By Cody Gustaveson, PhD — President and Clinical Director, Clinic Ovis
You sent the message at 9:14 p.m. It said Delivered. Then it said Read. Then the three dots appeared, moved for a second, and stopped.
That’s it. That’s the whole event. And yet somewhere in the twenty minutes that follow, a person can build an entire courtroom: what the pause meant, what the last message sounded like, whether the period at the end of “Sounds good.” was cold or just punctuation. The phone gets picked up. Nothing. Picked up again. Still nothing. The sent message gets re-read — not once, but closely, like a lawyer looking for the sentence that lost the case.
This is one of the most common presentations I see now, and it rarely arrives with the word OCD attached to it. People describe it as being “bad at texting,” or “too much,” or “just anxious.” What’s actually happening is older than the technology: a mind demanding certainty about something uncertain, and a set of behaviors that promise to deliver it.
The loop hasn’t changed. The equipment has.
Anxiety and OCD run on a simple mechanism. A thought shows up that feels intolerable — he’s annoyed with me, I said something wrong, something happened to her — and the discomfort creates an urgent pull toward resolution. You check. For a moment, the discomfort drops. That drop is the problem. Relief is a teacher, and what it teaches is that checking was necessary and that the next spike will require checking too.
Historically, this loop had natural limits. If you wanted reassurance, you had to call someone, drive somewhere, wait for the mail, ask a person out loud and risk them noticing you’d asked three times already. Friction slowed the loop down, and the slowdown gave people accidental exposure practice. You had to sit in not knowing because there was no alternative.
Connected life removed the friction. Reassurance is now free, instant, private, and infinite. Nobody sees you check. There’s no shame limit, no closing time, and no natural stopping point. You can run the loop forty times before breakfast and no one will know but you.
The forensics of a text message
Texting is the purest example, because it hands you data that feels like evidence but isn’t.
Read receipts, typing indicators, “active 4m ago,” delivery status, whether the reply came in two minutes or two hours — these are metrics about a person’s thumbs, not about their feelings toward you. But an anxious mind treats them as instruments. Patients tell me about response-time math: she used to answer in five minutes, now it’s forty. They tell me about tone analysis, running a one-line message through a dozen readings. About drafting a text, deleting it, rewriting it, sending it, then unsending it and rewriting it again. About sending a follow-up message specifically to dilute the previous one. About reading back through months of a thread to check whether things have “cooled.”
Every one of those is a compulsion doing a compulsion’s job: reducing uncertainty right now, at the cost of making uncertainty less tolerable later. And most of it never gets named as a compulsion, because it looks like ordinary modern behavior. Everyone checks their phone. The difference isn’t the checking. It’s what the checking is for.
Little blue dots
Location sharing deserves its own paragraph, because it is reassurance with a map interface.
Find My, Life360, and their relatives were built for genuinely good reasons, and plenty of families use them without incident. But for someone with an anxiety or OCD presentation, a live dot on a map is a slot machine. A partner who is fifteen minutes later than expected can now be watched, not waited for. A parent can refresh a teenager’s location during a movie. A dot that hasn’t moved in an hour becomes an emergency; a dot that stopped somewhere unexpected becomes an interrogation. The app promises to end worry, and instead it gives worry a live feed.
The tell is usually this: the checking doesn’t produce calm, it produces a slightly more specific question.
The other connected ways to obsess
Once you know the shape, you see it everywhere. Same loop, different dashboard:
- Sleep and recovery scores. A ring or a watch assigns a number to your night, and now you can feel bad about sleep you already slept. People wake up and check their readiness score before checking how they feel — sometimes deciding how they feel based on it.
- Symptom checking. Not just searching. Rechecking the same source, checking a second source to confirm the first, checking a forum for someone with identical symptoms, then starting again because the reassurance wore off.
- Health data. Heart rate, blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, continuous glucose monitors. Extremely useful tools that can also become a way to ask your body, forty times a day, whether it’s safe.
- Doorbell and security cameras. Reviewing footage of a quiet porch. Checking whether the door was closed by watching a video of yourself closing it.
- Package and flight tracking. Refreshing a delivery map that updates every ninety minutes.
- Banking apps. Opening the balance, closing it, opening it again — not to make a decision, just to confirm the number hasn’t changed.
- Work presence. The green dot next to your name. Whether your manager saw your message. Whether the “seen by” list on a team post included the person whose opinion you’re worried about.
- Social metrics. Who viewed a story, who unfollowed, how a post performed in its first hour, whether an old comment reads badly now.
None of these tools is the villain. A glucose monitor is a medical advance. A camera is a reasonable thing to own. The question is never whether you use them — it’s whether you can stop using them when nothing has actually happened.
Curiosity or compulsion?
A few questions that usually sort it out:
- Does the check end the question, or refine it into a smaller one?
- Would you still check if you were certain no one would ever know?
- How long does the relief last? Genuine information settles. Compulsions expire in minutes.
- Are you checking to make a decision, or to feel okay?
- If you couldn’t check for two hours, what would you predict happens? What actually happens?
What actually helps
Not deleting everything, at least not as the first move. Turning off read receipts and unsharing your location can be reasonable structural changes — but if the reason is I can’t handle knowing, you’ve removed the trigger without building the tolerance, and the anxiety will simply relocate to the next available number.
What builds tolerance is doing the opposite of what the urge asks, on purpose and repeatedly. Delay the check by ten minutes, then thirty. Send the message once and leave the thread. Let the map go unwatched for an evening. Notice the spike, name it — this is my mind asking for certainty — and go do the thing you were going to do anyway while the discomfort is still present. Not gritting your teeth until it passes. Living alongside it, at full volume, while it does whatever it’s going to do.
The goal isn’t to stop caring how people feel about you or where your kid is. It’s to be able to love people without surveilling them, and to send a text without needing a receipt.
Next in this series: the same machinery, pointed at choices. Twelve tabs open comparing the same four items, a purchase returned twice, a decision that feels impossible to make and impossible to leave alone — purchase and decision-making OCD, and why “just pick one” is such useless advice.