Triggered

Exploring the psychological landscape of OCD

Fletcher Wortmann

Managing Your OCD While Dealing With the Outbreak

OCD treatment, through ERP therapy, requires sufferers to confront danger and risk harm without protecting themselves. The coronavirus epidemic has flipped all this upside-down.

Horror Exposure and OCD

When you encounter a creative realization of your nightmares—in a comic, a book, a film, or perhaps in a piece you’ve created—you open space for new contexts and understandings.

Talking to Myself

When you’re thinking—when you’re literally talking to yourself—who is the listener?  And what—or who—is talking back?

Bear hibernating with cubs

Human Hibernation as a Survival Strategy

Giving up on everything can seem an obvious, even organic decision. But it’s an obsolete, irrelevant strategy; programmed in prehistoric conditions, never updated for modern life.

Rumination

When Depression Meets OCD: Understanding Rumination

Out-of-control negative thoughts, whether depressed or anxious, are painful. Noting subtle distinctions between rumination and obsession can be crucial to successful treatment.

Dungeons and Dragons

The Secret Life of Geeks

Why do we invest so much of ourselves into our favorite media? When does a fan become a fanatic?

Goya - The sleep of reason produces monsters

Internal Memes: Parasites and Predators of the Mind

Whether a negative thought acts like a T-Rex or a tapeworm, the result is the same: a disruption of our mental equilibrium, leading to distraction, anxiety, and suffering.

Striatal neuron

Infohazard Warning: How Internal Memes Infect Your Brain

If a meme is an idea that gets in your head, an "infohazard" is a meme that's actively harmful. But you can strengthen your mental immune system against them.

Why Did I Think That? Your Internal Memes

Why do some thoughts come to mind more often than others? What is it, exactly, that makes us think the thoughts we think? Welcome to the habitat of the internal meme.

Primal Fear in the Modern Age

Any threat can trigger the short-term fear response – but an anxiety disorder heightens and extends these effects. OCD goes one step further.

Pokémon Type Chart

Pokémon and Communication for the Non-Neurotypical

As a child, no one explained that this isn’t the common definition of “worried,” and no one asked if I meant something else.

OCD, Contamination, and the Disgust Affect

An effective system for keeping our prehistoric ancestors healthy can today misfire to trigger visceral and terrifying obsessions.

The Worst Thing in the World

Understand that, although it may be painful, you can never not profit when you learn something about yourself.

Brain Game: What’s Playing "God Hand" Got to Do With OCD?

The same way you can learn to beat a videogame, you can learn to disrupt self-destructive thinking and replace it with newer, healthier behaviors.

Stuck: OCD and Writer's Block

Struggling through writer’s block wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me: There was a repetitive component. A compulsion to produce perfection. An irrational repetition of some circular and almost-totally-arbitrary task (in this case, compulsively scribbling things down and scratching out and re-scribbling) that kicked up a whole lotta dust but didn’t actually accomplish much.

Obsessing About Obsessing: When OCD Goes Meta

I was being terrorized not by the intrusive thoughts, but by the exasperating persistence of the OCD itself. Somehow, unbelievably, maddeningly—I had started obsessing about obsessing.

OCD Cupid

With nowhere else to turn, I held my nose, lay down my dignity and my personally-identifiable information at the door, and stepped into the preferred digital meat market of underemployed millennials … online dating.

Has "Girls" Cured OCD?

In HBO’s Girls, I believe Lena Dunham has come closer than anyone in popular culture to showing the pain and black comedy of long-term OCD treatment. But if the show wants to honor the character’s disorder, then I think she and her family (and Adam, too, if he’s committed to this relationship) have a lot of work to do.

Subtle Signs of OCD in a Young Child

Not every child who has an abnormal fascination with collections of things like dinosaurs, Beanie Babies, and Pokémon, or who exhibits anxiety, low self-esteem, or all-consuming guilt suffers from OCD. But a thorough evaluation for the spectrum of anxiety disorders might have revealed that we had been dealing with individual symptoms, but had not identified the disease.

Caring for a Child with a Mental Illness

In caring for a child with a mental health challenge, your responsibility is the same as any other parent’s: to support your child, to lift them when they stumble, to guide them away from dangerous roads, to help them until they’re ready to strike out on their own, if they can.

With OCD—Waiting is the Hardest Part

There is absolutely nothing more toxic to an obsessive-compulsive than boredom. Boredom is to obsession as an incubator is to an egg, or a compost bin is to rotten fruit: it adds heat and pressure and that accelerates the process exponentially. When you have nothing to distract you, obsessive thoughts can quickly escalate from annoying to excruciating.

Distraction: How Occasional Escapism Can Help With OCD

The trick is knowing when you can face the symptoms and deal with them productively, and when to use escapism to check out of reality for a while. OCD can be a terrible burden, and there’s no shame in occasional escapism.

Cutting It Short

Medication withdrawal: It feels like trying to use a computer that’s old or slow or has a lousy connection. You’re staring at the screen, waiting for the content to appear - there just isn’t any content there.

Chaos Under Control: Dealing with Anxiety about Moving

There’s nothing that can actually make moving enjoyable, short of an electrode that zaps the pleasure center of your brain every time you fill another 1.5 cu. ft. cardboard box from uHaul. And sadly, an anxiety disorder only compounds the problem—but going in with a game plan can help.

Coming to Terms With Mental Illness

The first step is learning to confront the bad stuff, or at least live alongside it, instead of hiding from it….The end result is that the trauma of those memories begins to fade, and larger parts of your history feel like they’re yours again. It’s a good feeling. It gives you room to breathe.

Why "Monk" Stunk

I have no problem with jokes about OCD, but I do have a problem with entertainment that permits audiences to laugh at the disorder without showing them the terror and despair and shame and self-loathing that many OCD sufferers endure.

Choosing a College When Mental Health Is an Issue

For those with a mental health disability, transitioning to college can lead to a spike in symptoms at the worst time imaginable. When choosing a college, there are programs and services to look for.

“Girls” Gets OCD

It makes me wonder how many sufferers don’t ask for help with OCD intrusive thoughts (often sexual or violent) because they’re ashamed or confused.

The Pains and Gains of Yoga for OCD

With Zumba, I had high school flashbacks of the annual spring musical and cross-country; it brought me back to the bleeding-lung exhaustion of the latter and humiliating, zombie-like choreography of the former. But I found it a useful way to confront my social anxiety and phobia of looking silly in public. Because I promise you - with Zumba, you will look silly in public.

Dating With Anxiety

While it may not as seem romantic as catering to the every whim of your intended beloved, exposing yourself to increasingly more challenging (but still manageable) social situations is a much healthier way of building the confidence you need to find a date.

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