안녕하세요!

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

oh, Sisyphus! i got you

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)

You don’t need to do anything special or extra difficult to deserve a break.

You don’t need to reach a certain goalpost of suffering and exhaustion before you’re allowed time off.

Resting for a day doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to work twice as hard the next day.

Humans need variety. Humans need quiet time. Humans need time to “shut off”, whatever that looks like for them.