Why OCD Makes Certain Thoughts Feel So Real

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, it's Kelly and today I want to talk about the weight and the meaning that we assign to our thoughts.

[00:00:07]Okay, so to do this, let's start with a little experiment. I'm going to say a few random sentences and you're just going to monitor how you feel about them. Okay, so first one, let's get started is the sky is blue. Does this sentence, the sky is blue, make you feel any which way, one way or the other? Um, do you feel like you maybe need to confirm it or dispute it or check it or Google it? Anything? No. Okay, perfect.

[00:00:37]So, the next one is, I think I'll have pizza for dinner. Anything? I don't know. Maybe you don't like pizza, which as somebody from New Jersey, I'm kind of I'm feeling a certain way about you, but that's not why we're here. But really, does the thought and the words themselves, I think I'll have pizza for dinner, upset you or make you feel like you need to make it go away or do something to cancel out thinking about it. No. Okay, let's go on. Okay, so the next one is I'm going to hell. Okay, so now we're like turning the heat up a little bit. No pun intended. I know for some people that one might be a little bit rough, a little bit uncomfortable.

[00:01:22]Um, but that's okay. Before we get too caught up in it, let's move on to the next one. So, that is, what if I'm secretly a pedophile? Yikes. Does that make you feel something? Does that make you feel like maybe you have to check and make sure that you're not inappropriately attracted to children? Did you maybe have a groin response when you thought about it? I mean, my mouth watered when I was talking about the New Jersey pizza. So, what does that say about me?

[00:01:50]I know it might feel like I'm making light of some pretty dark topics, but it's all in an effort to make a point, I promise. So, let's look at what all of those sentences have in common. So, those are all thoughts that anybody, whether you have OCD or not, might have throughout the day. It's really important to understand through this process of what we're looking at that everybody, virtually everybody has intrusive thoughts. So if they all have that in common, then what makes them different? And in essence, the answer is nothing. What makes them feel different is the meaning that we are assigning to those sentences or the words that make up those sentences. They have some kind of weight that we are assigning to them.

[00:02:35]Have you ever noticed that your OCD rarely if ever? I don't think this has literally ever happened in my personal experience, but maybe it's happened in yours. I don't know. Have you ever noticed that it almost never flags a good thought as something that you need to obsess over? So for example, I might have the thought that I am going to be really successful one day or I might have the thought that you know what I might be a good person. But I never find myself thinking about them those thoughts in the way that I'm thinking about the negative thoughts. I just kind of let those good ones come and go. I just like don't give them any I don't pay them any mind. But if I have the thought that everything that I'm working towards is going to be a giant failure or I have the thought that I might actually be a bad person, it's a lot harder to come back from those thoughts. So our OCD has decided that those negative thoughts are something that requires an action from us or a reaction to thinking them. It's almost like they require us to do something compulsively. So they require maybe that we negate them somehow, cancel them out, or we might have to solve them or disprove them or just spend time figuring them out or do some kind of ritual to make them okay or to make them go away or whatever it is. You can, you know, fill in the blank with whatever your OCD makes you feel like you have to do. So those last few thoughts about being a failure or being a bad person and the ones that we talked about earlier in our experiment are all just thoughts that we might have as we are going about our business. But our brain has decided to give some of them a deeper meaning than the others. And sometimes trust me I know that this is really complicated and really difficult.

[00:04:40]But when you have OCD, something that's going to be really useful for you is to understand that you can simply make the choice basically to give those negative thoughts the same amount of attention that you're giving those positive ones or you know even those neutral ones. Not everything that pops into your brain is something that needs to be solved or something that deserves to demand a certain amount of your attention. And that's something that you will learn as you go through the process of ERP or exposure and response prevention therapy for your OCD. It's really easy to want to shy away from those negative thoughts or to feel like you have to just go to battle with them all the time to make them go away or to, you know, fix them or to do whatever. But when you're doing things like avoiding them or when you're fighting them, you're just making them come back stronger each time. And if you've been through it like I have and you you know that that's the whole process. Each time it feels like they demand more. They demand something additional versus the last time. And that's how we start to kind of get stuck in that cycle of being in, you know, we're having obsessions and we're doing compulsions and we're just going around and around and around. And each time that we do it, it takes more time. It takes more effort. It takes more energy.

[00:06:18]And that's how we find that we're just kind of existing in our day. And we're not really doing the things that we need to do because we're so caught up in doing our compulsions and rituals and doing whatever to negate these thoughts that we didn't really have to assign a meaning to in the first place. So through ERP, you work little by little to fight your OCD by kind of challenging those thoughts. So you'll start with, you know, agreeing with them or just accepting them. And eventually you work up to this point that you're going to bring those thoughts on on purpose and you're going to say to your brain, you know what, you don't know terror. I'm going to show you something. And you're trying to one up your brain. And eventually those reactions that you're having to those thoughts, everything kind of evens out. Everything kind of peters out and you just say, "Wait a minute. I'm not so concerned about the things that my brain is telling me anymore or I'm not so concerned about the things it's showing me. I don't feel like it's something that I have to act on right this moment to make it go away or make it feel better." And this goes for any kind of OCD that you have, any content of your thoughts, any theme. It could be for me, you know, I I really always struggled with the harm OCD. Um, it could be health OCD. It could be pedophilia OCD. It could be, I don't know, relationship OCD. Could be religious OCD. I mean, contamination OCD. Let's see. Just the list goes on and on. It doesn't matter. It really is important and I always try and hammer this point home. It doesn't matter what the content of your thoughts are. ERP is the way to go no matter what when you're experiencing OCD. So again, ERP is the way to get back that control over your life from your OCD. And NOCD is here to help with that. NOCD has a team of specialized therapists that are there to help you with the entire process of ERP.

[00:08:26]And that can, you know, look like identifying the things that are really troubling you and the things that are feeling like they're demanding your attention and that your OCD is saying, "Hey, this needs to be dealt with right now." And putting those things, those thoughts that you're having, those obsessions into a hierarchy so that you're not working on the hardest thing first. No one's asking you to do that.

[00:08:49]You're going to work up to those things and eventually over time it gets easier because you start to realize, wait a minute, I'm not feeling like I have to devote so much of my energy to this. I feel like I can just kind of exist with it and know that it doesn't control me anymore. There's also this whole community of people on OCD that are at all different points in working through ERP or working through their OCD. Some people are just kind of figuring it out now. Some people are still struggling.

[00:09:20]Some people feel like they really have it under control and are offering guidance and suggestions and encouragement. And I've said before that that's something that I always found really, really useful because it was so helpful to talk to other people and really understand that I wasn't alone in this process. And all the things that I have felt that really felt like I was the only one in the world who could possibly think those things or understand what was happening, it wasn't true. There's so many other people that are kind of in the same boat. If you feel like you're ready to take that step and start learning more about ERP, you can go to nocd.com or treatmy OCD.com today to get started. And on that note, I'm going to get going and I'll see you guys next time. Bye.