How OCD affected my life and how I survived
Hey,
I’m Ryan and I’m an entrepreneur running two companies, one of which is a mental health initiative that helps treat people suffering from anxiety disorders.
I’d like to think of myself as being fairly successful but it wasn’t always like this. Till a few years ago, I was fighting what seemed like a losing battle against OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder).
I don’t remember the exact time OCD started affecting me. I think it was when I was appearing for my 12th standard exams. The pressure on me was intense because everyone wanted to get into the best engineering schools. This was way back in 1987 and the emphasis was all on marks. Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics to be precise.
I was an above-average student and loved science and mathematics so scoring well was an imminent possibility. The problem was that I began obsessing about it. For some reason, I wanted to score nothing less than 100% and what made it worse was that I really believed I could do it.
I spent countless hours going through my textbooks, solving numerical problems, and being seduced by calculus so much so that it seemed my life had become one big “Integral Sign”.
And then one day, I noticed that I was reading paragraphs in my textbook multiple times. For no apparent reason. I didn’t think much of it but this went on until the repetition got to be noticeable.
Try as much as I did to focus and move on to the next line, I couldn’t, without reading the same sentences over and over again until I had reached some sort of a mental threshold of satisfaction.
I thought it would stop in due course but it never did. It got worse. Where normally it would take me 30 minutes to breeze through a chapter, it now took me twice that much time.
And it didn’t stop there…
This compulsion to keep re-reading written material began to spread to other aspects of my life. I started checking whether light switches had been turned off correctly, whether the door had been shut properly, whether the gas had been turned off…Jesus, it was never-ending.
Leaving the house to go somewhere wasn’t easy anymore. To most people this would mean opening the door, stepping out, pulling the door shut, and locking it if you needed to. As simple as that.
But not for me. I HAD to make sure that the door was locked properly. Which meant turning the key in the lock at least 10 times before I was satisfied that even a professional burglar could not break-in.
And don’t even get me started on the water taps. I just had to close the tap so tight that if it was a living thing, the poor guy would have had the life snuffed out of him at least 10 times in a row.
Pretty frustrating to say the least. I lost at least 60 minutes a day and maybe even more with this repetitive stuff.
It got worse…
But what really made me anxious and sent fear creeping down my spine was that I had started procrastinating. In the desire to have everything be as perfect as it could, I couldn’t start my daily routine without imagining that something would come along in the end and destroy my effort completely. I imagined that all my hard work would result in nothing and I would end up a total failure.
Does this sound silly to you? It probably does and I won’t blame you if you feel that way but this was what I began to live with for the rest of my life.
This illness of mine caused me to do things I might never have considered doing. I enrolled in courses I didn’t care much for, took up a line of work I didn’t appear to be suited for, took up jobs I didn’t care much for…I could go on and on…
I began obsessing over trivial happenings and placed undue emphasis on things people said to me. “Was my neighborhood secure, should I move to a new place, who is that new person in the neighborhood and why is he standing there looking at me like that?”
“What exactly did my friend mean when he said that to me? Should I call and ask him? Why did he say that?”
A Living Hell
My life was slowly becoming a living hell and I was becoming a prisoner of my own thoughts, tied by chains to some unknown, uncontrollable force that seemed to have limitless power in its ability to coerce me into imagining and doing things that seemed to have little relevance to my life.
That my friend, is what OCD is, in a nutshell.
It is a mental illness that causes repeated uncontrollable thoughts and sensations (obsessions) or the urge to do something over and over again (compulsions).
You will find some pretty good information here -> https://wb.md/3doNMxO
Some people, like me, were unfortunate enough to suffer from both (obsessions and compulsions).
The obsessive part is like being held in a vice-grip that you cannot get out of, despite trying your best.
As time went by, it got more serious.
College Life with OCD
I got into Engineering College and there was no sign of the effects of OCD letting up. I continued to obsess over marks and studies to the point where my friends in the hostel began poking fun at me. Probably because I was nowhere near the top of the class despite all the studying I did.
It was at that time that another weird habit took firm root in me and never let go for the entire 4 years of hostel life.
I refused to bathe, shave or keep clean regularly. I was never like that and just could not understand it. There was always some excuse; the water was too cold, the hostel bathrooms weren’t clean enough, there wasn’t enough privacy to undress…God!
It got to the point where I would go without a shave or a bath for an entire month and looked like someone who had lived the better part of his life in a jungle without any of the basic amenities.
Needless to say, I didn’t make many friends.
The weird thing is, one of the ways OCD manifests itself is by a mindless obsession of keeping yourself clean and indulging in rituals like endless hand washing and stuff. With me, it was the reverse. I don’t think it was laziness; it was definitely something I cannot put my finger on till today.
Rebel Without a Cause
Anyway, I passed out of Engineering College without adventure and jumped into working life. OCD had fully set in by then and had become a part of everything I did.
But to be honest, the pressures of work made me stick to deadlines and I turned out to do pretty well for myself as an Engineer.
The problems began to crop up when I got promoted to Managerial positions.
I began to fight for the teams reporting to me. For what earthly reason, I don’t know. It’s not like we were being ill-treated or anything like that. I worked for an American company and it had a heavily matrixed reporting structure with local managers in India and functional managers in the U.S. I was both a local and functional manager and had to walk the tightrope of being forthright and diplomatic where it mattered.
But I was obsessive about protecting my team from any “injustice” handed out in the form of unreasonable work demands or salary that could be better or whatever came to my notice that I thought could be improved.
This drove a wedge between my bosses in the US and me and the only thing that saved my job was probably the fact that I was damn good at it.
But I couldn’t take it much longer. The many years of continual bickering over conference calls, emails, and in-person meetings took their toll and I quit after 11 years.
When I looked back on what transpired, it came as a shock that the OCD seemed to have grown and mutated into deeply rooted obsessions that germinated from a single thought of undue intensity.
I thought it my duty to “protect” my team but in so doing took things too far that made me look like at times like a “rebel without a cause”.
It didn’t stop there. The OCD was growing into a Frankenstein and was running loose. At times I used to think of it like a traffic cop directing which way I should go.
I turn Entrepreneur
During the last few months of my corporate life, I felt the entrepreneurial bug bite me. I went over several ideas in my head but none seemed to make sense. Then one day I settled on healthcare.
Or rather, remote health monitoring for senior citizens. I won’t get into the details of what happened after that but suffice it to say that the idea took such firm root in my mind that I plunged right into it just 2 weeks after quitting my job.
Techniques for treating Anxiety disorders like OCD
I’ll tell you all about my entrepreneurial life in another post and how OCD affected some of the decisions I made but for now, let me leave you with the best techniques for helping people with anxiety disorders like OCD.
Doing some of this myself has helped me immensely in combating the illness and reducing the urge to indulge in compulsions.
The methodology most widely used is a form of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)called Exposure and Response Prevention (EX/RP). This involves both imaginal and in vivo techniques.
This article does a pretty good job of explaining the role of CBT in helping with anxiety disorders.
Imaginal is when the person is made to revisit the traumatic experience mentally and recount it to the therapist. Following that, the therapist discusses the experience with the person and makes him analyze the change in his thoughts and beliefs that the trauma has brought about.
In vivo is when the person is taken physically to visit places, objects, people, or situations that he used to avoid despite them being safe.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for OCD
In vivo techniques are used both in the presence of the therapist and also as homework. E.g., closing taps without the normal ritual of tightening the taps repeatedly to make sure they are closed, washing hands without the ritual of continual washing because of the fear that the patient will fall ill.
In places wherein Vivo is dangerous like in the fear of the consequences of contracting HIV, imaginal exposure is used. The patient vividly imagines the feared situation but anxiety is allowed to decrease on its own without the patient indulging in the compulsion.
What I did to fight it
And that’s what I did and continue to do. I use both the imaginal and the in vivo techniques to arm wrestle OCD to the ground. Very rarely do I feel the need to close taps multiple times or check the gas every few minutes. My reading efforts too have shown a marked improvement and I don’t feel compelled to re-read sentences.
But where my daily practice has helped the most is in reducing the fear of getting started on an initiative and completing it without fear of failure.
I’m not saying I’m successful all the time; I just do a better job of getting started and not procrastinating for days and weeks.
If you suffer from any form of OCD or know someone who does, write to me and tell me how you have coped or helped other people manage their condition. If you need advice, don’t hesitate to write to me at rlemos@mindwizzards.com.
I hope you found this little note useful. Feedback of any kind is welcomed, so comment below or write to me at rlemos@mindwizzards.com.
Till next time….
Sincerely,
Ryan Lemos
References:
WebMD — https://wb.md/3doNMxO
NCBI — https://bit.ly/3gdAKVQ
