Richard Hogan: Living with OCD and intrusive thoughts is a silent hell

Intrusive thoughts can be debilitating. More often than not, they're completely unfounded

The more we fret about an intrusive thought, the more pronounced the thought will become. Picture: Christian Erfurt, Unsplash.

The complexity of the world is almost too much for the human brain to comprehend. Only when something doesn’t work is this elucidated — the heating won’t turn on, the dishwasher isn’t washing, the dashboard is giving a strange reading. These minor inconveniences illuminate just how complex we have made our daily lives. We can’t solve the problems ourselves, but we know who to contact.

But what happens when we face a personal problem in all of this complexity? Well, we often apply a logic that becomes more problematic than the issue we are trying to solve. What I mean is that we often become stuck; doomed to repeat an ever-failing solution. When that solution becomes the problem, things get worse. When the thing we use to make ourselves feel better is the thing that makes us feel worse, we have moved into a familiar dilemma, one that is not so easily corrected.