I don’t think any of us can make it through this life without developing a compulsion towards something. Maybe it’s something as well known and relatively benign as nail biting, or maybe it’s more severe like pulling out your hair by the roots. In today’s day and age, it’s highly likely that you (whether you like it or not) exhibit compulsive behavior towards checking your messages/email/social media feeds. There are probably as many compulsions as there are people on this Earth (cause, like I said, we all have at least one), and even the most benign amongst them is likely at least mildly detrimental for a simple reason.
Compulsions take up A LOT of our bandwidth.
Whether it’s the actual compulsion itself being time consuming and draining or it’s the act of restraining yourself from indulging in the compulsion that is, the common thread is the compulsion actively distracts you from being able to focus on the things in life that feel most meaningful to you. The degree to which this impacts you might go nigh on unnoticeable in your day to day, or it might be so all consuming that it manifests as a diagnosable mental health condition known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
So why am I writing about this particular topic on this particular Friday?
Because I am in the midst of resisting one of my most detrimental compulsions. And it’s extraordinarily difficult, and I’m hoping that writing about it makes it feel more manageable or at least distracts me for long enough to help re-focus my mind in a direction that is net supportive of the way I want to be feeling. Whether or not it’s helping remains to be seen, but I digress.
This particularly unsavory behavior of mine is googling anything and everything I possibly can about chronic health conditions/life threatening illnesses that I may or may not actually have (Spoiler: I don’t, as far as I’ve been able to prove, actually have any of them). When I say anything and everything, I mean that quite literally. Over the years it’s been Lyme disease (which I do have, I guess, so I rescind my previous statement), STDs, cancer of pretty much any variety, AIDS, various infectious or bacterial diseases. You name it, I’ve probably tried to determine if I have it.
Put simply, if ANYTHING changes about my physical experience day to day, I have a tendency to automatically assume it’s a deeper problem.
Headache? Brain cancer.
Eye Floaters? I’m going blind.
Stomach pain? IBS or Crohns or celiac or colon cancer.
Acid reflux? Throat cancer.
Rash? Infection of some kind.
Heart skipped a beat? Heart failure.
I don’t even need google anymore at this point, because I have memorized effectively every constellation of symptoms for every life threatening illness you can imagine. Instead of filling my brain with more Japanese vocabulary, or reflecting on fiction that I’ve read, or just generally improving my mental state, I have effectively accumulated the world’s most damning dictionary of information. Anything and everything is capable of killing me and it’s actively killing me as we speak and there’s nothing I can do about it.
That’s what it often feels like in my brain.
Sometimes this compulsion is results in little more than a few lost minutes before I give up and return to whatever task is at hand. Sometimes this doom spiral of thought is so intense it drives me to go to the nearest emergency room, only to be told nothing is wrong with me and then, often hours later, being sent home. Which, though it pains me to admit (and is something I’ve never before admitted publicly), I have done more times than I can count at this point.
To be fair, and to give myself a bit of grace, I have plenty of reason to live in fear of my own body. I had a brain tumor at 17 months old which required two surgeries to remove. I’ve spiral fractured my right leg in two places. I’ve had a heart arrhythmia called SVT since I was 12. I had acute viral myocarditis and almost died.
It hasn’t exactly been all ponies and rainbows in this little meat suit of mine.
If you combine that veritable potpourri of trauma with a predisposition to mental health struggles, you’re left with an absolute embarrassment of riches available to the worst aspects of your brain. Our brains are, of course, prediction machines. They take the cumulative input that they’ve received over the course of our lives, and use it to try to predict the next bit of experience that’s going to come our way. And our brains, thanks to the generations of hunter gatherers who came before us, are hardwired to seek out danger and avoid it at all costs.
So, to my brain’s credit, it’s doing a damn good job of being hyper vigilant. And I did a damn good job of endlessly feeding it source material to chew on. Since AI is all the rage these days, the data set I trained my brain on was one of doom and despair.
It only recently came to my attention that this is likely not the most valuable use of my mental resources. After years and years of doing this, I made a commitment to myself that I would never again google a health related concern. If it feels significant enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment, I make one. If I find myself in a truly emergent and life threatening situation, I’ll head on over to the good ol’ ER.
But in the mean time, I have drawn the line in the sand. There shan’t be a speck of webMD-ing to be found on this (or any other) day.
If you’ve ever tried to quit an unsavory behavior of yours before, you know just how challenging this can be. Whether it was kicking a habit like smoking or drinking or refraining from chewing your nails or checking your body out in the mirror, they all have a common thread of your brain coming to trust that these are going to be reliable sources of stimuli on a daily basis.
And along with being prediction machines, our brains are stability machines. They LOVE homeostasis. They LOVE when their predictions are correct, and so they do their absolute best to make sure we continue engaging in the same behavior day after day, even if it’s a behavior that we know to be net detrimental.
All that’s to say, I’m about a month or so into refraining from this particular compulsion. I wish I could say it’s gotten easier everyday. As of late, though, it’s gotten harder every day. I don’t know if that’s just my brain and my ego doing their absolute best to get me to return to a pattern they understand before it gets erased from memory (it takes about 90 days to solidify a habit, or remove an old one, so I’ve got awhile ahead of me), but the itch has never been stronger.
While it might sound crazy, there is a tremendous amount of relief that comes from engaging in whatever your compulsive behavior is. A compulsion, ultimately, is a pressure release valve that your brain came up with to help it cope with the stresses of daily life. Without that one to reach for, it will often feel like you’re accumulating more and more and more and more stress and nothing will seem sweeter than reaching for that tried and true
release valve. It’s why we can’t stop smoking even when we say we will for the 100th time. It’s why we don’t ever kick our caffeine habit and why we don’t stop eating once we’re past the point of satisfaction.
The science says that there is effectively only one way out of the loop of compulsive behavior, and it’s as much of an absolute bullshit answer as I’ve ever heard. You basically just have to sit there and feel the compulsion, and not do anything about it. It’s very reminiscent of all the hollow advice you see on the internet. “Just stop doing X” or “Just start doing Y”. And unfortunately, in this case, it really is as simple as “just don’t do the thing that you are used to doing”. The only way out is to retrain your brain, to teach it to stop pulling this particular lever. Depending on how long you’ve had your compulsion before, this is a tall order.
There are some people, of course, who find tremendous relief through the use of medication to treat OCD, and I don’t want to discount that. But, even for those people, the type of exposure therapy I’m describing is often a crucial part of their getting better.
I firmly believe, though, that on the other side of not giving in to this feeling is freedom from allowing far too much of my cognitive energy to be consumed by doom looping myself into oblivion. So whilst it is uncomfortable in the short term, whilst it seems like each day gets harder and harder right now, I’m choosing to believe that means I’m almost through to the other side.
And that‘s a story that feels pretty darn good to believe in.
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