10 People With OCD Share Their Most Inconvenient Habit

You’re never as alone as you feel. If you’ve been suffering from OCD, it might comfort you to know that others have been dealing with the same things as you. Here are some real people on their most inconvenient OCD habit:

“Tons of things apply to this, but one thing stands out more than anything: Setting my alarm. Set my alarm, check the time, check the volume, check the ringtone, check that it’s on. Repeat all the steps over and over and over again. If I have one distracting thought while doing this, I need to start all over again. My record was taking 36 minutes to set my alarm. And this is only one of the countless thing I have to deal with day to day OCD is not fun. It’s not some fun thing to pretend to have for internet points. It’s not about liking things ‘even’ or ‘clean’. It’s a terrible compulsion that drives you to do things that are not normal. I hate it with every ounce of my being.” — BringRage

“Locking doors. I will stand in front of a door after I lock it and pull 5 times 3 different times before I feel comfortable leaving. If I don’t I will drive all the way back and make sure. I’ve gotten home from work and forget if I checked the door so I’ve driven all the way back to make sure. I hate it… I’ve almost been driven to tears on my way back home from checking because of it…” — AnxietyAttack2013

“Whatever I do to one hand, I have to repeat with the other. E.g. If I brush my hand against something when I’m walking somewhere, I have to turn around and do it to the other hand.” — QueerlyPerfect

“I used to get stuck in endless solitaire games because I could not end on a losing game or else something bad would happen. 3-4 AM, I’d be up playing solitaire.” — justahermit

“When I sit in a chair if I didn’t sit ‘right’ I have to re-attempt the sit multiple times.” — ErgonomicRock

“The worst thing for me was doors. I had to literally open and re-close doors because I felt that I didn’t close it ‘right.’ Over and over. Then when I’d be sitting in my chair the thought of the door would haunt me until I got up and opened and closed the damn thing again. It was hell.” — [deleted]

“Cracks on sidewalks, and hallway tiles. I have to step on equal amount of cracks with each foot. So if I step on 2 cracks with my right foot, I now have to step on 2 cracks with my left foot. I try my best to avoid cracks, so I don’t have this issue. Sometimes you either walk like an idiot, or you step on cracks. Then I try to even it out on the other foot. I walk looking down not because I have low self confidence, but because I’m watching for the cracks.” — [deleted]

“I have a really weird hint of OCD that I’ve never heard of someone else experiencing. Sometimes I imagine that there are strings tied to things and I have to keep them from getting tangled. For example, if I walk past a lamppost and then turn around, I sometimes have the urge to go walk around the other direction to keep the invisible string that is tied from me to who-knows-where from getting wrapped around the lamppost.” — sluuuurp

“I constantly worry. And when I worry, my OCD tells me that I have to go check that the alarm is on/that I locked the door/that a certain family member is breathing because I heard a weird noise/had a weird feeling. It usually happens when I’m going to bed, but recently it’s been happening during the day too. (Did I turn the burner off? Better go check three times or else the house will burn down and it’ll be my fault and people will get hurt). This started when I was 6 and I didn’t recognize it for a long time – I thought it was 100% normal.” — socialcasualty101

“When I’m reading, I can only blink at punctuation. This has actually in the last few years become MUST blink at ALL punctuation. Periods, commas, exclamation points, and question marks only. No apostrophes or hyphens or whatever. And if I blink at a mark one word away from the end of the line–on, say, the left–then I must immediately find another one-away word on the right and blink at that twice, and then back to the original one. If there is not such a word on the page, I must turn to a random page until I find one. There usually is one there. However if a particular page is full of left-side punctuation and I have to keep using the same right-side balancer, it eventually goes ‘stale’ and I have to find another. This is constant, every time I read, multiple times a page.” — cabothief