Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

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Oh I got the perfect answer for this one.

As someone who (now after about a year of therapy a while back) has my OCD managed, let me tell you what my brain still does with a moment of free time:

Visualizes the worst possible scenario of any situation I’m in!

Standing in line to get coffee: What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in this batch of coffee?

Walking with my kids to a park: What if that van over there is about to kidnap my kids. What if my oldest pushes my younger one out into traffic? What if one of them falls off the playground and gets permanent brain damage?

Sitting in bed at night: What if that weird feeling in my stomach is cancer? What if I left the heater on too high and it starts a fire that burns down my house? What if a giant sinkhole opens up beneath my house and swallows us whole?

All that being said, I used to spend hours compulsing to try and make the anxiety these thoughts cause go away but have learned to better accept them for what they are.

My favorite one lately has been, what if supply chains collapse and grocery stores are empty for weeks/month, causing most people to starve? Or similarly, what if the electrical grid just stops working for some reason, causing the majority of jobs to evaporate overnight (as well as the aforementioned supply chain problems, and a whole host of cascading effects).

As a SWE, I recognize that although this career is one of the most valued in our current economy, we're highly dependent on modern infrastructure. Take away certain services, and all our years of coding experience are rendered useless.

My go to reaction is to remind myself that "if that event happen, I will deal with it then."

That's solid. Taking this for myself. Thank you.

I also have OCD in the form of obsessive thoughts and had a very similar experience. Brain just computes extremely random, irrelevant scenarios throughout the day putting tons of serious effort, and it's impossible to stop. Thanks to CBT I learned how to deal with them, and for the most part it doesn't affect my life anymore, which is nice.

> What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in this batch of coffee?

It's fascinating that in American culture, the first one can be viewed as of the same grave magnitude as the other two (which can be life-ending events).

Just to be clear they were random examples of intrusive thoughts, not trying to equate blurting out something racist to a public shooting.

Very interesting that you consider uttering a racial slur as one of the worst scenarios that could occur to you while standing in line at a coffee shop.

Fun note: there was a patient in the group sessions I would go through in therapy that had tremendous anxiety around losing control of his body in public places and doing things like saying something racist really loud, taking his pants off, randomly attacking a stranger in line with him, etc.

So for his exposure therapy (after a considerable amount of work to get to this point), our therapist had him go into social situations and do some harmless stuff to embarrass himself to learn not to really fear it. One example was like rambling gibberish while in line for coffee or awkwardly dancing while waiting at a crosswalk where passing cars could see him.

Also have OCD and have the same types of thoughts.

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