Dealing with OCD
Since lately a lot of the articles I’ve been publishing have been either reviews or showcases of videos or streams I have done lately, I felt like taking the time to write something a bit more personal. Now, some of you already probably know this about me, but I do tend to have obsessive behaviors. It isn’t that I am actually diagnosed as having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, however, given what I know about myself, I can say with great confidence that I probably have it. And, while some people tend to laugh about OCD and think that is is kind of funny, I don’t think they themselves understand just how it can be for the person that has it.
To relate this to something most people reading this will be familiar with, let’s consider if I install a new graphics card to my computer, which I did recently. Some people would just get the card in there, make sure the drivers were set up properly, and then jump on into their favorite games and not think much more of it, other than that they can tell the system is running as smooth as butter. For me, though, and likely for others that suffer from this affliction, it isn’t so simple. Once I get the new card installed, I will sit there and benchmark a ton of games on the maximum settings to be sure that they are running at the maximum frame-rate, then will obsess over what new settings can do what, and then will go back to each game and do test recordings at a bunch of different settings to see what all the system is capable of, even if I really don’t want to do this. Part of me will say that it is stupid and an absolute waste of time, yet if I walk away and go and do something else, I will still feel this overwhelming urge to go back and do it, even to the extreme of if I had walked away from the computer to go get ready for bed, but then will have to go back and run this one last test so that my mind will finally be satisfied and I can finally go to sleep.
Seems kind of silly, right? Some may say that it only means that I am a videophile or something, and that I just want to get the maximum quality out of what I paid for. But the thing is, I know that I am getting obsessive because then there are times when I will set all of these settings up in the graphics control panel, on the display itself, and in the game, and yet in some weird lapse of sanity (or self-reliance and trust), I will have to go back and double and triple-check these settings to see if they somehow magically changed since I last looked at them, despite the fact that I know these things cannot change on their own and these thoughts are purely irrational whims. What’s worse, this is all done at the cost of actually having fun. And really, that’s when you know something is being problematic, because at that point, it is cutting into you actually enjoying your time off and enjoying the things you spend a lot of money on, and this is why I do think that OCD is a true “illness” because of what it can do to the person that suffers from it.
I’ve struggled with OCD in various forms for as long as I can remember, and sometimes I’ll have success at dealing with it, and at other times it manages to overcome me for a while and I will get into a downward spiral of worrying about stuff and checking, double-checking, triple-checking, etc. things and squandering all the time I had to go and do something else. Yet, one thing that is true that can help deal with problems of this nature is to actually find something to work on. When people say that idle time can be a dangerous thing, this is actually very true. Usually it is during these idle times when I have nothing else to focus on that my mind can start wandering to silly things like obsessing over frame-rate values or component temperatures, etc., and obsessing about settings in games I don’t even play. This of course to say nothing of obsessing about external things too.
The funny thing is, even finding hobbies and fun things to take up my time can be vexing. Say I am listening to a podcast I enjoy, but then something interrupts it part-way through. Normally, someone would just pause it, deal with whatever they needed to deal with, and then resume, but sometimes I will have this weird obsession about having an “uninterrupted experience” and will have to start the whole episode over, and if it gets interrupted again, do it all over again. With willpower though, this can be overcome, but it is still a vexing problem that I think a lot of other people simply don’t appreciate or understand.
What about you all? Do any of you have to deal with something like this, perhaps obsessing about other types of things?
I think probably a lot of people have at least a mild form of OCD, even if it’s not, or couldn’t be, medically classified as such, and therefore the anxiety that tends to go hand in hand with it. It’s great that you’ve written something so personal 🙂
Thank you for the kind words, I do think that I should make a point to write more things like this in addition to my other posts/content 🙂
I also think you are right – everyone has their own quirks and things that make them different, and things they put a lot of effort in even to the point of what others would say was obsession. Some of us might have it worse that others, but everyone has their own things they focus huge amounts of time and thought too and which can cause anxiety, and everyone has their own vices 😛
As far as mild OCD goes, I tend to get like that about both data storage space and data organization. I tend to download a lot of things online, and save a lot of things I find an interest in, and I’m pretty much a packrat for what I download unless I absolutely do not have a current interest in it or desire to check it out in the future(the grand backlog in my emulation collection or my anime backlog, for example). So I tend to get really strict about both how specific things I download are organized and where what goes on all of my devices and storage drives.
That’s really interesting, thank you for sharing that! So, are you saying you don’t want to watch the anime you have saved up or that you do, you are just busy and whatnot?
I can get like that sometimes. Like, if there is a really neat game I downloaded (say, an indie title that is strictly a download and no Steam or Desura or anything), I take it a step further and often burn the game’s installer or whatever to a disc just in case I wipe the drives one day and the game is no longer readily available online, which happens occasionally 😛