Transcript

My experiences with OCD | Zane Smith | TEDxUBC

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v76sr5AU1MY
Video ID: v76sr5AU1MY
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So, everyone's given the same few lectures as a kid. There's no monitors in your closets. You got to eat your vegetables and always wear flip-flop flip public pools. Well, thanks mom and dad cuz I didn't get that lecture. And as a middle schooler who loved swimming, I one day woke up and found myself with a planter ward on my thumb. It's a pretty common thing. Most kids get them. I'm sure most of you have had them. But for me that that triggered a condition that I'm sure you now know is called OCD or obsessivempulsive disorder. So what is it? Well, according to the chart, OCD is characterized by excessive anxietyinducing and very distressing thoughts called obsessions. And actions designed to relieve the anxiety caused by said thoughts called compulsions. They cause a cycle here. People with OCD will experience these distressing obsessions will conduct compulsions to relieve themselves of that anxiety and that provides temporary relief. Now, contamination OCD is the most common kind of OCD and is the kind that I battle in which the obsession is a fear of contamination, germs, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and the ritual or the compulsion in that case is washing your hands. And I'm sure you've heard of that kind of obsidian before. That's the kind that I battle, but it's the most common. So, you might ask me, well, Zay, what makes your story repelling? And for me, the answer is it was the severity of the OC die that I battled and rather not the kind. In that vein, I one day Googled what exactly warts were, wanting to learn about them, and I found out that they're caused by certain strands of HPV. Now, certain strands of HPV cause warts and aren't STD, and they're spread through two main methods, being first and second hand contact. Firstand contact is simple, direct contact with a wart. Secondhand contact is a little more complicated in that it involves a single object in between, and that the wart touches an object, touches skin. That's what happens in public pools and that someone with a wart on their toe will step on a wet tile or a wet part of the pool that isn't the water mind you someone will then come by and walk on and will cause a wart to grow there. Few key takeaways from that. I learned one that I could spread that wart from my toe to anywhere else in my body like my hands, my face, my nose, my eyelids, or god forbid anywhere else. That's called an obsession. And the second takeaway was that anybody in public with a wart could spread one to me. being that if they had a wart in their hand and touched something that I touched that could spread the wart to me and that became my overarching phobia was warts and contamination with warts. So my grade immediately designed two systems or rather OCD did that it promised me would keep me safe from the possibility of growing new warts and this is the first one. Now, I am sure you you don't have a routine for how you wash your hands, or not a super long one, mind you. This probably ended up being near 100 steps, and it's worse, and I won't go into the whole thing. As you can tell, it's very long. Um, but more or less, this governed how a single hand wash should be performed in that my brain, my mind had a certain set of steps I had to carry out to the tea, and if not done perfectly, I have to redo all over again. Think of any annoying boss or teacher that you had that made you repeat a task until they said it was done. Now on top of that there was a a time limit. I had to do this within a certain time limit i.e. before the soap dried or else it wouldn't be counted as one single hand wash. I say single because this next system dictates how many hand washes I'd have to do based on the trigger. Now first and second hand contact are both verified medically methods of transmitting warts and the HPV virus. But OCD was so stringent in not allowing that to happen that it extended this to third hand, fourth hand, and fifth hand contact, which as I'm sure you can infer means that there's an extra object in between each jungle. So second hand is just floor or wart to floor to hand. And then third hand is wart to floor to extra object to hand. And then fourth hand is wart to object to object to object to hand. and so on and so forth. And I I'd have to do five hand washes for first hand all the way down to one hand wash for fifth hand. And they're also in ter in order of necessity being that first hand is due now and fifth hand is as soon as possible. Now with that in mind, I have to track every object in existence. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that. If I was going to a friend's house, I'd have to check and see if anybody in their family had a small ward in their finger. And only once I verified that they didn't have one could I start touching things in their house. Otherwise, I'd use my sleeve. I'd uh walk around everywhere and touch things with my sleeve. And that was how I operated in in public, too. The the few times when I first developed OCD that I went into public, I used my sleeves to do everything. And I didn't pick outfits based on whether or not I like the look, but how easy it was to fit my sleeve or my my my hand into my sleeve and touch things, open door handles like that. That was how I operated in public. That was how I operated on public transport. And so from that, I thought, well, how many jumps would it take between certain objects? uh to be classified as second hand or third hand contact and am I safe touching this? Will I have to wash my hands after I touch this? And a whole slew of things. Now, I'm going to take away your visuals for a second because I want you to visualize what I'm about to tell you. This was the worst point of my life, the worst part of OCD, the the the peak of the anxiety that I I experienced. For any of you who know who Howard Hughes was, that was how I lived life. I just said that when OCD was at its beginning, I could somehow still go into public sometimes and touch things with with my sleeve. But at its worst, I couldn't leave my home. For the bare exceptions like school, I was able to leave. Of course, I I usually wore double double long sleeves to protect myself and make any contact with anything in public or kind at minimum. But going to a friend's house was almost entirely out of the question. I woke up early in the mornings because Just to give you an instance, do your feet touch your socks by by any chance? Um, I'm sure the answer is yes. Uh, but that counts as secondhand contact for me because the wart was on my foot. So, touching my foot to my sock would be secondhand contact. So, every morning when I get out of the shower, which in itself say up to an hour, I would have to put my socks on like that and then my brain would tell me that's secondhand contact. Zayn, wash your hands for 40 minutes now. And that was one thing. So then you add you add into the mix that my toothbrush fell on the floor eight months ago and the wart lives like the wart virus lives for up to a year on a surface. So because I dropped my toothbrush on the floor, that's another 30 minutes of hand washing because that's third hand contact. And then I'm putting my my clothes on and and that's interacting with the soak that I splashed while I was washing my hands and that's another 20 minutes of hand rinsing or whatever the case. And that means that I take hours every morning just to get ready and go to school. So because school starts at 8 a.m. I have to wake up at 6:00. I like to wake up at 5:00. And I tell my friends, I lie to them. I say, "I like to wake up early because I'm more productive. I take longer showers because I like the hot water. I feed them all of these lies because I want to feel like I'm in control. Because I want to feel like I'm a real normal person that doesn't have to rely on lies and excuses and admit that I have a problem, that I'm not in control of my own brain. How do you live like that? How do you live not in control of your own brain?" So I I pondered that and as again you you cut six months forward, 10 months forward and it's still going. It's getting worse. I'm spending hours a day washing my hands, not just two hours. Not not some penny number that barely makes it equal to the you know the plural like saying two hours. It was more 3 hours, four hours some days. You know, I have tests and midterms. So that's five hours of hand washing because stress and anxiety makes it worse. Makes it makes it take longer. And I can't say no to this nagging monkey in my brain that keeps saying wash your hands longer. Wash your hands longer. It it's nonsense, but it's still going. My hands are bleeding. Some days I have to keep scraping my fingers into my palms because OCD promises that there's somehow more soap that needs to be administered. There's somehow more viruses hiding in my nail beds that I haven't scooped up entirely yet. And my mother notices. One day she says, "Zane, have you been washing your hands for hours?" And I say, "Yeah, I have been." So the next week she takes him to she takes him to go see a psychiatrist and he says, "I recommend they be medicated and institutionalized until he's ready to reenter society." Now that that's a pretty heavy quote. And I I I tell myself, I'm not crazy. I don't belong in an institution. I'm not insane. I don't need a straight jacket. And of course, that's an exaggeration. It's not what an institution is. But to my 10th grade brain, my 11th grade brain, that's what it was. I thought I was going to end up like some kind of axe murderer at an institution, like some crazy guy. I'm not crazy. I knew I wasn't crazy. This was all logical. Or so OCD told me. What he recommended was that I try and rewire my brain. You see, we as human beings, we we made a certain word or a process that happens. When we perform an action often enough, we find it easier and easier to do. We call these habits. I'm sure you know what the word habit means. And OCD play OCD prays on that. The more we do an a compulsion to relieve ourselves of that anxiety, we we more or less get get addicted to it. We associate that that that ritual, that compulsion with temporary anxiety based relief. So he says, try this thing called CBT or uh cognitive behavioral therapy. Now what that is, it it relies on a tactic called ERP or exposure response prevention. Essentially, as you can see outlined in red, anxiety will in initially rise when you feel contaminated. It plateaus when you handwash, i.e. conduct a ritual to relieve yourself of it, and it goes down for some time before going up again. And then that cycle repeats. It never fully ever stays down. Whereas with ERP outlined in green, you instead try to do something else. You let the anxiety spike and you force yourself to feel anxious, but you don't conduct the ritual. you force yourself to feel anxious and instead ride that wave out till it eventually drops down. It it it drops and it doesn't go back up after that. So, what he recommended is that I try and be the willow tree. I let the breeze fly by me and I imagine it the OCD and the anxiety slowly coming by and let it let it leave and that it'll it'll eventually go. And I said, "Okay, fine. Your your strategy won't work. My systems are too logical. I'm I'm I'm too smart for you. I'm smarter than the PhD graduate. And of course, 10th grade ego believed that. So I went home and I tried it. I I washed my hands and I said, I'm going to cut out one step of my process. So I did. I soaked up one part of my right nail bed, a little less than my brain wanted me to. And I I stepped away from the sink and the nerves didn't feel right with the with the water there going. I was like, "Okay, I can leave. I can step away. I'm done." And I just couldn't I couldn't be the willow. couldn't let the OCD just come by. It wasn't done. I needed to be finished. And so I went back and I rinsed my fingers off and I go back to the psychiatrist the next week and I said, "Your strategy failed me. You didn't work for me. You lied to me." And he says, "Zane, try it again." So I go back to next week or that day actually cuz I was in public so I have to wash my hands for four hours or whatever. I do it again and I said, "This time, this time I'm not going to be the willow." OCD put me through years of torment every single day. Wasted hours of my life every single day. Made me lie to my friends. Made me act like I just preferred hot showers over just whatever OCD promised me. And instead, I pictured myself fighting OCD. Whatever visual you want to conjure, I fought back. I beat it back. And I pictured it as that little rodent that I said it was. And I fought against it. I pictured myself somehow resisting it. And through that vague idea of saying no, I was able to say no. I stepped away and I shut the water off and then 30 minutes later that feeling left just like the graph says. And so I kept working at it. I kept using that that that that tactic of imagining myself fighting it instead of being some passive Zen river, this Zen willow tree. And then through that I found success. Through that I was able to cut out fifth hand contact, fourth hand contact, third hand contact and I'm working on secondhand contact. You can see I'm touching my sock there. Uh I'm making progress evidently. And the reason that I I I believe the reason that that was was because instead of trying to be some Zen willow, I found a method that resonated with me. I found passion in fighting against obesity, in taking hits and getting back up again instead of trying to hit it, if that makes sense. It's about resilience and standing up as opposed to simply letting it flow by. At least it was for me. And so my my ultimate takeaway was that it's about finding a method that resonates with you. If you find yourself battling OCD or any other kind of extreme anxiety, picture a method that gives you satisfaction, that might be Zen meditation, that might be being the willow, that might be fighting back like I did or picturing yourself fighting back and through that you conquer anxiety. So, even at my worst moments when I found myself standing in front of a sink, unable to walk away, stuck there, washing my hands until they bled, until my knuckles cracked, they stung, and I they were tinted red rather than the rest of my body, that is. Even though I wanted to fall over to my knees and cry and just tell myself that I'd been cursed somehow, I knew that I couldn't do that. that that I' I'd end up winning because the problem and the source of that problem was in my own head, was in my own mind, was me, was myself that I and no one else was the problem and that I would no one else would win and end up in control. So with that, I thank you.