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Is anyone else obsessed with 'understanding their own thoughts'?


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Hi,

Apologies for the long post. It’s a long, if baffling, one.

I was wondering if anyone else is obsessed with 'understanding their own thoughts'. I have this rather baffling thing where, similarly to 'just right' OCD, I feel I absolutely need to understand the (often bizarre) thoughts that go through my mind, but not really because of any specific fear, I just feel a sense of panic that I haven't immediately understood them and might forget them before I do (this is particularly bad when I'm engaged in doing something else, and so can't apply myself to the thought fully). My thoughts are normally semi-philosophical, but increasingly, I'm not even sure what exactly is prompting them, which is what makes them so addictive. It's like the answer is on the tip of my tongue, but I can't express what is bothering me, and so it drives me nuts! It's also strange in that a lot of people with OCD are encouraged to stop avoiding their thoughts and 'let them pass peacefully by', but I almost have the opposite problem, in that I'm continuously trying to grasp them but can never convince myself I've really understood them.

Just today, for example, I’ve had the following thoughts (note that I’ve tried to present them as they occurred to me, as something of a jumbled stream of consciousness that I try to impose order on, but that I’m never sure I’ve really understood. This being so, they are very confusing, and yet I still feel that I’ve still not entirely captured the essence of the questions, and that I’ve only made them remotely understandable because I need to do so to describe them using language!):

Strange thoughts:

  • There is something ‘wrong’ about how only a thin piece of glass separates ‘inside’ from ‘outside’ in a skyscraper, because everything on the inside is split into discrete floors, but as soon as you go ‘out the window’ there is suddenly no structure and the idea of separate layers or floors is meaningless. There ‘should’ be something other than a window demarcating this transition. Also, communal areas ‘should’ provide some kind of buffer zone between private areas of a building and the outside, and ‘dipped’ or lowered areas of one floor are straying into some kind of ill-defined middle ground between floors, and are therefore also ‘wrong’ in some way that wouldn’t be the case for the floor in a single-story building!
  • There is something ‘wrong’ about how averages are worked out because bigger numbers should have a heavier ‘weighting’ (I’m well aware that weighted averages exist, but for some reason had the indescribable feeling today that when calculating an average and looking at the results on a graph, a ‘big’ number should be weighted additionally to the fact that it is already ‘big’ by adding some extra factor) i.e. the mean average of 1 and 9 is 5, but I had the overwhelming feeling that it ‘should’ be pulled more towards 9, as 9 is ‘bigger’.
  • There is something ‘wrong’ about how listening to different types of music make you feel like the ambience of the whole universe changes, rather than implicitly understanding that it only affects you and your immediate surroundings. Why is the effect lessened when other people are around? Do they provide some kind of anchoring to your baseline view of the universe?
  • There is something ‘wrong’ about the recruitment process for companies, because it’s only by selecting people for a role that they change to be capable in that role. I asked myself; do people who are capable or incapable have some inherent property that not every recruiter can see? Does the recruiter retrospectively imagine that they had some property that may or may not exist, i.e. do we mis-remember how people performed based on their current capability level? Do ‘past-recruit’ and ‘present-recruit’ all exist simultaneously in space-time so their capability-property always existed in some way, even if they hadn’t been tested yet!?!

The last example in particular illustrates how I have this racing set of thoughts that play out as I try and understand what felt ‘off’ about the original thought (“there’s something ‘ wrong’ about the recruitment process”).

As part of my obsessing, I try and corral my thoughts into some kind of categories, and loosely this divides them into the general fears that the not-understood thought will:

  • undermine my ‘purpose’ / meaning of life
  • be a question (or perception or experience) that is one that no other people have ever thought of, or possibly could ever understand, so it’s ‘on me’ to make sure I understand it.
  • somehow make things ‘unfair’ by not being understood, either on me or some other party.

I think these categories are sort-of similar to what other people experience. The weird thought about the calculation of averages being wrong, I could sort of see as having been prompted by me thinking it was somehow ‘unfair’ on bigger numbers (ludicrous as that sounds). The recruitment process one sent me into a panic because I was talking to someone when it occurred to me, and was trying to multi-task figuring the thought out while holding up my end of a conversation, and could almost feel it as a once-in-a-lifetime insight that was slipping away from me (as per the second bullet point).

Anyhow, does anyone else get this feeling of occasionally having a completely incomprehensible feeling of wrongness associated with something, either abstract or concrete, that they feel they absolutely have to get to the bottom of. If so, please answer! It would make me feel much better knowing there is someone similarly crazy out there!

Thanks for reading!

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There is nothing unusual about what you are describing. OCD has three essential ingredients:

Obsessions, which are intrusive thoughts, images, fears, doubts, etc. that are unbidden.

Distress caused by the appearance of obsessions. Most people call the distress anxiety but it can include frustration, guilt, shame, disgust.

Compulsions, which are repetitive acts, behaviors or rituals/physicsl or mental that are done to alleviate the distress caused by obsessions and sometimes to stop a bad thing from happening.

If you can wrap your head around that, you understand the basics of OCD.

I didn't read your examples because they are irrelevant. All I needed to know was in your first few paragraphs.

You say you have bizarre thoughts going through your mind. Those are the obsessions.

Those thoughts obviously distress you in some way or you wouldn't be here.

In response, you try to figure out the thoughts/solve the problem. That's basically ruminating and it is a well known compulsion.

You also say that you never really figure out the answers to the thoughts, no matter how hard you try. That leads to a truth about OCD: Compulsions don't work.

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If your mind is racing find out why. Caffeine & energy drinks can do it. NHS says those with anxiety disorders should avoid these. Ample sleep too. 

Thoughts usually come from culture, environment, education & our primary guardian.  

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8 hours ago, Koala17 said:

I feel I absolutely need to understand the (often bizarre) thoughts that go through my mind, but not really because of any specific fear, I just feel a sense of panic that I haven't immediately understood them and might forget them before I do

The underlying issue with OCD is an inability to feel satisfied or complete about a thought/idea/image and thus able to move on.  While this is often experienced by people as worrying about a particular feared outcome ("what if I get cancer" "what if I forgot to turn off the oven") it can also manifest as a more general sense of a situation or idea not being quite "right". 

So, once you get in a state of feeling "not right", the natural inclination is to try and fix that.  Normally if you have some doubt about something you can take steps to reaffirm and move on.  Not sure if you locked your door or not? Check it real quick, your brain will click into "satisfied" mode and you'll move on, no big deal.  For OCD though, checking often doesn't help, the "satisfied" switch is still jammed up, and even though you did the thing that SHOULD have fixed it, for some reason it doesn't.  So you keep feeling anxiety.  In your case that "satisfied" switch is in relation to the thoughts on various topics you are having, you want to feel like you have resolved the thought in some way or another before you can move on.

As PolarBear says, the exact contents of the thoughts that cause you anxiety aren't of particular importance, as long as it follows the pattern of OCD, you can treat it like you would any other OCD.  In your case, you need to actively recognize that you don't HAVE to answer these questions, even if you feel uneasy if you don't.  Some of them are things you simply can't answer anyway.  Sure, calculating averages feels 'wrong' to you, but you can't actually change it.  The math behind it is sound and how you or I or anyone feels doesn't really impact it.  You feel how you feel, but there is nothing you can DO about the situation except ruminate on it.  Its an unanswerable question in the end anyway.  But even if there were questions which theoretically COULD be answered, that doesn't even mean YOU have to do it.  Its impossible for one person to answer all unanswered questions anyway.

Ultimately it all depends on how much the situation is having a negative impact on your life.  If having these thoughts and spending some time pondering them doesn't cause you suffering, doesn't prevent you from doing things you value otherwise in your life, then no problem.  Lots of people spend part of their time thinking about and pondering deep questions.  On the other hand if you find these long thought digressions to cause anxiety and not enjoyment and/or they cause you to have troubles in other areas of your life, then you should confront it and treat it as the mental health problem it is.

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On 08/08/2019 at 00:02, Handy said:

If your mind is racing find out why. Caffeine & energy drinks can do it. NHS says those with anxiety disorders should avoid these. Ample sleep too. 

Thoughts usually come from culture, environment, education & our primary guardian.  

Could you cite your source? Not on NHS Choices web pages.

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As a matter of interest just googled. For GAD and panic disorders caffeine is mentioned as increases heart rate and affects sleep. Based on a WHO study. Interestingly not mentioned for OCD. Why is this? What do you mean by ‘mind racing’? The poster mentioned bizarre thoughts. 

Edited by Angst
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Yes, Koala.  I do I do!!  I am often engaged in what i believe is called "metacognition" by pschiatrists, when you analyse and dissect the thoughts that are plaguing you.  And then, when you think you have sorted one aspect of them out, another doubt will appear in your mind and the cycle starts again!  I am often thinking about my thoughts and comparing them to others i have had, to make sure that they are just OCD..... it goes on and on!  

Tez

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Thanks all for your speedy replies. It's just intensely annoying as I know I've reached that stage where I've overcome a few initial (mostly pseudo-philosophical) OCD worry beads and it has (predictably) just splintered into a whole host of new uncertainties. I know that with ~7 Billion people on the planet, the probability of me having had a completely unique thought or something that only I could understand is pretty remote, let alone the probability of having several a day, but the overwhelming feeling I get (that I'm sure is familiar to many of you) is that I'm always just on the cusp of some great insight about reality (as it is, or as it should be), my mind, or my purpose in life, and I guess feelings of guilt weigh into that in that I feel I need to make sure that I personally understand them to the fullest extent. It's pretty ridiculous really - me feeling that I've understood something is just that - a feeling - so really I'm chasing something pretty basic, and yet it always feels like I'm tangling with some impossibly abstract super-critical question, the answer to which can only be found if it is  instantly grabbed before it disappears :-) It's ot even like I'm looking for answers, I'm still trying to grasp the question!

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