Rewire Your Ocd Brain summary

What qualifies as an obsessive thought? To answer this, it’s important to first make the distinction among worries, anxieties, and the thoughts that come to dominate a person’s life.

When you worry, you’re thinking about what could go wrong. Unlike an obsessive thought, this changes from time to time, depending on the circumstances or the day. In this situation you move on once you get a result.

Anxieties tend to hang around longer, but usually also dissipate with time.

Obsessions, though, simply don’t go away. Let’s say you just had an interview for a job. You keep thinking about what happened, what might have happened, or what will happen once they start reviewing your file.

Then you pick up your certificates and start searching for the grades that might bring you down. From here you start stressing about that math class you hated in school – and it just goes on and on and on. That’s an obsessive behavior you’re likely to repeat even after you get the job.

Whether inherited or acquired through experience, these thoughts have one thing in common: they work in cycles. They lurk in the background and influence the way you live and the decisions you make.

For another person it might be the image of a violent scene that keeps popping up in their mind – maybe an accident or thoughts of an assault, and the fear that that generates.

An obsession might also take the form of an impulse. Someone might suddenly feel the urge to drive in front of a moving train, and then hold that thought to the point where the person starts obsessing about self-harm.

Obsessive thoughts take different forms, but they embody common themes – the fear of contamination, a strong desire to organize things and events in a particular order, violence and aggression, sexual violence and impulses, and the desire to avoid mistakes. 

Religious obsessions can cripple people with guilt or embolden them with a conviction to act in the hope they’ll find relief. Every obsessive person will do something to find relief, repeatedly performing an act till it becomes a compulsion.

Do you find yourself going to check the door every ten minutes, or getting annoyed if your shoes are not in a particular order? Maybe you keep reading that email you’ve read 20 times already.

Compulsive behaviors provide relief, but it’s only temporary. Long-term solutions start with addressing the root cause of anxiety – and that’s what you’re going to learn next.