Compulsive googling

Hey. I'm new here, I'm a young adult who has had OCD symptoms since childhood. It has covered a number of different themes, mostly pertaining to safety/harm of myself or others, relationships, past events, sexual things and scrupulosity.

At the moment my main compulsion is googling things and spending hours reading about them. I mostly use search terms that relate to my OCD or things I obsess about and try to find people with similar experiences to reassure myself. I'll also google things relating to hypothetical situations I'm afraid of in order to "prepare" myself for them. I'll open 10 different tabs from the search results, take forever to read through them all, and then as soon as I'm done reading them I'll be googling something else.

I am honestly trying so hard to stop doing this, but it's like nothing else can hold my attention. I'll always somehow end up reading about a subject that's at least loosely related to one of my obsessions. Almost everything else feels irrelevant. I don't really have any hobbies because of this. I often end up reading the same things over and over, but the urges to keep typing slight variations of the same phrases into google are so strong it feels like I truly can't resist them. Like I might eventually find one piece of information that will put my mind at rest for good.

Is anyone else going through something like this? Is there a way to stop doing a compulsion that feels impossible to resist, when nothing else can hold your attention?

Hello and welcome. Yes I do this too. Usually when I'm worrying I don't have OCD. Last night I suddenly panicked about something I've been having trouble with lately that I was sure was OCD. I suddenly thought 'what if it's realistic and not OCD?' And started googling to see if anyone else with OCD had mentioned it. I couldn't find anything and then I felt scared.

You and I both know we will never find the one page that makes us certain about whatever we need to know the answer to. In my case, whether X is an OCD symptom and proof that I have OCD. Therefore I know the way to get over it is to live with the uncertainty and resist the googling, but I realise that is not easy. Could you start by setting a time limit, perhaps? Say half an hour, set a timer then stop, put away your phone and do something else? Then cut it down gradually?

kah80 wrote:Hello and welcome. Yes I do this too. Usually when I'm worrying I don't have OCD. Last night I suddenly panicked about something I've been having trouble with lately that I was sure was OCD. I suddenly thought 'what if it's realistic and not OCD?' And started googling to see if anyone else with OCD had mentioned it. I couldn't find anything and then I felt scared.

You and I both know we will never find the one page that makes us certain about whatever we need to know the answer to. In my case, whether X is an OCD symptom and proof that I have OCD. Therefore I know the way to get over it is to live with the uncertainty and resist the googling, but I realise that is not easy. Could you start by setting a time limit, perhaps? Say half an hour, set a timer then stop, put away your phone and do something else? Then cut it down gradually?

Thank you for your reply! I don't doubt that I have OCD now, but my biggest fear is that weird thoughts and compulsions I had before I was diagnosed weren't "normal" for OCD and were a sign of something worse (especially things related to sexual and harm OCD) even though I've found plenty of very similar stories. I'm also very afraid of people judging me for the content of my OCD, so it's reassuring to see people in similar situations getting only compassionate replies.

I like the idea of setting some time aside to do it and stopping when the time limit is up. It will be difficult to go from hours every day to just half an hour, so I may have to make it broader for now, like "I can only do it before 3pm" and cut down from there. But I'll try doing something like that.

I've had the Googling compulsion with various obsessions. Distraction and staying away from devices has helped, but I've become obsessed with ADHD over the past week or so and have been Googling that.

CloudShark wrote:I've had the Googling compulsion with various obsessions. Distraction and staying away from devices has helped, but I've become obsessed with ADHD over the past week or so and have been Googling that.

Is that because you think you might have ADHD yourself, or do you just get obsessed with a subject randomly and research it? I've had both kinds of obsession regarding various things, including a lot of different medical conditions.

I find it difficult staying away from devices since I'm always worried I'll miss something important like a message or phone call, and I find it soothing to have them nearby (I think this is another OCD thing related to safety that dates back to when I was very young). I could try focusing all my attention on my devices to something else though. Even just playing some addictive games on them for hours would probably be better from a psychological standpoint than what I'm doing now.

Update: despite deciding not to do this anymore I still spent a large amount of yesterday and the day before reading through 15 pages of forum posts relating to one of my broader OCD themes trying to find experiences like mine. Many of them I had already read at least once before while doing similar searches. To make it worse, 10 pages in my computer crashed and I lost the page I was on, but I still entered the same search terms again and skipped to page 10 so I could carry on reading because I felt so much like I would miss something important if I didn't. On the plus side I have also managed to spend a fair amount of time focusing on other things and have eventually felt slightly better while doing so, but still, why does it feel so much like these urges are impossible to resist?