brain tumour.
That sounds mild â a little silly even â but true clinical hypochondriacs experience life in a similar way to someone with OCD: they convert intrusive thoughts of illness into obsessions, and then develop lengthy compulsive rituals to address them. They take their own temperature, pulse rate and even blood pressure. They compulsively check they can swallow, keep a close eye on their urine and excrement and feel for cancerous lumps. In some cases, these constant prods and pokes bring on the bodily changes and discomfort they fear in the first place. They almost always ask others for reassurance â family, friends, doctors, specialists, hospital phone lines, and experts and non-experts on the Internet. Unlike OCD, which comes from thoughts, people with hypochondriasis tend to fixate on genuine physical sensations and exaggerate their impact.
Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa show some striking similarities to OCD. Repetitive and strongly held thoughts force people to carry out rituals and patterns of behaviour to reduce anxiety â refusal to eat or inability to stop â followed immediately by compulsions to make themselves vomit or over-exercise. Thought suppression seems to play an important role â with those who try and fail to squash negative thoughts about their eating habits more likely to show symptoms of bulimia. People with anorexia can show obsessions and compulsions unrelated to food or weight, including an irrational desire to arrange things in symmetrical patterns.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
One of the newest additions to the list of abnormalities that could relate to obsessive-compulsive symptoms is maladaptive daydreaming. Freud said to daydream was infantile and neurotic, but these days psychologists and neuroscientists see daydreaming â sometimes called undirected thought or mind wandering â as a normal and probably useful part of human cognition. It might help us to solve problems, and we can usually snap out of it when we need to. Some people turn their daydreams into something more serious. They do it compulsively; they find it hard â if not impossible â to not daydream and the behaviour has a negative effect on the rest of their lives. Rachel was one of the first people identified with this problem.
As a child in the United States of the 1970s, Rachel would spend much of her time in a self-created fantasy world. She would imagine herself in her favourite television shows and run episodes inside her head. As a teenager, Rachel started to lose control of what she and her parents had always considered a harmless hobby. She recalls how the daydreams took over until she was no longer in charge of her thoughts and her life â vividly similar to the language people with OCD use to describe their obsessions.
Rachel, later a successful lawyer, sought and received treatment, eventually taking medicine commonly given to tackle OCD. She is far from alone. Wild Minds , a web forum for maladaptive daydreamers, has some 2,200 members from across the world. In 2011, scientists in New York reported the first academic survey of the condition. They questioned by email 90 people â 75 women and 15 men â who described themselves as excessive or maladaptive fantasizers. These people did not know each other, but they reported a tight set of thoughts and behaviours.
The level of detail was striking â âI have spun tons of plot lines in this world spanning multiple generations of characters,â one said.
The parts of my daydreams I obsess over are the most intense emotional scenes ⦠a characterâs parents or best friend dies, a character is injured, abused, tortured or raped, or even just has a terrible argument with a loved one ⦠Characters fall in love, get married, have and raise children, develop deep and strong friendships.
The people who responded to the survey said they would spend, on
That sounds mild â a little silly even â but true clinical hypochondriacs experience life in a similar way to someone with OCD: they convert intrusive thoughts of illness into obsessions, and then develop lengthy compulsive rituals to address them. They take their own temperature, pulse rate and even blood pressure. They compulsively check they can swallow, keep a close eye on their urine and excrement and feel for cancerous lumps. In some cases, these constant prods and pokes bring on the bodily changes and discomfort they fear in the first place. They almost always ask others for reassurance â family, friends, doctors, specialists, hospital phone lines, and experts and non-experts on the Internet. Unlike OCD, which comes from thoughts, people with hypochondriasis tend to fixate on genuine physical sensations and exaggerate their impact.
Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa show some striking similarities to OCD. Repetitive and strongly held thoughts force people to carry out rituals and patterns of behaviour to reduce anxiety â refusal to eat or inability to stop â followed immediately by compulsions to make themselves vomit or over-exercise. Thought suppression seems to play an important role â with those who try and fail to squash negative thoughts about their eating habits more likely to show symptoms of bulimia. People with anorexia can show obsessions and compulsions unrelated to food or weight, including an irrational desire to arrange things in symmetrical patterns.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
One of the newest additions to the list of abnormalities that could relate to obsessive-compulsive symptoms is maladaptive daydreaming. Freud said to daydream was infantile and neurotic, but these days psychologists and neuroscientists see daydreaming â sometimes called undirected thought or mind wandering â as a normal and probably useful part of human cognition. It might help us to solve problems, and we can usually snap out of it when we need to. Some people turn their daydreams into something more serious. They do it compulsively; they find it hard â if not impossible â to not daydream and the behaviour has a negative effect on the rest of their lives. Rachel was one of the first people identified with this problem.
As a child in the United States of the 1970s, Rachel would spend much of her time in a self-created fantasy world. She would imagine herself in her favourite television shows and run episodes inside her head. As a teenager, Rachel started to lose control of what she and her parents had always considered a harmless hobby. She recalls how the daydreams took over until she was no longer in charge of her thoughts and her life â vividly similar to the language people with OCD use to describe their obsessions.
Rachel, later a successful lawyer, sought and received treatment, eventually taking medicine commonly given to tackle OCD. She is far from alone. Wild Minds , a web forum for maladaptive daydreamers, has some 2,200 members from across the world. In 2011, scientists in New York reported the first academic survey of the condition. They questioned by email 90 people â 75 women and 15 men â who described themselves as excessive or maladaptive fantasizers. These people did not know each other, but they reported a tight set of thoughts and behaviours.
The level of detail was striking â âI have spun tons of plot lines in this world spanning multiple generations of characters,â one said.
The parts of my daydreams I obsess over are the most intense emotional scenes ⦠a characterâs parents or best friend dies, a character is injured, abused, tortured or raped, or even just has a terrible argument with a loved one ⦠Characters fall in love, get married, have and raise children, develop deep and strong friendships.
The people who responded to the survey said they would spend, on
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