Anxiety vs. OCD

Deciphering between whether or not you may be experiencing anxiety or OCD can be a bit tricky. OCD used to be considered an anxiety disorder, but now is a separate class of disorder on it’s own. The best way I’ve determined to decipher between the two is how you respond to your anxious thoughts. Typically with anxious thoughts, we are able (albeit difficult at times!) to provide challenge and rationality to our thoughts which allows us to let the anxious thought go. This does NOT work with OCD.

Here would be an example of a thought that could be present in both an anxiety disorder and OCD: “What if I forgot to lock my car doors?”. This can cause anxiety for anyone, regardless if they have OCD, an anxiety disorder, or nothing at all. An anxious response might be to go and check your car doors and then worry about what could have gone wrong. An OCD response would be to check the car doors, then second guess that we REALLY checked, go check again, worry that maybe someone broke into the car and we didn’t notice something missing, so we check again, and then have troubles sleeping at night wondering if you really did lock the door and what if I forget to do this again tomorrow? The difference here is that no matter how much checking, or mentally reviewing, or providing real evidence that we shouldn’t worry about something, the doubt persists.

There can be an overlap of symptoms of an anxiety disorder and OCD which is why it’s important to be assessed by a professional who understands OCD and has experience and training in treating the disorder to know if you meet criteria for OCD. Unfortunately, many people with OCD are often misdiagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The average rate for someone to receive an appropriate diagnosis of OCD is 14 years in treatment! If you feel that your anxious thoughts may be more related to OCD, please talk to someone about it. You may not be getting the correct treatment for your anxious thoughts.