’t think many (if any) will be able to relate….and I am not sharing this to get validation. Its more of a lack of connection and lack of understanding situation. I feel really alone. I have had OCD since I was a child. I truthfully think it happened because of some not okay sexual things happening at home. To add fuel to the fire God decided to give me type 1 diabetes as a child…which only intensified the OCD. Especially because the mother he assigned to me is extremely controlling and emotionally abusive. I am 33 years old living at home- I would have never dreamed my life would have ended up as terrible as it did and I have no words to express that. It isn’t for lack of trying, ive been working since I was 14 years old. But With the economy and the cost of my disease (that is out of control) and disability only offering me $800 a month, i am stuck at home. Pity party starting now: Imagine for a moment your OCD is cleanliness. And you have a disease that not only causes you severe pain; but causes other issues such as but not limited to, issues with going to the bathroom. ie: if my sugar is 400 like it is currently the piss Will spray out of me like a broken faucet and get on my inner thigh like it has just done. Not only this but anyone who has experienced blood sugar this high would know it causes scary cognitive function issues and dark thoughts, spiraling thoughts. So I can’t just work through the thought of being dirty..ive tried..i spiral. Then my sugar gets worse, i faint and have to call the ambulance. Imagine having a mother who after 20 years of you being sick can’t understand it. And doesn’t care how sick you are or how you feel in regards to your diabetes. And who laughs and makes fun of you in regards to your OCD. And now imagine you live in America where everything is so expensive that you can’t leave.