Top 3 Types of OCD thinking
1. Rumination
Rumination, also known as overthinking and excessive worry, is the single biggest mental ritual performed by those with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). During this process, negative thoughts lead to repetitive, unproductive thinking cycles. Some experience rumination as a “What if” spiral, an agonizing inventory of errors, or a “why?” questioning cycle. Someone with OCD around social interactions might do a painstaking review of every comment stated in a conversation. The difference between rumination and just regular analyzing is that rumination has no definite end point because sufficient certainty is never reached by the OCD brain.
2. Threat monitoring
Those with OCD engage in a constant scanning of their worlds for their triggers and potential dangers. People may scan for intrusive thoughts, contamination (mental or physical), or even environmental dangers. Some might engage in threat monitoring of their own memories – ie. reviewing memories to see if they actually did something horrible that they know they didn’t do.
3. Metacognitive Beliefs
Metacognition is what we think about our thinking. We can experience thoughts as automatically valid and needing attention, or we can experience thoughts as transient, not necessarily significant. Those with OCD over index to their thoughts and apply too much significance to every thought that comes into their consciousness. Those with OCD might also have the belief that there is a thought-action fusion. This means that thinking about something makes it more likely that we will do the thing (such as having an intrusive thought about stabbing our spouse makes us more dangerous in real life).
Others with OCD suffer from thought-event fusion, which is the belief that thinking about some bad event makes it more likely to happen. For example, imagining getting cancer makes it more probable.
The key to healing from the mental rituals of OCD is to learn to hold thoughts lightly and not attribute undo power to thoughts.
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