I’ve been an early adopter when it comes to wearable technology, going back fifteen plus years when I had a Zeo headband that tracked my sleep. Since then I’ve tried wearables worn around the finger, head, chest, wrist, and ankle with varying degrees of success. In this blog post, I’ll offer criteria you can use to make decisions about whether wearable technology might be right for you and your OCD recovery while sharing examples from my own experience about how OCD, self-criticism, and wearable technology can interact. Is the wearable accurate and how is that affecting OCD? My first criteri ..read more

You don’t have to have OCD to experience depression, adopt a negative outlook on the future, and/or take a dim view of people and the world. But in my own personal and clinical experience, having OCD certainly doesn’t help. Nor does the news, as I’ve written about previously, as there are enough conflicts and problems covered each day to darken anyone’s worldview whether you have OCD or not. Therefore, as part of maintenance for my own OCD recovery, I try to read widely with an eye to gaining new perspectives that just might prove my OCD’s jaded worldview wrong. In this post, I’m going to sha ..read more

People pleasing is about avoiding anxiety You don’t have to have OCD to engage in people pleasing, but people with OCD often end up participating in this exhausting compulsive behavior of doing things for others for fear-based reasons. It often takes the form of “I have to or I should do this, or [negative consequence will happen].” People pleasing is all about trying to avoid anxiety and/or other challenging emotions, by taking actions that seem to help you: Manage other people’s thoughts or emotions in general. Manage other people’s thoughts or emotions about you. Live up to what some peopl ..read more

Reid Wilson, PhD, who wrote the Afterword to my memoir, Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life, and I recorded “How to Maintain Your Gains in the OCD Recovery Process” in June 2020 for the International OCD Foundation online conference. Steps to maintaining OCD recovery gains In the video we discuss: Step back to step up: change the focus from OCD content to a generic sense of doubt and anxiety I want this!: dropping the resistance to OCD because this is an opportunity to get stronger Step forward with attitude: put your Shoulders Back! Be cunning: act as though ..read more

By my mid-twenties, I had lots of OCD, as I describe in this excerpt from Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life: My life had become all OCD, all the time. Almost like a radio station I was unable to turn down, no matter what I did. All danger, all the time. Your home for the worst-case scenario. All the bad things that could happen to you and the people you love, broadcast uninterrupted, twenty-four hours a day … for your listening hell. My own private radio permanently tuned to the danger station: WDNG. (pp. 104-105) How did I go from WDNG to reclaiming my life fr ..read more

I coined the term “optimization OCD” to describe a mixture of workaholism, just right OCD, and a feeling of never being quite good enough. It’s a topic I’ve written about before in “Breaking out of the OCD cycle: lessons from my younger self,” although I hadn’t come up with a name for it at that tiem. With optimization OCD, our value is conditional and based on activity, so we rush around creating lives we can’t manage in search of worthiness we never feel. We become so busy trying to fix our unworthiness by fixing everything we see around us—in our homes, jobs, relationships, or leisure time ..read more

By Shala Nicely, LPC and Caitlin Pinciotti, PhD, Assistant Professor at Baylor College of Medicine I’m thrilled to be joined by Dr. Caitlin Pinciotti of Baylor College of Medicine for this Aha! Moments blog post about post-traumatic OCD, where we’re going to cover: Shala’s recent personal experience with PTSD, OCD, and a combination of the two: post-traumatic OCD The characteristics of post-traumatic OCD The research about OCD, trauma, and post-traumatic OCD The treatment for post-traumatic OCD Things we hope you remember during your treatment journey Where to find treatment for post-traumat ..read more

My top five OCD-taming tips in celebration of the five-year anniversary of my memoir, Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life! 1. Don’t buy OCD’s bravado, because you can tame OCD At its worst, my OCD was something I called the Triad of Hell: As I conceived it, the Triad of Hell spun three characters into one: Gollum from Lord of the Rings, obsessed with his precious ring—or in my life, with anything that could bring harm; the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, hypervigilant, whirling around searching for the next thing that could kill us; and a Harry Potter-styled demento ..read more

Is your brain deceiving you? If you have OCD, you’ll probably say yes, at times, your brain does like to deceive you. But you may be unaware that your brain’s deception can go far beyond OCD. For instance, have you ever had thoughts like these? I’ll never be able to live a normal life like everyone else because of OCD. I’m a misfit because I have OCD. ERP therapy for OCD may work for other people, but I bet it’s not going to work for me. I have OCD, and therefore I’ll never be truly happy. When thoughts like those enter your mind, what do you do with them? 1) Ignore them and move on with yo ..read more

It’s always wonderful when my OCD is wringing its hands about something when I’m writing blog posts, because it gives me something to work with. Today I woke up with both back pain (thanks to an over-energetic workout this weekend) and tummy troubles (thanks to who knows what?), and my OCD added these symptoms together and came up with—you guessed it—cancer. OCD is nothing if not predictable. My OCD has been worried about cancer ever since it determined that I had “head cancer” as a child, when I was suffering from unexplained hair loss: …from the moment my mind locked on the idea that my ha ..read more