Obsessive compulsive disorder and your mental health

We all know at least one person with OCD or perhaps that person is you, so buckle up and give this one a read.

Imagine you have a dinner that you are hosting and you want everything to be impeccable. You spend hours perfecting your meal, coordinating what your family is going to wear and arranging a lovely centre piece for the table. Each utensil or piece of cutlery you carefully wash them and set them aside ensuring the kitchen is neat and immaculate. You go upstairs to change and head back to the dining room and notice the glassware is a tad skew. You try to straighten it and for some reason it does not look perfect in your eyes.

After that you slowly glance at the coffee table and notice a stain from the bottom of a mug of coffee and you quickly clean it up. As you admire your masterpiece, the flowers on the table are slanting (ever so slightly) so you try to rearrange them. At this point time is ticking and your guests are almost arriving. Your partner comes down the stairs with creased shirt and this sends you overboard. You crash and you have had enough. Up they go for a quick iron. 

Obsessive compulsive disorder is by definition, obsessions that lead to compulsions.

You begin to obsess over certain aspects of your life or your surroundings. I have a dear friend and for the context of this blog I’ll call him Al Bishop. God forbid you walk into his office and leave papers lying around the desk or Bobby not putting back the stapler where it was originally on his desk (but I love him any way).If he walked past a table full of paperwork, he would lose his mind and he loves things to flow in a particular order. He loved starting with a plan and sticking to it and deviating only when necessary. Obsessive compulsive disorder is not only prevalent in work places, it’s vast reach have also arrived at the shores of our homes. 

On a personal note, I think we all have varying degrees of OCD, it’s just that in some people it’s more obvious and more intense (like with Al) than with others. At home, I’m not allowed to wash dishes because apparently I don’t know how to arrange the dishes correctly in the rack. My response was “There’s a way to load dish rack”? Completely oblivious I happily obliged because why on earth would I want to do the dishes in the first place. I do have a level of OCD in terms of time management. I obsess over time and I have it in my head that certain things need to be completed by a certain time. For example, food must be ready by 5pm and no later than 5 or I’m an absolute disaster. It leads to my anxiety and believe it or not OCD and anxiety are actually quite closely related. 

Let me explain why I believe it is so closely intertwined. Having OCD is like an obsession with something and it leads to repetitive behaviours. If you are like me I don’t like to be turned away at a place that I need paperwork done for example SARS or even the renewal of my car licence disc. I obsess to make sure I have everything I need and when I get to the establishment I become anxious thinking about if I have everything or not. My mind starts to overthink with things like ‘What if they need more documents?” or “Did I miss something out?’ After that your mind continues to create a mountain out a molehill and your anxiety kicks in and unleashes more fury.

On television OCD is depicted as someone constantly cleaning their houses by taking bleach and scrubbing until everything is spotless however I don’t think it’s like that for everyone. It manifests in many different ways. It could be you wanting to leave the house way more earlier than you should for a flight or constantly fixing your attire until it’s deemed perfect to you. OCD also impacts the way you do your work on a regular basis. Having OCD in the workplace can be a challenge for co workers so keep an eye on that.

Nobody likes someone always correcting them and having rules that are enforced to suit your own disorder. 

On the other side of the coin, employers probably love staff with OCD because they know they will get the best possible outcome in any project. With this being said, how healthy is OCD for you as a person? Do you think that obsessing over skew table settings or random pieces of paper on your desk is healthy? Sure, it allows you to purge out brilliant work, but at what cost.

This disorder is one that is extremely difficult to break free from because it’s almost like an innate response to the things happening around you. OCD in relationships is another sore point because usually, the person with the disorder tends to drive the other crazy and that’s how some relationships end. However, in most relationships, there’s always someone with OCD and the other that doesn’t seem to mind it. Look at me, I got away from washing dishes and so many other tasks. There are so many OCD people out there and they just don’t even know it for instance, there are some people so particular about parking their vehicle in a certain way everyday, there are others that tuck their shirt in a specific way and ensure their tie is always perfect. There are some females that do their make up in a certain way and style their hair in particular way. OCD doesn’t have an age group mind you, how many times have you heard your dad ask your mum if she locked the house or switched off the stove? 

The key to understanding someone with OCD is to understand their thought process. All they want is for things to be orderly, neat, on time, least amount of clutter at all times and safe. By safe I mean, their triple checking of electrical items ensured that the house doesn’t burn down. It’s definitely difficult to be in their shoes however, the outcome of their disorder has more positive effects as compared to other mental health disorders.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is in all of us, unless you are a go with the flow type of person. If you are someone that treats everything like water off a ducks back then you have been saved by OCD. I will always link OCD and anxiety as co conspirators because they link extremely closely however, a person with this disorder doesn’t see it as an unhealthy condition. In their mind they believe its what works and it’s something that gets things done. If someone becomes overly obsessed and overly compulsive and has severe bouts of OCD, then it’s definitely time to re-evaluate your life. Life doesn’t happen in steps and it doesn’t happen with a plan that we decide on. As long as you are willing to divert  when things go awry, then it should be ok. 

I hope this post helps understand OCD and recognise the OCD in yourself and others and give people your understanding and patience when they have particular ways of doing things. Most of the time, they get the job done and it’s usually of higher quality due to their triple checking. Lol.

To my sweet friend Al Bishop, I hope you enjoyed this one. Sometimes you just need to say “Que Sera Sera’ and continue (which is his favourite line ironically).

Till next time!