There’s an ocd phenomenon that doesn’t get talked about enough (so rarely, in fact, that I had to create a name for it) which I call “moving the goalposts.” It most frequently occurs with magical thinking or anytime you feel like you need to do a certain thing to achieve a result

I think it’s one of the distinguishing characteristics of ocd, actually. It’s when you decide that in order to get B, you must do A. For instance (using example from today), in order to get the satisfaction I desired, I had to keep taking my temperature until it was <99

So this is what got me thinking about it. I did eventually get a reading under 99, which any sane person would say accomplished the task, but then my brain played a switch on me and I had to get <99 enough times to “cancel out” the >99s otherwise it wouldn’t be valid

And then when I did that, I thought that this was a very imprecise thermometer so I had to get a good reading on a DIFFERENT thermometer for it to be valid. Which I did. But this one was <96 so I concluded that this thermometer was actually wrong and I couldn’t trust it.

This is how shit like this spirals. When you become so obsessed with certainty that you make it literally impossible to accomplish the desired “task” (which is usually confirming something that you already know to be true) that you keep moving the goalposts

When this phenomenon gets talked about, it’s usually erroneously framed as “doing something over and over again” which is true on a surface level but people rarely talk about the internal mechanism that causes it. So to people on the outside looking in it doesn’t make much sense

Anyway if you read this entire thread thank you bc I know it’s too long. I hope it made sense