White-Collar OCD vs Blue-Collar OCD

I wanted to use this post to reinforce the idea that no matter how “diverse” our OCD thoughts may be, they are in the end, all trying to do the same thing and should be dealt with in the same way. To illustrate this, I’d like to detail a white-collar and blue-collar example from my own professional experience. These situations were marked by two seemingly unrelated OCD thought processes (in two vastly different work environments), but the solution was the same.

White-Collar Example: Was tasked with calculating year-end bonuses for entire sales force (based on their performance that year). No one was going to check my work when I was done, so I had to make sure I had calculated the correct amounts for everyone. I became extremely worried that I was going to miss something and affect the financial livelihood of one of my coworkers. So I checked the final version probably about 60-70 times before I sent it out. This was obviously unhealthy and I knew it while I was doing it, but my mind just wouldn’t let me move on. My OCD was trying to convince me that I had messed up and that I was screwing someone out of money they had rightfully earned. So rather than the review of this finished project taking 5 minutes, it took multiple, mentally exhausting hours.

Blue-Collar Example: Was working at an outdoor recreation area and cleaning one of the site’s bathrooms. Although I was wearing gloves, one was loose and slipped off a bit as I was cleaning a toilet. This resulted in a bit of my un-gloved hand making contact with the inside of the toilet bowl. My mind flashed back to that one time in sex-ed class when my teacher had said you could get STDs from the toilet and just like that my OCD went to work. I spent the next couple days researching every STD symptom and then examining my body to see if I was exhibiting any of those symptoms. This of course was unnecessary, and actually just raised my stress level to the point where I gave myself a week-long headache just by worrying. But in the moment, my OCD was screaming at me saying, “You have an STD now, you will never be cured, no one will ever love you, and you will never be happy again!” And those fears, no matter how over-dramatic or stupid, always felt like they needed to be “checked” and so that is what I was doing with all that internet research and bodily investigation.

Solutions: While these OCD fears (financially harming others and sexual/contamination) appear to be wildly different in subject matter, the treatment for them was based on the same principle. For the white-collar fear, I worked with my therapist to create a plan that would set a limit on the amount of times I could check “important” documents. Every week we reduced the limit and now today I have the confidence to review these documents just once or twice before sending them off. And for the STD fears, my therapy consisted of a lot of public bathrooms visits followed by a limit on the internet research I did (post-bathroom visit). Now I can sit on public toilets with ease (what a strange thing to feel proud of). In both of these cases, my mind was ringing alarm bells and trying to convince me something was wrong and that I needed to fix it. And even though the details of what was specifically bothering me felt super important at the time, I realize now that both the white-collar and blue-collar example were basically the same problem. My “miswired” brain was overreacting to something that was not an issue and attempting to make it into a disaster. So, the solution in both cases was the same. Continue exposing myself to situations similar to the original one (which caused me so much anxiety) and then slowly reduce the compulsions associated with each of these situations until it reached a point where I was treating these situations like a “normal” person would. Once again, it comes back to exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. I know I mention these in almost every post, but that is mainly because they were the keys in getting me to the much healthier state I am in today. They helped me realize that those alarm bells didn’t need to be ringing, and that, like a “normal” person, I could just be bored by tasks such as creating compensation reports or scrubbing toilets, rather than terrified by them.