These OCD Symptoms Have Nothing to Do With Being Organized

If your brain has ever latched onto a random thought and refused to let it go for the next six hours, Carla Bezanson would like you to know you’re not alone.

On Don’t Think, the content creator opens up about what OCD actually looks like for her—and spoiler alert: it has way less to do with alphabetized spice racks and way more to do with feeling mentally exhausted all the time. From intrusive thoughts to decision paralysis, she breaks down the kinds of symptoms that often get overlooked because they happen almost entirely inside your head.

Here are a few signs OCD might be showing up in ways you never realized.

Not-So-Obvious OCD Signs That Might Be Showing Up in Your Head

Thought loops that won’t close

Bezanson describes one of her biggest OCD symptoms as “thought loops,” which she compares to having tabs permanently open in your brain.

It can be something huge, like spiraling over her career or relationships on a random Tuesday afternoon, or something ridiculously small. She gives the example of someone casually forgetting the name of a restaurant mid-conversation. Most people shrug and move on. Her brain absolutely does not.

“I need to know what that restaurant was called or I will pass away,” she jokes.

At that point, the missing restaurant name basically becomes an unsolved cold case her brain refuses to drop until there’s an answer.

Intrusive thoughts that come out of nowhere

These are the random, dark, deeply unhinged thoughts that pop into your head completely unprompted and have nothing to do with what you actually want or believe. Bezanson shared one involving her boyfriend, their dog, and a completely horrifying car door accident that immediately sent her brain into overdrive.

Getting diagnosed with OCD helped her realize intrusive thoughts aren’t secret messages about who you are deep down. Sometimes your brain just throws something disturbing at you for absolutely no reason. Once she stopped treating every intrusive thought like evidence of something bigger, it became easier to let the spiral end there instead of feeding it for the rest of the day.

Mental compulsions nobody sees

Compulsions don’t always look obvious from the outside. For Bezanson, most of them happen silently in her head. So the people around her would probably never realize they’re happening at all.

It can look like replaying a conversation from three days ago trying to figure out if she sounded weird, reopening a decision she already made just to make sure it was the “right” one, or mentally going over the same thought so many times it starts feeling impossible to focus on anything else. Sometimes it’s even a random word or song getting stuck in her brain and refusing to leave.

“When my anxiety is bad, it gets louder,” she says. It’s exhausting in the same way a group chat that won’t stop blowing up is exhausting, except the group chat is your own brain.

A brain that needs 100 percent certainty

“My brain, it hates maybe,” Bezanson says. “It wants a hundred percent certainty before I act, before I make decisions.”

The problem is most things in life don’t come with that. Your career, your relationships, whether your friends actually like you, whether you should send the text. There’s no math equation to solve any of it. But an OCD brain doesn’t accept that. So it just keeps trying to think its way to a guarantee that doesn’t exist.

If you’ve ever told yourself “if I just think about this hard enough, I can figure it out,” that’s the certainty-seeking on full display. And honestly, the only way through is accepting that some questions are never going to have a clear answer, no matter how many hours you give them. 

Decision paralysis that takes over your morning

Opening your eyes and immediately getting stuck in a mental debate over whether to go to the gym, go for a walk, answer emails, clean your apartment, or stay in bed a little longer sounds harmless until suddenly it’s noon and your brain feels like it already ran a marathon. Bezanson says the decision spirals got so overwhelming at one point that she stopped traveling alone because she’d end up stuck in hotel rooms unable to decide what to do next.

The realization that helped her most was understanding that the problem wasn’t that she was “bad” at making decisions. “The problem is that I believe that there is a right one,” she says. Once she stopped treating every choice like there was a perfect answer hidden somewhere inside it, the pressure around making decisions started easing up too.

A quick PSA

Everybody overthinks sometimes, and relating to one or two of these signs doesn’t automatically mean you have OCD. But when your brain starts turning everyday thoughts into full-time mental side quests, constantly searching for reassurance, or refusing to let things go long after everyone else has moved on, it might be worth paying attention to.

Reaching out to a therapist or mental health professional doesn’t have to mean things are falling apart. For a lot of people, it’s just the thing that finally helps their brain feel a little less exhausting to live in.

Listen to the full episode on Don’t Think with Carla Bezanson, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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