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Comment by meguest | Hacker News Reader

I struggle a lot with OCD. I have a therapist. We have techniques and routines to try and reduce the anxiety and compulsions to some reasonable baseline. Some days are O.K, others are torture.

My frequent OCDs include:

1. Leaving the cooker on 2. Leaving the taps on 3. Leaving a window open or a door unlocked 4. Some kind of electrical fault burning down the house 5. Causing harm to other people, particularly when driving 6. Searching the Internet for illegal content 7. Doing something awful/unforgivable and being criminally prosecuted or losing all my savings in some kind of civil case

I never usually experience them at the same time. They come and go one at a time and some I have learned to manage better than others.

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"Leaving the cooker on 2. Leaving the taps on 3. Leaving a window open or a door unlocked"

I fret about these things a lot - so I take pictures on my phone. This completely solves the problem for me and, of course, I never look at the resulting pictures.

Does create some surreal Apple Memories made up of nothing but unplugged plugs and locked doors set to music.... :-)

Hey, perhaps a life-blogging camera would be the ultimate solution :)

I must admit that I occasionally look at the Hive app and conclude that if our house is at 18C then it probably isn't on fire... :-)

That's a very practical and straightforward way of addressing it, a really good idea.

In my case I very occasionally worry about having left the gas stove on in the kitchen after cooking, and what usually works, in a way similar to the pictures you take I guess, is re-tracing my actions just before and after switching the gas off. This way I can actually visualize how I turned off the gas just before draining the pasta in the sink or whatever.

This works if I remember something particular about that specific occasion tho, but it usually does the thing.

I too started taking photos on my phone. It's not a solution, it's a safety behaviour. The trouble with safety behaviours is that they can stop working after a while and then you're in trouble.

I found it helped my compulsion to repeatedly check if I locked a door was to check, and then say, out loud, to myself, "OK, it's locked." Just throwing it out there for someone else.

Although I don’t have OCD, I have ADHD. Your condition causes you to have anxiety about it, and my condition makes me more likely to actually do one of those things :)

How I’ve gotten around the anxiety (as I actually have left doors unlocked to my detriment on multiple occasions, have left the stove on etc.), is I say it out loud as I’m doing it. “Locking the front door.” Sometimes I might have to add a day: “Monday morning. Locking the front door.” as my brain will occasionally trick me into thinking that memory wasn’t from today.

I did this enough that now it’s somehow ingrained in my head and I don’t forget to do things as often. I’m not sure if this would work for you, but it might help.

Useful mechanism. And I really like the Monday morning "timestamp" thing.

I remember this appeared around HN some time ago, you might find it interesting: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...

> 5. Causing harm to other people, particularly when driving

I actually think this is a healthy thing to be a little obsessively worried about. Drivers are generally too blasé about the damage they can cause to other humans through their actions.

Like, most people should be worried about that enough that they drive less often because of it.

It's not healthy. For some people their OCD is so bad that they cannot pass a cyclist or pedestrian, regardless of how safe or textbook the manoeuvre, without having deep anxiety that they might have hit them.

Is it healthy for a cyclist or pedestrian to have a deep anxiety that any given driver passing them is going to hit them? Because that bit happens pretty frequently.

You and sibling are right that such a horrific illness shouldn't be trivialized, but I get really tired of people pretending that driving a car should be something you don't feel a little nervous doing.

Please don't trivialse a disabling condition by saying "sure, but everyone does that".

All you've done here is shown that you have fialed to listen to and understand the parent poster.

They're not describing the perfectly normal response of "I'm in two tons of metal hurtling down the road I better be careful".

They're describing the pathological anxiety response. That gentle rumbling noise? That's a dead child trapped in the wheel arch, and I ran over them at that last junction. The air con is working a bit harder? That's because I ran over someone and that accident damaged the aircon. That car behind me, that everyone else says is perfectly normal? They're trying to get my attention to tell me about the cyclist I just killed.

Would it help to automate stuff? Like detectors on your windows/doors? Or to cook with induction (shuts off when there is no pan and after a certain wattage has been applied to a pan). Or would other things fill the void?

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