Yes.
I am the database administrator for a psychiatric clinic. They give huge batteries of psychological exams and a bunch of them are for OCD. I wrote the scoring procedure, and of course, I “took” the exams as part of testing the procedures. Yes, I have OCD tendencies.
I mentioned this to one of the docs, saying I didn’t know if I should be a staff member or a patient. He laughed and said anyone who is successful in their career is mildly OCD; that’s what helps make them successful.
Oh wow, I do the same thing with the rectcle bin, and 666!
Yes. I tolerate (or suffer if need be) from intrusive thoughts. I have to be careful to gingerly scan headlines in the paper hints of gruesome, sad stories, otherwise they will haunt me for days. And certain songs, things I’ve read, even conversations, will reverberate, over and over and over, inside my head for hours. I was reading something by Mark Twain before Mr. Salinqmind and I spent a whole day wallpapering a room, a dull job, and a paragraph from the store repeated itself in my head like a broken record.
Plus much of the above behavior applies to me.
But Mr. Salinqmind not only rides the OCD train, he often tries to derail that train. He gets an idea in his head: “I need wool socks.” A month later, his dresser is crammed with a lifetime supply of expensive wool socks. “I liked that book by Joe Blow.” I am sent off to the library to find every. single. book. ever. written. by Joe Blow, and order from Amazon.com if need be. “I had fun making a birdhouse”. Enough birdhouses are then made to…well… Get a thought. Follow through as much as humanly possible.
I’m obsessed about numbers be it a clock, my grocery total, etc. I always have to know if it is a prime number or not. I get oddly elated when I see the time is 1:13. Yeah 113, prime number!
I am usually the last person to leave work. I’ve gotten into the habit of chanting a mantra when I leave: Lights, computer, Lock door. I work on the 18th floor. Very often I will get to the door in the lobby and then turn around go back upstairs to make sure the door is locked.
Whenever I do a shot at the bar I cheers glasses then have to tap my glass on the bar before I shoot it. This may not be OCD as everyone I know does this. Maybe it’s a weird drinking superstition.
I pluck hair too. Not from my head cuz I buzz my hair but frequently pull chest, nose and armpit hair. This disturbs my SO.
I’ve got different ones. When I move into a state, I need to see every number and letter combination on license plates - we have n nnn lll plates, so I need to see ns from 000 - 999, and ls from AAA to ZZZ - independently. However, once I finish this, I don’t repeat the process.
I compute odometer milestones and the percentage to them. Originally to 100,000 miles, but once I blew past that to each thousand miles additional. I might compute the number of miles to 1/2 of 1/3 of 1/3 of the way from 131,000 to 132,000.
I also like digging nasty weeds from my lawn and garden by hand - much more satisfying than poison. At least that is a green compulsion.
I never thought of myself as OC, until I saw this site 18 Little Things That Will Drive You Insane and realized many of the things applied to me, in particular the airplane tray table and the opening packages wrongly (actually opening from the bottom makes sense, the top is usually thicker and has a hole that will send your tear off course). I can relate to some of the things in this thread too, like the bread when making sandwiches. I don’t feel like I HAVE to align them, just that it would be nice if they ended up in the same order.
I’m not especially clean or tidy, am I still obsessive-compulsive?
I’m compulsively lazy. Does that count?
Counting is a common sign of OCD.
I have obsessive, intrusive thoughts. I’m not going to go into them here, but suffice to say that they can end up spiralling me into a significant despair or depression, and have physical side effects (ever had a vasovagal response from a thought? Not fun). It’s tiresome and horrible and I just want it to stop.
I have some hair pulling and picking behaviors. I don’t know if it’s bad enough to qualify as trichotillomania or dermatillomania, since I’m not ripping out bald patches or making myself bleed, but it’s noticeable.
I used to be way worse about certain things. I can now wear the same pajamas for 3 nights instead of only 1, and I no longer need to change my shirt after going outside for longer than 30 minutes. I’ve also been able to stop vacuuming the bed with a dustbuster every night. But I still cannot sit on my unmade bed if I’m not wearing pajamas, and anyone else sitting on my bed or touching my pillow in street clothes makes my skin crawl.
Like most mental ‘disorders’, I think everybody has some obsessive-compulsive tendencies; the degree to which these tendencies have developed is what seperates a ‘healthy’ person from a person actually suffering from OCD (IMHO of course).
I’m a counter. Ever since I was about 12 and found out what digital roots were, I have remained obsessed with calculating them. To calculate a digital root, you add together all the digits in a number and then do the same to that result, until you’re left with a single-digit number. For example:
198,407
1+9+8+4+0+7 = 29
2+9=11
1+1=2
So, the digital root of 198,407 is 2.
It started with mailbox numbers, then phone numbers. 9 has a digital root of 0 (since 10 has a digital root of 1, and 9 is 1 less than 10, 9 has an effective digital root of zero). Thus, 3 and 9 are both magic numbers because 9s cancel themselves out when digital rooting, and 3 is 9’s square root. So, using this principle, the shortcut to the above example is:
198,407
cancel out the zeroes and nines and the numbers adding up to nine = 47 (because 8+1=9=0)
4+7=11
1+1=2. Same result, much more efficient calculation! /geekhat
I have a thing about evenness. If I rotate a pdf or tiff document at work, I have to overrotate it and rotate it back or else I’ll feel uneven and uncomfortable. If I step on a crack with my left foot, I have to step on the next one with my right foot (I try to avoid cracks, though). When I was a little kid, I remember having a thing about the colored tiles at the grocery store. 1 out of 9 were gray, and the rest were white. I had to step on the same number of gray tiles with each foot before I could leave the store! Another thing was stairs. I have to count stairs. In my childhood home (where I haven’t been since I was 18), I still remember there were 6 stairs leading up to my front porch, 3 more on the porch itself, and 15 from the first floor to the second floor (all great numbers, since they’re divisible by 3). There were 10 stairs leading down to the basement, and I hated going down there because of that. My last apartment had 14 stairs going up to the top floor, which bugged the crap out of me until I started counting the minor step up over the front door threshhold as 1. My current basement has 12 stairs, also good 
I’ve always had to wash and dry myself in the exact same way and the exact same order every time. I don’t really understand how other people can just casually rub their towel wherever until they’re dry, that would drive me nuts!
This all takes place inside my head though, so I don’t think anybody would know about it from pure observation. I don’t believe any of these things rise to the level of clinical OCD, since the behaviors don’t unduly disrupt my life. They’re just a part of who I am, I don’t let them bug anyone else, and that’s cool with me. I’m already a fast reader, so brief pauses to count the words in a sentence don’t slow me down significantly. And adding up numbers is actually fun. My issues aren’t *nearly *as burdensome as issues like excessive handwashing and checking locks or stove burners–those things have NEVER bothered me.
If I experience specific sensations on one side of the body, I need to experience them on the other. Say I press down on the webbing between, say, the middle and ring finger on my right hand. and experience that slight burn… I really want to do the same on the other. If I do that, and press to hard on the left hand’s webbing, I need to redo the right hand and so on until they’re “even”.
When stressed or deep in thought, I scratch at my scalp to the point of causing pain. I’ll realize “that hurts better quit it”… even as I continue to do so.
What differentiates these from true OCD, I think, is that I can stop, and if distracted I can forget about it and not get stressed when I can’t continue it.
Whenever I let someone do something for me, I have this tendency of always checking how everything goes, if everything is okay. I feel like I can’t give my 100% trust that that someone can really do it. And because of that attitude of mine, my friends said I’m so OC. Am I really OC? I hate being called one.
This might help those who are trying to stop biting their nails. I let myself have one fingernail to keep biting (the left pinkie.) The others grew out and started looking nice. After a couple months I stopped biting the “keeper,” too. I had setbacks now and then but generally the absense of throbbing pain in my fingertips made it easier and easier to stop doing it.
Is OCD the current word for being anal? Like PTSD to shell shock?
I have a kind of obsessive need to check all the windows and doors when I leave for work in the morning. I’ll be heading for work and have to stop in the street in front of my house to go back and check the front, rear, and garage doors. Even after I’ve checked them once. There have been some break-ins in the neighborhood, so it’s not totally ridiculous. I have a sneaky ass cat that is always plotting to escape but is too stupid to survive the real world so I am a little compulsive about making sure he’s inside before I leave.
You should be ashamed of yourself; sheesh…kids these days!
From one geek to another…
The last one I was not even aware of until she pointed it out to me.
Let’s not even get into the organization of my tool box.
I could go on, but they are serving dinner now.
I’m obsessive about being efficient in my use of time or even down to the level of bodily movements. However, I can shut it down and do nothing very easily. It’s not like I need to use every available minute to accomplish something.
Contrary to something mentioned above, I don’t need to set up things for future efficiency since that could possibly be a waste of time. In that vein, I also refrain from doing things that I’m not sure I can accomplish efficiently. I’m not very handy around the house in large part because I don’t want to waste any time, effort or money doing something that I could easily screw up.
I’m also kind of cheap but I like to think of that as just being obsessive about the efficient use of money.
That’s me, too. I read Cheaper By The Dozen at an early age and I think the time-saving ideas of Frank Galbraith made a lifelong impression on me. I’m forever trying to find the fastest, most efficient way of doing things, and I’m pretty good at it. This can backfire at work: I once saw a comic sign which stated “I’m not goofing off. I work so fast, I’m always done.” Often this can apply to me so I have to be careful not to clear my desk too quickly. Bosses who like to do things in a slow, sloppy plodding way can take a dim view of this.
And being efficient about money applies to me, too. It makes me into a better investor because I try to get maximum result for minimal effort and risk.
I started with cuticle biting as a child. Then, well you know that feeling when you put Elmer’s glue on your fingers, let it dry, and then peel it off?
I do that with the pads of my fingers (where the fingerprints are and sometimes further down). Without the glue. I actually feel a real rush when I can get a nice big layer off (the skin there has become dry and so it doesn’t hurt if I do it right). Sometimes it bleeds because I go too deep. Sometimes when I am really nervous or annoyed, I will rip like hell to distract myself and then it really bleeds. The skin actually peels off along the lines of the fingerprints. And then I eat the skin.
Now for something completely different: If I am singing along to a song on the radio, and I accidentally sing the wrong lyric for that part of the song, when I get to the place where that lyric goes, I will sing what the lyric was supposed to be the first time instead, to even it out.