Areas › Worry and anxiety › Obsessions and compulsions
Some worries are perfectly reasonable, and settling them still will not settle you. Someone living where the storms come can build the kit, check the kit, and find the worry has quietly moved on to something else.
This one is worth testing on yourself, because it removes the argument that you would be fine if only the fear were irrational. The probability was never the sticking point. The hard part is the scrap of not knowing that stays behind after every sensible precaution, and that scrap does not shrink by adding more precautions on top.
Obsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
I seek refuge with you, Lord, so that they may not come near me (Quran 23:98). What is asked for is distance from the thing, not a guarantee about how it will turn out.
وَأَعُوذُ بِكَ رَبِّ أَن يَحۡضُرُونِ
I seek refuge with you, Lord, so that they may not come near me.’
Qur’an 23:98read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In one analogue study, people with high obsessive-compulsive symptoms were about as intolerant of uncertainty as people high in worry, which suggests the drive to be certain sits under both patterns. The sample was students rather than diagnosed patients and the design was a snapshot in time, so this is a clue about a shared driver and not a clinical finding.
Holaway RM, Heimberg RG, Coles ME. (2006). A comparison of intolerance of uncertainty in analogue obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.. Journal of anxiety disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
No amount of preparing removes the last bit of uncertainty, so the search for it has no end.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Plenty of people quietly believe that thinking about something bad makes it more likely to happen. It has a name, it is a known part of this condition, and having the belief does not make you dangerous.
When obsessions start early and dig in deep, ask gently what anxiety looks like elsewhere in the family. Often there is an undiagnosed parent, and often that parent is helping in ways that keep the whole thing running.
If every step you try keeps not working, however small you make it, that is information rather than failure. A more intensive programme is the next thing to look at, and it should be put to you as an option.