Addictive Behaviours and OCD

I do wonder whether there is a close correlation between OCD and addictive behaviours. I have had a few addictions over the years and sometimes they have overlapped and sometimes they have caused me a fair bit of trouble. If you stop to think about it, addictive behaviours such as drinking heavily, taking drugs, gambling, online shopping anyone, are all soothing behaviours. You are self-medicating yourself because the thoughts that you are having are causing a distressed emotional response. You have a thought, it causes a reaction from the emotional centres in your brain, your body releases hormones that cause really unpleasant bodily sensations to prepare you for the invisible fight and to make yourself feel better, you eat, you drink, get excessively sexual, work or whatever it is. And it works.... in the short term at least. Any behaviour that stimulates the reward centre gives you a nice shot of serotonin or other feel-good hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins. The trouble is, that just like the lever pressing monkey getting his peanut, you just keep pressing the lever over and over and over until unfortunately your brain structure starts to alter. This behaviour is progressive which means that you have to keep increasing the size of the bet, drink more alcohol, eat more chocolate or whatever it is to stimulate the body to give you the same soothing effect. And this really is the part of addiction process that really comes into its own and starts getting you into trouble. Increasing, the behaviours begin to be a bigger problem that the one that you started with. 

So, for me, I see the parallels with OCD which is; I get a thought I don't like and then I carry out, mentally in my case, but is often physically, a ritual or behaviour to neutralise that bad thought, to make it go away, to make it seem unimportant, to say to myself, no that thought was wrong. I want to re-set! The intrusive OCD thoughts cause my stress levels to increase just as they do with other thoughts that stress me out but instead of carrying out an addictive behaviour for soothing myself, I carry out a mental thought sequence to 'make things better'.  Again, the nature of the body is pretty much set in stone, what happens? The mind-body gets used to you carrying out that ritual but it no longer soothes you and makes everything alright because, and yes you guessed it, it's progressive. You need to keep doing more of the rituals to get the same effect and the more you do, the more you are resigning yourself to do in the future. Of course, what I have done in the past is to do my compulsive thoughts (and any checking behaviours, ruminating or asking for reassurance) and then graduate to my addictive behaviours when they either don't work or I've needed extra 'medication'! It's actually a totally normal response by the way to either having intrusive thoughts or thoughts caused by traumatic life events, to try and soothe them away, so remember to be very nice to yourself. Anybody would do exactly the same in your position and it’s only been recently that we've been learning that that is the case. Until next time and Step 3...