Living with OCD

OCD at work: the quiet second job

From the outside it can pass for conscientiousness, one more read of the email, one more check of the doors on the way out. From the inside it's a second job nobody assigned and nobody sees. This page is about what that job costs, and which of the decisions around it are actually yours.

What OCD costs at work, quietly

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) at work usually hides inside effort that looks normal, things like re-reading what you already sent, re-checking what you already finished, or quietly avoiding whatever sets the fear off. The fears are the obsessions, the repeats are the compulsions, and together they use up time and energy the job never sees. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) describes the symptoms as time-consuming and able to interfere with daily life. Work is daily life, eight hours of it.

What that looks like from the inside may be something like this. The email was finished half an hour ago, and you're reading it again, not to make it better but to make sure it can't hurt you, checking whether the wrong file is attached, whether a sentence could be read as rude, whether you're sure. From three feet away, none of that shows. What a coworker sees is a careful employee who looks busy.

An International OCD Foundation post about OCD on the job describes the same scenes from real workdays. "Reading the email seven times before hitting send, even after confirming with others that the email was correct." And, "Checking and rechecking all of the building doors, even after seeing they were secured."

Both of those checks happen after the answer is already in. The email was confirmed correct. The doors were seen secured. So the checking isn't gathering information. It's paying an alarm.

At a job, the compulsions tend to look like the job. Often it's re-reading what you already sent, hunting for the mistake that would sink you, or re-checking work that was finished an hour ago. It can be replaying a meeting for the thing you might have said. And staying late is a common one, not to do more work, to redo finished work.

There's a number for what this costs, and it comes from the driest source available.

An hour is the floor, not the ceiling. And no workday has a spare hour lying around, so OCD takes it from somewhere. Maybe from the morning's focus. Maybe from the lunch you skip, or from the evening you stay to redo what the checking ate. The IOCDF's definition adds the part that stings, that obsessions "are time-consuming and get in the way of important activities the person values." For a lot of people, work is one of those activities.

The other cost hides even better than the checking does. NIMH notes that people with OCD "might avoid situations that trigger their symptoms." At work, avoidance can look like a meeting you didn't speak in, or perhaps a task you quietly traded away. For some people it's the promotion never chased, because the new role has more ways to be responsible for something going wrong. The job sees none of this, and you pay for all of it.

Should I tell my employer?

There's no rule that requires it. Telling an employer about obsessive-compulsive disorder is a personal decision with weight on both sides. Disclosure can buy context and open a formal conversation, and it can't be taken back. The specifics of any formal request belong with HR or official resources, and the choice stays yours.

The fear deserves to go first, because it's real. The author of that IOCDF post put it in one line, that "the thought of self-disclosure felt synonymous with putting a target on my back."

That fear has company. A 2019 American Psychiatric Association poll, cited in the same post, found roughly 50% of American workers were afraid to discuss mental health conditions with their employers, and over one-third were worried about job consequences if they sought mental health care. That second number is worth sitting with. The worry there isn't about an awkward conversation so much as about the job itself.

So hold on to the baseline before you weigh anything. Jon Hershfield, a therapist who writes for the IOCDF about disclosing OCD to the people around you, starts from it plainly. "If you have OCD, you don't have to disclose your condition to anyone, even family members." An employer isn't an exception to that.

He also gives disclosure a purpose test worth carrying into any office. "The purpose of disclosure is to promote collaboration and empathy, not make it easier to do compulsions." That test does real work here. Telling your manager so the hard weeks make sense is collaboration. Telling a teammate so they'll keep answering "did that sound okay" is OCD recruiting a coworker into the compulsion.

What telling can buy is context for the days OCD wins, and one less secret to manage at the hardest hour of the day. It can also open a formal conversation, if you want one. What it risks is that you can't untell it, and you don't control what it means to the person who hears it. Both sides of that ledger are real, which is why this is a decision and not a rule.

If you want the formal route, the IOCDF post points at two concrete doors, in its own words. "Take advantage of your workplace Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for free access to licensed counselors and mental health resources." And, "Consider requesting ADA accommodations through your supervisor or the human resources department." Whether your workplace has an EAP, and what a formal request would involve where you work, are questions for HR and for official government resources, answered in writing by people whose job it is to know, not by an article.

One more thing, because OCD will try to take this decision over too. If the plan is to research disclosure for another three weeks and poll a few more people and decide once you're certain, it's worth asking who wrote that plan. Certainty about a thing like this isn't coming, and deciding without it is allowed.

Getting through the workday

Getting through a workday with obsessive-compulsive disorder starts with learning to tell the job apart from the disorder. Work adds information or gets a task closer to done. A compulsion buys quiet from an alarm, a pass that changes nothing, a check that confirms what you already saw. One is the job. The other is OCD, on the clock.

There's no trick that switches the alarm off at nine and back on at five, and anyone who has tried to white-knuckle a workday knows willpower runs out before the alarm does. So the realistic version of getting through starts smaller, with learning to tell which parts of your own day are work and which are compulsions.

The rule of thumb I'd hand you is to ask what ends the repeat. A second read that stops because you caught a real typo is work. A seventh read that stops because the dread finally loosened is a compulsion, and the tell is that nothing in the email changed between read two and read seven. Something in you changed, for a few minutes. That's what you paid for.

Deadlines make this harder to look away from. Compulsions and deadlines want the same hours, so when something is due at noon, every extra pass costs more, and OCD doesn't price its demands against your calendar. If your hardest days are deadline days, you're not imagining the collision. And leaving a seventh read undone while something is due is no small task, which is worth saying out loud.

Noticing all of this is worth doing, and it isn't a treatment. Nobody audits their way out of OCD with a rule of thumb. What noticing buys you is a clear picture of where the checking runs and what it takes with it. Real treatment starts from exactly that picture.

It's worth being honest about the drift, too. NIMH says it without decoration: "If left untreated, OCD symptoms can become severe and interfere with daily life." The same brochure names the quiet coping that can show up in someone managing alone, avoiding whatever sets the fear off, or turning to "drugs or alcohol to cope." If the workday has started ending with a drink that's doing a job, that's information, and it deserves to be taken seriously before it takes more hours.

The treatment aimed at the disorder itself is exposure and response prevention (ERP), usually with medication as the other first-line option. What works for OCD is its own page, so the next hour you spend on this can be a planning hour instead of another lap.

When work feeds the loop

A workplace hands obsessive-compulsive disorder its favorite materials. Consequences and deadlines, a record of everything you send, and a person one desk away who will answer a worried question. Each check, and each answered question, buys a short relief, and the relief teaches the alarm that it was worth sounding.

"Can you look at this once more before I send it?" Maybe that's the third time today, same paragraph. Your teammate answers, because they like you and it costs them nothing. It reads fine. It read fine the first time.

It's worth slowing down what that answer actually does. The worry spikes and you ask, and the relief that follows is real. Then it fades, and the same worry comes back with the same question in hand. Paul Munford, a psychologist writing about reassurance for the IOCDF, saw the pattern across the people he treated: "To ease this distress, they ask other people, usually family members or close friends, over and over again to reassure them that their fears will not materialize." At work, the close friend is the person at the next desk.

And OCD keeps exact books. In Munford's words: "Typically they get the reassurance that they want and temporary relief, but like other compulsions reassurance blocks recovery." He continues: "The more reassurance received, the more reassurance wanted." Trying to satisfy it, he writes, is like trying to fill a bottomless pit. Every kind answer is another rehearsal for the alarm.

Asking even hides inside the checking. Go back to that first email, the one read "seven times before hitting send, even after confirming with others that the email was correct." The confirming with others is doing the same job as the re-reading. Checking and asking are one compulsion in two forms.

None of this makes your teammate the problem, and quitting the questions cold at your desk isn't a plan on its own. The pattern has a name and a way out, and there's a full article on it, why answering makes OCD stronger. It's written for the people who love someone with OCD, and it works the same three feet from your monitor.

OCD at work is the disorder running on company time, not a discipline problem and not a personality flaw. The hours it takes are real hours, and treatment is how people get them back, usually ERP with a clinician who knows OCD, rather than hiding the compulsions better. The job goes back to being work.

What to carry into Monday

• At work, OCD often passes for diligence. Sent email gets re-read and finished work gets re-checked, and the evening can run late redoing what was already done.
• The cost is measurable. NIMH describes people with OCD spending more than 1 hour a day on obsessions or compulsions, and a workday has no spare hour.
• Telling your employer is a personal decision with weight on both sides, not a requirement. The specifics of any formal request belong with HR or official resources.
• Reassurance from coworkers feeds OCD the same way any reassurance does. Real relief now, the same question back tomorrow.
• The way out runs through treatment aimed at the disorder itself, usually exposure and response prevention (ERP), not through hiding the compulsions better.