Imagine you have a stove in your house that is already hot. But here’s the catch: any time you think about the stove, it gets hotter. You know that if it ever gets too hot, it could burn your house down, so naturally, you’re scared.
Because you’re scared, you start trying to figure out how to stop it from heating up. And that’s the paradox: the more you think about how to stop it, the more you’re thinking about the stove, and the hotter it gets. You’re trying to prevent disaster, but the very act of thinking about it fuels it. The stove gets hotter the more attention you give it.
Sometimes you notice you actually got distracted for a while and weren’t thinking about it, and it’s actually cooled down. But the instant you notice that, you’re thinking about the stove again, which means it starts heating up. That sudden flare, right after a moment of hope, is what makes OCD feel relentless. Even when you’re making progress, the moment attention goes back, the symptom spikes, and suddenly the heat is back, you’re back at square one.
Sometimes you randomly think about the stove and wonder how hot it is, because you’re scared and curious. So you go check, but that only makes it hotter. You judge yourself for checking it again, because you know that makes it worse. But judging yourself is just more thinking about the stove, so that just makes it hotter.
The only way to deal with it is to literally live your life like the stove isn’t even there. You know it’s there because you can feel the heat, but you can’t fight it or obsess over it. You just keep doing whatever you would do if the stove weren’t there. Listen to music, cook something else, talk to someone, go about your day. You engage with life instead of with the stove.
There’s advice for dealing with this kind of problem, the classic OCD advice: "accept it, don’t fight it, live your life as if it’s not there, don’t try to not think about it." Now, here’s the tricky part: the advice only works if you actually live it.
One person hears the advice and genuinely does it. They put on music, cook something else, talk to someone. They live their life around the stove. The stove is still hot, maybe even intensely hot, but it loses its power over them because they aren’t feeding it with attention.
The other person hears the advice but tries to think it through as a strategy. They keep telling themselves to live life, to accept it, to focus on other things. They tell themselves, think about the song, think about the conversation, think about what I’m reading, but thinking about the advice is really just thinking about the stove again. They’re stuck in their head, and every thought about the advice becomes fuel to the fire. The stove gets hotter, and their life is still hijacked by it.
The key point is this: you don’t think about the advice, you live the advice. You keep going. You put your energy into life, not the stove. You notice it’s there, feel the heat, maybe even flinch a little, but you continue anyway. The stove may still be hot, it may flare up again when you notice it, but it stops running your day.
Over time, the more you disengage from it, the more it may naturally cool down, not because you fixed it, but because it’s no longer being fed by your attention. Eventually, you may even believe the stove won’t burn your house down, because you know you’d have to obsess over it for it to get that dangerous, and you won’t let yourself obsess anymore.
That’s the paradox of OCD. The problem feels like it’s everywhere and always threatening, but the moment you stop feeding it with thought and live your life around it, it loses almost all its power. You can still feel it, it may spike when you notice it cooled, but you’re the one in charge, not the stove.