On the feeling of executive overload and OCD coping
So, I have OCD. I won’t go into the full story, but I used to have lots of tics and rituals, some of which could be quite disruptive. Over the years things have improved and now I rarely tic at all. My OCD manifests more in my thinking structures and rigid schema (which is why a philosophy of becoming is both therapeutic and a challenge for me). I have noticed that I’m still hyper-specific about where things “need” to be in my apartment, or anywhere that I consider “personal space” (a story for another day). Right now, I’m thinking about the experience of executive overload.
When I first learned about the concept of executive dysfunction, I didn’t know if it applied to me. Most of the literature I found was focused on ADHD, but I had a suspicion that it explained something about my struggles. I felt like concept had something to say about why I would stand for 20 minutes in front of my wardrobe, incapable of choosing clothes and getting dressed, and unable to get on with my day. Turns out it does. And quite recently I’ve come across the more specific concept of executive overload, which feels particularly suited to explain a bunch of my struggles with getting caught up in thought, mentally exhausted, unable to get to the things I want or need to get done, and just generally overwhelmed while not being very productive.
Executive overload, in OCD, refers to the toll that obsessive thoughts take on cognitive processing power, and how it may affect concentration and effectiveness in solving tasks. Put simply, if I’m constantly dealing with obsessive, intrusive thoughts, it’s hard to stay concentrated, and it takes a lot more effort to deal with what I have in front of me if I constantly have to address what’s going on in my head.
Now, in my case it’s no longer a concrete intrusive thought like “do x or y will happen” that repeats, but a vaguer feeling that ideas are “open” and need to be closed, and they drag me back because I’m not always sure how to close them. It can feel like having to many browser tabs open, and feeling the need to constantly remember what’s in all of them because if you forget they automatically close and you might not remember what was important about them, so you constantly have to work over all of the things that are going through your head. They can only be intentionally closed once they have been fully and properly addressed and I can move on. But when there’s so many of them I begin to lose track and enter this stupor where I can’t really process any thought because to get to it I need to work through so many others. And its really frustrating because it does make accomplishing things really hard. If I let my curiosity lead and I “open too many windows” I become unable to engage with any of them.
I’ve worked on this a bit, I’ve worked on learning to go with the flow more, accepting that I will forget things and just dealing with the thing I feel like doing in the moment. Mindfulness strategies have helped somewhat, but the cognitive toll is real. Quieting those worries and fighting against that tendency does take energy.
Now, being able to understand it and recognize what’s happening to me really goes a long way. When I’m in the thick of it I feel like every thought is extremely important, and there is such a thing as “completing it”. When I think of this through the lens of executive overload, it’s easier for me to think of these as more elaborate tics and realize it’s not as important to deal with everything. I do also try to keep an awareness of not opening too many windows, which allows me to enjoy what I’m doing more, but it’s seeing it as a tic-like behaviour that really helps me dispel it and let go. And knowing that this is something that can happen to me, that I get cognitively overloaded to the point where it’s hard to work, and it doesn’t mean I’m stupid, lazy or unproductive, lets me extend some grace to myself and find better ways to prepare and work around it.
Thinking about my environment and the way it can create queues to facilitate my functioning is a good complement, as a relationship to place can facilitate certain dispositions and reduce the amount of thinking I need to do to begin doing something. But this also comes with a risk, as obsessing over space and wanting to have it right so I can begin a task can be another pitfall. Even if it’s not healthy to overly obsess over space and tolerating some messiness instead of having to fix everything is better if you want to focus on a task at hand, keeping a relatively tidy and functional space helps me get to what matters most to me without spending as much cognitive energy to get there.
I guess I just wanted to explain this to say; it sucks. It sucks when you want to do something and struggle all day to accomplish it and then feel like shit because you “wasted your day” and you feel unable to progress with your goals, creative projects and the things you want to share with others. It really sucks to feel unable to do the thing you know you want to set out to do because you are tripping yourself. It sucks to look back at a month and realize a lot of the windows you “opened” with excitement at the beginning are still open now and you haven’t gotten very far with them. But I don’t want to give up and I constantly try to keep doing the things I care about and find strategies to work through it. And articulating this helps too.