Numerological Obsessions: Constantly Thinking About Numbers
Count to one hundred every time I write a word. Always walk around the block three times before you can enter the house. Touch or ask the same thing seven times in a row.
Brush your teeth exactly 35 times before spitting and rinsing your mouth. All of these situations have something in common: for some reason an action is performed a certain number of times. This is a common occurrence for people with numerological obsession.a, a type of obsessions typical of subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
To understand how numerological obsessions work, first of all it is necessary to make a brief summary of the disorder in which it appears: obsessive-compulsive disorder.
He Obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD is a psychological disorder closely linked to anxiety and characterized by the presence of obsessions, intrusive and recurring thoughts that escape the person’s control and cause a high level of anxiety, despite the fact that they are recognized as their own and that they try to neutralize.
Generally, in order to reduce anxiety, the subject ends up starting to perform some type of action, whether physical or mental, an activity that, by relieving anxiety, is reinforced and repeated each time the thought re-emerges, establishing itself as a compulsion. This creates a continuous spiral between obsessive thinking and anxiety-regulating mechanism, which occupies a large part of the patient’s time and plunges him into a state of permanent anxiety from which he can only escape temporarily through compulsions (an escape that in turn reinforces anxiety), producing continuous discomfort.
Going into a thought loop
The process that this disorder follows is usually the following: Fortuitously, one day a thought appears that seems aberrant and unacceptable to the person.. The fact that this idea has crossed your mind generates a high level of discomfort and anxiety, trying at all costs to eliminate the thought and avoid it as much as possible. However, trying to avoid it causes a fixation on it, making its reappearance even more likely and generating even greater anxiety that we will try harder to avoid. To do this, he generally uses the aforementioned compulsions, which produce temporary relief from the discomfort.
It is a disorder that causes deep vital suffering to those who suffer from it: The person knows that the thoughts and actions they carry out have no logical or practical meaning and they experience them as something absurd, but nevertheless they have to carry them out. out to reduce your anxiety level. The same goes for obsessive thoughts.
The continuous cycle between obsession and compulsion only feeds on each other and aggravates the subject’s condition.taking up a large part of your daily time and being an element that greatly inhibits your life in various aspects. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for variations to appear within the vicious circle, and new anxiety-generating thoughts can be added.
The causes of the appearance of obsessive thoughts and the fixation on them are due to multiple causes, with a certain genetic predisposition in this regard. Many of these patients have been found to have frontal hyperactivity along with basal ganglia problems. It is also common for them to appear in people who are strongly inhibited at a vital level, restricted in one or more aspects of their person by society or education received.
There are a wide variety of obsessions and compulsions that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder have, such as cleaning or checking. One of them is obsessions that have to do with numbers, or numerological obsession..
Numerological obsession: numbers that settle in the mind
Count to ten. That is something that a large majority of the population has done at some point, usually to calm down after something or someone has provoked our anger, anger or anxiety. And counting and ordering makes us occupy our minds on something specific that demands our attention, and can be an escape route to avoid doing something we regret or leaving aside something that upsets us.
Returning to obsessive-compulsive disorder, in people who have numerological obsessions the mechanism used as a calming anxiety ritual is based precisely on this. But then, Why do we talk about numerological obsession and not numerological rituals or compulsions?
A mechanism to calm anxiety… or anxiety itself
This is because people with numerological obsession do not only use numbers as a mechanism to calm anxiety, but the numbers themselves are the reason for anxiety. This type of case is very complex, since in them the person would find themselves completely blocked, to the point of having already forgotten the reason that led them to use numbers as a means of calming down and transforming what was a compulsion into an obsession. This does not mean that the original idea has faded, but rather that the issue that produces obsession has been masked.
The way in which numbers are applied is very varied. There are people who have to mentally count up to a certain number, perform an action a certain number of times, have a specific number of objects at their disposal, or avoid contact with anything linked to one or more numbers in question. In fact, it may appear related to other obsessions and compulsions such as cleaning, but in the case of numerological obsession what will prevail will be the number and not the action per se (that is, if they do not wash X number of times, their anxiety does not decrease).
There are numerous cases of OCD with numerological obsessionsthe obsession with specific numbers or with groupings of them that have common characteristics (for example with even or odd numbers) is common. A well-known example is the famous inventor Nicholas Tesla, who was obsessed with the number three in multiple aspects of his life.
Treating numerological OCD
The treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder has been somewhat complex throughout history, being a disorder traditionally difficult to treat. Thus, OCD (including numerological obsessions).
One of them is from pharmacology, which allows treating and reducing symptoms with a certain level of effectiveness. Especially effective are antidepressants that inhibit serotonin reuptake, SSRIs.
Generally, from the cognitive-behavioral side, obsessive-compulsive disorder is treated through exposure techniques with response prevention, causing the patient to gradually disassociate the obsessive thought and the compulsion. Since the repetition of the compulsion maintains the vicious cycle of obsession-compulsion through negative reinforcement, it is one of the most applied therapies to treat the symptoms.
In the case of numerological obsession, this type of treatment encounters the problem that It is more difficult to find the origin thought that causes anxiety and work with it. Despite this, working on response prevention is possible and can help reduce overt behaviors.
Along with this, interventions are applied to show realistically the level of responsibility of the patient in the events that he imagines could occur due to non-compliance with the rituals, to make visible that trying to deny a thought causes us to repeat it and that thinking something negative It does not imply doing it. Again, in numerological obsession this type of treatment is very complicated as it is not visible which specific thought produces the problem. A deep analysis of the case and the circumstances surrounding it is necessary in order to discover it.
Other current therapies such as psychodynamics show that although the treatment of the symptom is very useful to improve the patient’s condition and can lead to success, Treatment should focus on modifying the primary cause that caused the patient’s obsessive structure.. In this aspect, reducing inhibition and uncovering and directing internal energy to what the individual really wants can greatly help to bring about a structural change in the person, which can greatly contribute to the person’s recovery.
