OCD, Intrusive Thoughts, and the Difference Between Thinking and Believing
I want to engage you in an exercise, and it will only take a moment.
First, a claim I suspect you will agree with.
Simply saying or thinking something does not mean it will come true.
In other words, what happens in your head does not change what happens in the world. Thinking about winning the lottery does not mean you will win. Concentrating on heads does not change a coin that has already been flipped and covered.
Most people accept this without argument. I certainly do.
Now the second part. Think of someone you love. Write their name down or hold their name in your mind for a moment.
Then finish this sentence:
Tomorrow, something horrific will happen to …
You do not have to write it down. Just observe what happened when you read it.
If you hesitated or felt discomfort, you are in good company. This demonstration is used in clinical training, and rooms full of psychologists and psychiatrists refuse the same way. Some of them will not write the sentence at all. Others write it and then tear the paper into pieces, as though the words need to be undone (OCD UK).
These are people who study this for a living. They know the sentence is only a sentence. They agreed to that a minute earlier, just as you and I did.
Nothing is wrong with you for hesitating; that reaction is expected. Most minds produce a thought like that, register the discomfort, and move on. The thought arrives, it fails to matter, and then departs.
Mine doesn’t always let go. The thought persists, and the discomfort doesn’t easily fade. This is because I have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
I will share a bit about OCD, but less from a scientific perspective and more from an experiential perspective. None of this is advice, as I am not a mental health professional. I simply want to share my experience, as someone managing the condition.
I want to start by clarifying a couple of things. First, OCD is not an adjective. No one is “a little OCD.” Someone may have obsessive or compulsive tendencies, or they may meet the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder. In other words, OCD is a diagnosis, not a description. Second, OCD is incredibly unpleasant and there is no satisfaction in having OCD. No one should wish they were ‘more OCD’ so that their room would be cleaner. Using the term “OCD” in this way minimizes the distress and pain that this disorder causes.
OCD is often misunderstood, despite being one of the most disabling health conditions in the world (Singh et al. 2023). The experience is difficult to understand from an outside perspective because all that is visible are the repetitive and seemingly unnecessary behaviors. It can be obvious that someone is struggling, but unclear why or what the problem is.
There are several interacting experiences of OCD, surrounding the cycle of obsessions, anxiety, and compulsions. I typically experience:
Obsessions:
1. Persistent intrusive thoughts that often attack my identity and values
2. An overestimation of threat and inflated sense of responsibility, making it feel as though something will go wrong and I must prevent it
3. Anxiety around the feared outcome and my inability to eliminate the uncertainty
4. Shame around the irrationality of the thoughts and the fact that they continue despite knowing better
Compulsions:
5. Repetitive behaviors or mental rituals aimed at temporarily relieving the anxiety
6. A sense of relief that teaches my brain the compulsion was necessary
7. Shame around the impractical nature of the compulsions and the time and energy devoted to them
8. A strong need for certainty and low tolerance for uncertainty
9. Difficulty trusting my own memory, judgement, and experiences
10. The return of the intrusive thought because the perceived threat was never truly resolved
The cycle is distracting, demanding, and distressing.
OCD is a condition where the solution to the problem becomes another problem. A fear-based obsessive thought causes distress, the compulsion temporarily relieves the stress, your brain records this as a solution, the intrusive thoughts return, and the cycle continues.
Let’s walk through an example:
You know that feeling when you are on your way to work and then suddenly don’t remember if you locked the front door to your house or not? Maybe you go back and check or maybe you resign yourself to the house being okay for a few hours. It is a fleeting thought, you get closure, and you continue on with your day.
Well, my experience of this same situation is different. I would go back and check that the door is locked, maybe two or three or ten times. The first time going back to check might be five minutes out, then maybe the next time I would make it thirty seconds down the street, but thereafter, I would barely make it to the car before confirming again to be sure. I will know and remember that I went back and confirmed, but I still feel like I need to check again. At some point, I must leave for work and just recognize that I will be left feeling the uncertainty and anxiety all day until I get home and can check again. All day, I keep thinking about the unlocked door, feeling the same anxiousness we did in the first exercise. I try to remember the times I went back and confirmed that it was locked. I think about the mechanical sounds the doorknob made as I tested the locked door, I picture the way the light cast my shadow as I checked the door, I recall the way the porch plant hit my arm on the way back to the car. All of this gives me confidence that I did, in fact, lock the door this morning. I am then able to go about my day… until the thought comes back a few minutes later. I begin doubting myself again because maybe all of these memories were actually from yesterday and not this morning or maybe that final time I relocked the door didn’t actually work.
I know how silly this seems, and that is part of the shame associated with OCD. I am a rational person, I know I am, and yet I cannot get unstuck from the loop. I sit in anxiety all day over something that I should feel certain about or at least something that I should be able to just accept.
But the problem is, the stress doesn’t feel like it is just about the door being unlocked. The fear rarely stays attached to the practical problem; it is also about questioning:
- Am I careless for leaving the things I value, and the things people I love value, so vulnerable if I go without being sure?
- Am I selfish for abandoning this responsibility for other priorities? Or am I crazy for even comparing the importance of checking the door for the sixth time with the responsibility of getting to my morning meeting on time?
- Shouldn’t I trust myself more? This is a simple task that everyone everywhere does every day, why am I unable to do this right?
- Does my lack of control over this situation make me weak?
While this experience with the front door sounds like the stereotypical OCD, it doesn’t always feel as clear in my own head. My OCD thoughts are often narratives that feel less objective or mechanical. I chose to share this example because it felt safe and relatable, but the intrusive thoughts often pull from more offensive themes. This adds to the shame, loneliness, and unwillingness to seek support.
A simple doubt about a locked door becomes so much more, because my brain doesn’t always weigh the thoughts appropriately. Most minds sort thoughts automatically, but mine often feels stuck in manual mode, asking me to evaluate the same thought long after it should have passed.
What gives the thought its power is not its presence, but the meaning I attach to it. It feels revealing, as though it says something important about who I am, and that sense of significance keeps pulling me back.
Two practices have changed how I respond. The first is exposure. I sit in the discomfort of not knowing, without checking and without seeking reassurance. Yes, it is as uncomfortable as it sounds. But it builds my tolerance for the anxiety, and each time I skip the compulsion and the outcome is one I can live with, I gather evidence about the real risk instead of the felt one. Over time, the anxiety loses some of its grip.
The second is a question I ask of any thought that sticks: do I agree with this? For years, I asked it with real intensity and intention, inspecting an unwanted thought from every angle. Now it runs in the background and mostly on its own.
Consider the sentence from the beginning of this essay. Tomorrow, something horrific will happen to someone I love. When I ask the question now, the answer comes quickly. No. I do not want that. The thought arrived, and the discomfort arrived with it, but neither one is a belief. They are things my mind produced, and I get to decide whether I endorse them.
Doing this has given me a clearer view of my own mind than I would have otherwise. Most people never have to separate the thoughts that pass through them from the ones they stand behind. I did, and I now know where that line sits for me.
I don’t love the reason I had to learn this. But I am grateful for what it has given me, and for the way examining my thoughts has reinforced something true about all of us:
We are not defined by the thoughts that pass through our minds, but by the ones we choose to believe.
References
Singh A, Anjankar VP, Sapkale B. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A Comprehensive Review of Diagnosis, Comorbidities, and Treatment Approaches. Cureus. 2023 Nov 17;15(11):e48960. doi: 10.7759/cureus.48960. PMID: 38111433; PMCID: PMC10726089.
“What Are Obsessions?” OCD-UK, https://www.ocduk.org/ocd/obsessions/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.