Quotes & Sayings About Obsessive Compulsive

We're not going to waste our valuable space or your precious energy by giving equal time to stories of tragedy, failure, and tumult. They get far more that their fair share of attention everywhere else. Future historians might even conclude that our age suffered from a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder: the pathological need to repetitively seek out reasons for how bad life is. — Rob Brezsny

Love is a mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder romanticized! — Eric Jerome Dickey

Welcome to the psychiatric hotline: if you are obsessive compulsive press one repeatedly. If you are schizophrenic listen closely and a little voice will tell you which number to press. If you have borderline personality disorder hang up; you have already pushed everybody's buttons. — Barbara Oakley

If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money - money is all they think about - they're all nuts. — John Cleese

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned. — David Mitchell

Manchester United could have any goalkeeper in the world. I was a 23-year-old kid from New Jersey who, from an early age, had to cope with Tourette's Syndrome, a brain disorder that can trigger speech and facial tics, vocal outbursts and obsessive compulsive behavior. — Tim Howard

I think I have minor obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be tidy and just right. — Bobby Davro

I'm probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac. — Anne Lamott

I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain. — Richard Ford

Obsessive compulsive" Nikolaus mumble in amusement.
"I would rather eat a grenade than make a line with two different colors!" Remy responded in a pained voice as he pointed at the pad of paper. Thiago snickered as he continued to torment the Cajun with his blue pen.
Speaking of grenades, though ... Brandt had a timing device around here somewhere. What had he done with it? — Abigail Roux

Cleckley reported that psychopaths never experience grief, honesty, deep joy, or genuine despair. From my own experience, I would add to Cleckley's observations that the psychopath never ruminates on anything.

Rumination is a process that often contributes to depression and in extreme forms to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The process of rumination is often associated with some anxiety or subjective feeling of concern or worry, and this can help precipitate change in the individual in order to reduce the anxiety.

The psychopath experiences none of this.

Indeed, if you ask a psychopath if he has ever worried about whether he left the house with the stove on (a common problem among those with obsessive-compulsive disorder), he will look at you like you are an alien, in stunned disbelief. — Kent A. Kiehl

In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin. — Daria Snadowsky

I know I have an eccentric, obsessive-compulsive side. — Demi Moore

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. — Adam Rapp

Lane, I will become attached to you. It happens with everyone. Something about my personality makes me latch on to people. First, it was my friend Tina, then Liam, and now you. I'm sorry, but I know it will happen. It already is happening. Now that we've had sex, I don't want you out of my sight. — K. Webster

Imagine Smaug's treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste. — Jim Butcher

We work crazy hours in Silicon Valley; my wife says we're all kind of diseased in some way. We're totally obsessive compulsive - when we see an idea, we're like, 'let me in, it's so much fun.' — Tony Fadell

The search for safety takes its clearest form ... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis ... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear. — Abraham Maslow

I've never told anyone this before, but I'm an obsessive-compulsive. I go back to my hotel room every evening and put the coat hangers back in order and open my bag and rearrange it. It takes a lot of my time, but if I don't do it I can't sleep. — Freida Pinto

Let's dispel this bloody stupid myth of love at first sight, all this tear-jerking romance you see in films, all this overwhelming passion. They're feelings I just can't conceive of, which are capable of reducing an individual who was previously perfectly self-sufficient into a human wreck suffering from all the most worrying psychiatric disorders, from obsessive-compulsive disorder to abandonment anxiety. — Celia Hayes

Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that "plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject." In addition to being "the mechanism for development and learning," plasticity can be "a cause of pathology."35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. — Nicholas Carr

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me. — David Guterson

I am methodical to the point of being obsessive-compulsive. And I have always been good at multi-tasking. — Deepika Padukone

Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick. — Thomas Boswell

Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you're in your mind, you're hardly ever at peace, and when you're at peace, you're never only in your mind. — Richard Rohr

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self? — T.C. Boyle

As an actor, I don't have any politics. As an actor, I'm driven more by an authentic - I would say an obsessive-compulsive-disorder level-fixation on mimicry, tonality of voice, to literally imitate something until I can just disappear into it. — Edward Norton

I have a little obsessive-compulsive personality. You can tell because I played online games for eight hours a day. — Felicia Day

I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist. — Charles Stross

It is suspected, by some, that spiritual beings are extremely jealous of the natural world because they are nothing more than a figment of the imagination. This might explain their compulsive and obsessive behavior in trying to convince others they are real, and that the natural world is an illusion. The end of the world scenarios they conjure up reveal their Napoleon whit and superiority complex. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

The nice word for you is methodical. Obsessive-compulsive is the meaner phrase, and one you've truly earned. — Claire Kendal

My work in general involves getting over my fears that are deeply embedded since childhood: Fear of darkness, fear of dangerous activities in general, and fear of dirt - I had a considerable obsessive compulsive disorder as a child. — Miru Kim

I'm kind of an obsessive-compulsive person, like, neat obsessive. — Liev Schreiber

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.
But there's nothing like a book. — Laurie R. King

I'm a hygiene freak. I'm like obsessive-compulsive when it comes to washing your hands. — Kelly Clarkson

On the other hand, there is the person in my family, who surprisingly is not me, who keeps nearly every scrap of paper she's ever touched, just in case, just in case the world is ending and everyone has enough food and water but needs ephemera, needs slips of paper, needs old articles and wrapping paper and tax documents and someone else's past to stand in for the past of us all.
I hover somewhere between these two worlds, saving some memories, letting others fritter and slip away. Down one of these paths, it seems to me, the obsessive compulsive holding on and the equally aggressive letting go, lies madness, and even I don't know which one. Culturally and personally both
who can say, which path leads to the better place? — Liz Stephens

Dr. Pervy-Pants
Dr. Depravity
Dr. Ain't-Puttin'-Out
Dr. Bossy-as-Fuck
Dr. Obsessive-Compulsive
Dr. Kinkybones
Dr. Deviant
Dr. Oh-So-Proper-I-Iron-My-Jeans
Dr. Lick-My-Boots
Dr. Smug-as-Shit
Dr. Love-Me-Love-My-Butt-Nozzle
Dr. Damn-Your-Dick-is-Motherfucking-Big
Dr. Full-of-Shit
Dr. Smack-a-Lot
Dr. Ruined-Me-For-Anyone-Else — Finn Marlowe

We allowed each other a number of "philosospasms" per year; these were episodes of obsessive/compulsive behavior, often involving sexual affairs with students, or periods of deep, intricate despair, or occasionally intense political adventures which made us very vulnerable to the media and the public and caused us great discomfort. But our agreement was that we would support each other during these spasms, and would treat that momentary reality as though it were the only true reality, which, of course, in so doing, it was. — David Cronenberg

I'm sorry! I just ... I have this thing about opening stuff. I see a door or a lid that's closed, I just gotta open it! Our family therapist says I'm obsessive-compulsive. — Gary Whitta

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work. — Louise Erdrich

I think, therefore I am (obsessive and compulsive). — Amy Surprenant

I was diagnosed a number of years ago with obsessive-compulsive disorder - which everyone has, to some degree - and I have this really annoying trait where in conversation, I always steer it back to something that happened to me. — Paula Poundstone

My characters' addictions are what makes them a bit stylized or "grotesque" - not just in appearance but through what drives them. Addiction is what threatens stability and normalcy and yet it seems very much a part of being human - at least we are all a bit obsessive and compulsive. Aren't all humans driven by mad desires for one thing or another? — Porochista Khakpour

I define workaholism as an obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifests itself through self-imposed demands, an inability to regulate work habits, and overindulgence in work to the exclusion of most other life activities. — Bryan E. Robinson

Never admit you have obsessive-compulsive disorder to someone who doesn't have it because they'll think you're crazy. But — Simon Van Booy

Even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. "Any school assignment, be it playing a musical instrument or writing papers, whatever, he would do at any or all hours of the day". — James Wallace

I don't relax. I can't take vacations. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I worry with every project that I'm going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it's a fantastic feeling, and I find it very hard to stop. — Mary Ellen Mark

I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don't remember a time when I didn't have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out. — Howie Mandel

It's like you have some sort of breast obsessive compulsive disorder. Have you considered seeking counselling for your addiction?' He sighed, face carefully set 'nothing wrong with a man admiring a fine female chest but if you disagree feel free to hold it against me. — Kylie Scott

Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders. — Kimberly McCreight

Freud, who spoke German, used the term zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis). The word zwang was translated as 'obsession' in London, but 'compulsion' in New York. Faced with confusion, scientists introduced the hybrid term 'obsessive-compulsive', a label subsequently given to millions of people, as a compromise. — David Adam

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

tidying with what a couple of the other pianists had called her obsessive-compulsive neatness. Well, could she help it if she liked the sheet music alphabetized? And then put in numerical order according to the year it was written? — Elizabeth Bevarly

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith. — Catherynne M Valente

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage. — Fiona Apple

Personally I'm obsessive-compulsive about the placement and cleanliness of my things. — Chace Crawford

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis. — Sigmund Freud

According to National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the following anxiety disorders exist within adults with Asperger's: 1. Panic Disorder 2. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) 3. Social Anxiety Disorder / Social Phobia 4. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) — Leslie Burby

The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all. — Philip K. Dick

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work. — Andrew O'Hagan

I'm not as obsessive-compulsive about certain things; I give a lot of latitude to people and support people. I know that I can't do it myself and that you're only as good as the people you have behind you. — Donna Karan

For a film to be viable, it has to survive this process of scrutiny. I think most filmmakers have obsessive-compulsive tendencies and would be completely unemployable in any other job - so it's great to be able to channel your psychological anomalies into something productive and creative. — James Marsh

I have got this obsessive compulsive disorder where I have to have everything in a straight line, or everything has to be in pairs. — David Beckham

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange. — Tracy Kidder

Emotions are given to us by God, so that we can fully experience our experiences. The only problem with emotions is that we get addicted or attached to them. We take them as final or substantive. Emotions do have the ability to open you to consciousness, but then they tend to become the whole show. Most human thought is just obsessive, compulsive commentary. It's "repetitive and useless," as Eckart Tolle says. I would say the same of emotions.
Contemplation allows you to see (contemplata means "to see") this happening in yourself ...
Contemplation and silence nip the ego and its negatives in the bud by teaching you how to watch and guard your very thoughts and feelings - but from a place of love and not judgment. — Richard Rohr

Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it's like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It's never going to satisfy me. — Sufjan Stevens

In one case a desperate college student felt so trapped by his obsessive worries and compulsions that he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed into his frontal lobe, causing a frontal lobotomy, which was at the time a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was found still alive, his disorder cured, and he returned to college. — Anonymous

I'd learned that you couldn't talk to kids about death or show them music videos of of men who sing in eyeliner. I possibly had turned one kid into an obsessive-compulsive with the urge to murder, and another kid gay. I'm not equating being a murderer with being gay, but from what I understand, either can be a difficult thing to admit to your family. — Jen Kirkman

Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith. — Ann Patchett

Serge's attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to be the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome. — Tim Dorsey

If you wish to take shamatha all the way to its ground, however, it requires a supportive, serene environment, good diet, proper exercise, and very few preoccupations. The necessary internal conditions are minimal desires, few activities and concerns, contentment, pure ethical discipline, and freedom from obsessive, compulsive thinking. It is my feeling that the achievement of shamatha is so rare today because those circumstances are so rare. It is difficult to find a conducive environment in which to practice at length and without interference - even more so to have that and access to suitable spiritual friends for support and guidance. Therefore, if the causes are difficult to bring together, the result - shamatha - is also necessarily rare. — B. Alan Wallace

I now believe that virtually all my problems could be attributed to my brain's being configured differently from those of the majority of humans. All the psychiatric symptoms were a result of this difference, not of any underlying disease. Of course I was depressed: I lacked friends, sex, and a social life, because I was incompatible with other people. My intensity and focus were misinterpreted as mania. And my concern with organization was labeled as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Julie — Graeme Simsion

It's a thousand tiny impulses, building on one another. First you decide it's a good idea to check the oatmeal bin for bugs. Next you're going through all the canisters, and before you know it, you're wearing a hazmat suit and examining the frosted flakes for ground-up glass. Each action further enforces the obsessive-compulsive circuit. When the disease is full-blown, sufferers are firmly entrenched in the neural loops that make them repeat thoughts and actions over and over. In other words, your brain keeps getting back in line for the same carnival ride it didn't enjoy in the first place. You lose your sunglasses, you throw up on your shirt, and two minutes later you're back on the Whizzer. Wheeee. — Jennifer Traig