Stop Asking "What If?"

To put it mildly, it has been an emotional week in the United States.

Former President Donald J. Trump won the presidential election against Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris. News outlets are calling it a “historic comeback campaign,” and election predictions expected a far closer race than the sweeping victory we saw on Tuesday night.

This was a surprise to everyone and has been met with mixed reactions. 

I don’t write about politics, and I don’t want to start now. The 2020 news cycle, which included headlines about COVID-19, racial unrest, anti-police rhetoric, and the presidential election, pushed me over the edge. I experienced one of the most debilitating flare ups of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of my life as a result of consuming these headlines day after day.

I refuse to let that happen again, and there are some things I've learned over the past four years that I hope will help you if you are struggling with anxiety and uncertainty—no matter your political stance.

It’s hard to explain OCD to someone who doesn’t suffer from it. There are two parts to the disorder, obsessions and compulsions. 

• Obsessions are things that you obsess over, usually something that you are afraid of. Obsessions can be completely irrational or rooted in truth. 

• Compulsions are behaviors, physical or mental, that help mollify the fear caused by the obsessions. Sometimes they are directly connected to the fear, other times they are not. 

One of my common obsessions is whether or not I turned my stove off. I’m afraid of leaving the stove (or my hair straightener or my coffee pot) on and burning down my house with my dog inside. My compulsion is to mentally review my morning to see if I can remember turning off the stove. Mind you, I have never left my stove on by mistake.

Mentally reviewing the morning may help ease the fear for a few moments, but then I start second-guessing myself. Am I remembering this morning or yesterday morning? What if I accidentally bumped the knob when I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes and turned the stove back on?

The compulsions do ease the anxiety, but it’s only temporary, and then it comes back worse than before. My brain should have a gold medal in mental gymnastics for some of the stuff it has come up with over the years. 

OCD is incredibly challenging because obsessions are intensely personal and make you feel like you’re living in your worst nightmares, but they don’t matter. Obsessions aren’t the issue—the content doesn’t matter. Compulsions are the problem. 

I walk my dog on the same road nearly every day. Part of our route is unpaved—it’s just gravel over dirt. We’ve been walking together for over two years, and the side of the road that we walk on is beginning to wear down. The rocks are compressed into the earth, and you can identify the path we take.

Compulsions do the same thing to your brain. Every time I choose to partake in a compulsion, I’m wearing down a little neural pathway in my brain that leads back to the obsession. It’s like a slot car track—my thoughts automatically zip along the path, and no matter how many times I drive it, I’m always going to end up where I started—terrified, exhausted, and trapped. 

OCD is called the “doubting disease.” It feeds on uncertainty and the fear that comes from it. 

Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty in our country—there has been for weeks. People on both sides of the political spectrum were in a frenzy in the weeks leading up to the election, and now there are many people who are feeling a lot of anxiety and uncertainty because of the election results.

When being treated for OCD, one of the first things you learn is that the content of your obsessions doesn’t matter. This doesn’t mean the fear and anxiety you feel doesn’t matter.

I started going to therapy my senior year of college because I had a lot of anxiety about living off campus. I was terrified that someone would break into my house when my roommates were away and attack me while I was asleep. My therapist didn’t recognize this as OCD. He tried to get to the root of my fears rather than recognizing them as obsessions—it took several more years and a different therapist to finally recognize that I was struggling with OCD, not just anxiety. 

The treatment approach is completely different for OCD than anxiety. OCD treatment focuses on preventing compulsions. It helps you deal with uncertainty and learn to sit with discomfort. It forces you to face reality and live in the moment rather than worry incessantly about an unknown future.

My struggle with OCD has changed my perspective on life, and now that I am in “remission,” I find that I rarely worry about ambiguous “what ifs.” I don’t even ask that question anymore because I know it starts wearing a path… Now, I try to ask “What is?”

None of us know what the next four years will bring. We can assume and worry about all the “what ifs” and continue wearing down the path that always leads to despair, or we can sit with uncertainty. Allow the discomfort to wash over us. And deal with concerns as they arise.