“Oh I’m So OCD About It” — The Times When You’re Just Normal

Aug 21, 2024

4 min read

How many of you have heard someone say this phrase, or even said it yourself when it came to cleaning that one spot on the table, moving the pen to align with all others, or just having to check the door lock once more? I’m sure all of you. But is it really Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) — which is so not an adjective (let’s get into that later) — or is it just you being like everyone else? Read on to find out.

Remember when your all-clear face had that one annoying pimple pop out suddenly? Or when that one missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle you were solving bothered you for days? Why did they bother you? The answer lies in your mind — in how it processes things that you see all the time. Our daily lives are filled with an overboard of stimulation; if we think about each separately, we’ll never get to the end of it. I mean, think how much pressure you’d be in if you were asked to remember everything you saw on your way to work! So what do we do to avoid that pressure — we use shortcuts.

These ‘shortcuts’ that our mind uses can be of several types — from choosing your favorite movie to watch every time (heuristic), liking that colleague because of his music preferences (stereotypes), and finally thinking of a group of street dogs as just dogs and not their breeds (gestalt principle of similarity). What is relevant to us in this article is the last one — Gestalt Principles. These are certain shortcuts and ways of thinking that we use when we need to process all the things in our surroundings quickly. Some common Gestalt Principles are — similarity, closure, and symmetry.

Principle of Similarity

This principle comes in handy when we many objects around us, but some of them have some common features as compared to others. In the picture above we tend to group and think of the circles as one group and the triangles as the other, instead of looking at each circle and triangle individually. This is why you would group and think of all kinds of dogs as ‘dogs’ and all kinds of cats as ‘cats’ on most days. Thinking like this saves us time and is easier for us.

Principle of Closure

In the above picture, what do you see? A football, I’m assuming. If you look closely or think about the picture, you’ll realize that it is just a collection of pentagons. There is no form given to the picture. But our brain looks at it as a football. Why? Because adding a boundary and perceiving it as one object is easier than thinking about so many pentagons weirdly placed. To make sense of what we see, we use the principle of closure and add the unmade boundary by ourselves. Anything to make it easier on us, right?

Principle of Symmetry and Order

When looking at the above picture, what do you immediately see? Two sides of a face (a weird face yes) one in black, the other in white or a dot, half a triangle, a line placed randomly? I’m pretty sure it’s the first one (unless you gave yourself the time to look at the picture for too long…even then some of the other principles might have been in use). The reason this happens is because normally, we really love symmetry. We can organize things together and think of them in halves. It's easier that way and faster. And that is what this principle states.

Okay, I know I started with OCD… trust me this is not clickbait. Gestalt principles may seem just that — principles with no use in real life — but they are more real than they seem. When someone talks about being bothered by a pen a little diagonal than the other straight ones, it is most probably not their OCD kicking in, but their principle of symmetry feeling off-balanced. It is harder to process that one single pen separately than moving it a little for symmetry.

Similarly, wanting to keep things organized and clean does not necessarily mean you have OCD. It is normal to want that symmetry in your life, it is normal to see things as one whole (a full kitchen counter) rather than individual elements (utensils, napkins, etc spread out). All our preoccupations about such things are just our mind saying “Hey! I’m having a tough time putting it all together, please make it easy for me.”

That is not to say that OCD is not a real disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a severe mental disorder wherein a person has constant intrusive thoughts — about themselves, the situation, or others — due to which they can’t help but perform certain acts to ease their anxiety. These thoughts are not in the person’s control and are mostly not related to the acts they end up performing. More importantly, both, intrusive thoughts and the compulsions make the person too distressed to do anything that they are supposed to do — sit and work, meet friends, sleep, etc.

So the next time you find yourself saying “I’m just so OCD about it” pause and think — is it my brain asking me to ease it down or is it forcing me to a point where I can’t control it? This small difference can make a huge difference in clearing the stigma about mental health.

If you liked what you read and would like to know more about these principles and the disorder check the links below

References