Brad Stulberg

And what that does is it gives you relief maybe for a minute, but then the OCD brain says, well, what if you're wrong?

What if you actually are going to do it?

Followed by bad depression, bad anxiety accompanying those, and you get into this cycle.

So the themes of OCD too, they're really bizarre, but they're really common.

And I think it's important just in case listeners might be going through this and are ashamed to get help.

So I thought like,

This is nuts.

This is just happening to me.

There's no one else that's constantly worried about this or constantly questioning the meaning of life.

But sure enough, it's like one of the big 10 themes of OCD is existential OCD, which is just that.

Like, what's the point of it?

Another form of OCD that I fortunately have never had this theme, but again, is really common, but people are ashamed to talk about it, is you think that you're going to randomly push someone in front of a car or push someone onto the tracks of a subway.

So then you don't leave your house.

Or when you do, you get so anxious because you think that you're going to do this thing.

And the person experiencing that thinks they're a psychopath.

They think they're crazy, but actually it's the fact that they don't want to do it and that it's accompanied by so much anxiety that makes it OCD.

So to zoom out from the weeds, it's some sort of intrusive thought and feeling

that is like 10 out of 10 bad, accompanied by some kind of compulsion that you do to make it go away, which can be something external like counting, like organizing, like washing your hands, but it can also be something internal like problem solving or trying to convince yourself all the reasons you won't do that bad thing.

I think it's a little bit of both.

So what I'd say is that I still have OCD, but my experiences of it are much less frequent.