[193]

Well, one way out is behavioral therapy.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a form of anxiety disorder. You are afraid of something (sickness, death, loosing control) - then you get obsessive about it and then you do some compulsive action to mentally ease that thought/anxiety.

But now you have "learned" to behave in a certain way to feel better. And you are weighting the triggering thought as more important by giving that much attention to it. This is resulting in a self-enforcing feedback loop in the end.

Behavioral therapy is a way to "unlearn" this behavior. Mostly by working against the initial anxiety. If you are unconcerned/neutral/bored of something, you cannot gain that much obsessive/compulsive momentum.

[inertiatic]

Unless you pull a logical trick to reduce every discomfort to fear, I don't agree that everyone that suffers from OCD is afraid of something and anxious about it.

[193]

I don't think that fear and anxiety are exactly the same thing. (fear being a very basic response to a very concrete (perceived) threat, while anxiety is more diffuse, constant, covering larger timeframes)

Assuming we are talking about the same thing (anxiety), why do you think that not everyone suffering from OCD has that as the cause? What other types do you know of? It is possible that I was focusing too much on intrusive thoughts and related issue, but my current understanding is that the OCD mechanism described above is the same for any type of OCD and that it is by definition an anxiety disorder.

The discomfort you are describing could be the same thing as the anxiety I was speaking of, although discomfort is maybe not intense enough to describe the internal experience of the disorder.

As always: these things are distributed on a spectrum with better/worse days and cases between people. It only becomes a disorder if you suffer from it on a regular basis in some phase of your life.

[coldtea]

>I don't think that fear and anxiety are exactly the same thing. (fear being a very basic response to a very concrete (perceived) threat, while anxiety is more diffuse, constant, covering larger timeframes)

That could just be a historical product of the English language. Other languages don't necessarily discriminate this way between fear and anxiety.

E.g. we can equally talk about someone "fearing" they have forgot the stove open or "being anxious" about it in this here parts.

[fatbird]

What 193 is describing isn't a conversion of discomfort to fear, it's an a-rational pattern of behaviour that's independent of discomfort or fear.

Orwell talked about reinforcing effects: "A man may drink because he is failing, then become all the more a failure because he drinks." OCD as a form of anxiety is about a sufferer having taught themselves to behaviourally self-medicate. And just like most forms of addictive self-medication, it becomes a reinforcing effect that's somewhat independent of any real objective cause.

CBT and other behavioural approaches to therapy try (with measurable success) to interrupt that self-reinforcing behavioural effect. Many here are talking about somewhat obsessively checking things, and they're describing it perfectly: "did I check? I'll check again just to make sure", which grants a moment of relief from the anxiety; give it a few minutes, and the anxiety returns, forcing another hit of reassurance to be sought. OCD is an extreme form of addiction to this cycle.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Traditionally the DSM categorized OCD as an anxiety disorder - apparently now it's categorized in the larger envelope "neurotic, stress-related, and somatoform disorders", which anxiety falls under as well. There's certainly an anxiety element, as it causes a great deal of distress to fail to follow the behavior.

[coldtea]

>Unless you pull a logical trick to reduce every discomfort to fear

In OCD there's no external discomfort (like having your hand touch a stove or having a headache).

So it can very well be all about fear and anxiety in general without having to "reduce every discomfort to fear".