Last updated: June 12th, 2025
The OCD cycle is the process by which obsessions and compulsions get worse over time if left untreated. Fortunately, there are effective ways to interrupt the cycle and overcome OCD.
Many people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) find themselves saying things like:
- “I know I haven’t used my stove recently, but I still have to check that it’s off before I leave home.”
- “I don’t actually think that tapping something an odd number of times will hurt someone…but what if I’m wrong?”
- “Could this feeling I have in my stomach be a serious illness? Let me see what the internet has to say about it.”
Thoughts like these often feel scary and stressful. Most people will do something to try and find relief from the fear and anxiety the thoughts cause. For example, they could take an action, like checking a stove, or instead might tell themselves something calming. Unfortunately, these efforts don’t always help. Why? The answer has to do with the “vicious cycle” of OCD.
What Is OCD?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a condition in which people experience obsessions or compulsions, and often both. Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive mental experiences (such as thoughts, images, or urges) that lead to anxiety and discomfort. Discomfort with doubt and uncertainty is a core feature of OCD. Compulsions are behaviors that people perform repeatedly in an attempt to lessen the anxiety and discomfort caused by obsessions. It’s important to understand that obsessions and compulsions aren’t just occasional or fleeting in this condition – they’re recurrent and persistent. They eat up time and mental energy, and interfere with daily life.
The OCD Cycle
The best way to understand how OCD operates is to understand its cycle.
Obsessions
The cycle of OCD begins with obsessions. Obsessions can be thoughts, images, or urges, and are sometimes prompted by external triggers. They can also just show up in your mind unprompted. Because obsessions are unwanted and upsetting, it’s easy for them to be interpreted as either threatening or important to pay attention to (or both). When thoughts feel so upsetting and consequential, it’s natural to push them away. However, trying to get rid of your obsessions typically doesn’t work for long. Instead, this strategy often makes thoughts come back again and again. The thoughts can also get more intense as they get more frequent.
Obsessions lead to feelings of anxiety and distress. Everyone naturally wants to minimize or get rid of uncomfortable feelings. As anxiety and distress become stronger, so does the urge to perform a compulsion.
Compulsions
Compulsions are anything you do to reduce the anxiety and discomfort caused by obsessions, or to prevent something you’re afraid of from happening. They can be physical and observable, like handwashing, checking, or repeating an action. However, compulsions can also be mental – for example, mentally reviewing your conversation with a coworker to be sure you didn’t say anything inappropriate, or reassuring yourself by running through a list of facts that show you that you’re a good person who won’t harm others. Though mental compulsions aren’t visible to others, they serve the same purpose as more obvious compulsions and are just as powerful.
Compulsions tempt you with the promise of taking away the discomfort, doubt, and anxiety that comes from obsessions. Unfortunately, the relief that compulsions provide is temporary.
Performing compulsions is what most directly fuels the cycle of OCD, and makes it such a vicious cycle.
Negative reinforcement
Although the relief that comes from performing compulsions is real, it makes your anxiety and OCD worse over time. This happens through a process called negative reinforcement. The compulsions take away your anxiety (negative – as in subtraction) temporarily, which strengthens (reinforces) your likelihood to rely on the compulsion again next time. That’s how the OCD cycle picks up steam. After many repetitions of the cycle, you’ll find it difficult to tolerate the discomfort and uncertainty triggered by obsessions. Why? Because you’ve become so reliant on compulsions for short-term relief.
As soon as the relief following a compulsion ends, and the anxiety returns, the OCD cycle is ready to start all over again.
Why Does Understanding the OCD Cycle Matter?
Like many other challenges in life, OCD is easier to address if you understand how it works, and what keeps it going. Understanding the OCD cycle can help you recognize how obsessions and compulsions happen for you.
Some parts of the cycle of OCD are outside of our control:
- Every person experiences intrusive thoughts. Trying to stop them backfires, as described above
- Everyone feels increased anxiety and discomfort when they have to deal with something upsetting. So, you can’t ask yourself to “just not be upset” by obsessions or intrusive thoughts
However, other parts of the cycle of OCD are ones you can learn to bring under your control:
- Learning to resist the urge to perform compulsions. Even though the urge to perform compulsions can be powerful, you can learn to resist doing them
- Learning to treat obsessions and intrusive thoughts as neither threatening nor important to pay close attention to
These are the parts of the cycle that are targeted in OCD treatment to help break the cycle of OCD. Breaking the cycle can be difficult, but is possible – especially with treatment from an experienced OCD therapist.
Treatment – Exposure and Response Prevention
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and, more specifically, exposure and response prevention (ERP) are the gold-standard psychological treatments for OCD. ERP is a form of CBT that specifically targets OCD. Working with an experienced ERP therapist can help you overcome OCD.
The two main elements of ERP treatment are:
- exposing yourself to situations that elicit anxiety or discomfort (exposure) while…
- practicing resisting the urge to perform compulsions (response prevention)
During treatment, you and your therapist will collaborate and design a tailored plan to guide you through exposure exercises. These exposures deliberately provoke discomfort related to your obsessions.
Exposure exercises
The goal of these exercises is to help you practice facing your anxiety and discomfort in a therapeutic way, and grow your abilities to tolerate discomfort and to resist the demands of OCD. Though they are uncomfortable to practice at first, keeping at them makes them less upsetting over time, and shows you can tolerate discomfort, while resisting the short-term relief from compulsions and breaking the cycle of OCD.
Changing your behavior
Refraining from engaging in any compulsions or rituals is often easier said than done, but your therapist will teach you how and help you practice this as part of treatment. It’s not always easy to catch yourself performing a compulsion, especially if it’s a mental one. It can be so familiar to you that you don’t notice it at all, or perhaps not until you’ve already been pulled into it for a while. Working with an experienced ERP therapist can help you spot these sneaky compulsions that fuel the cycle of OCD.
In summary, ERP treatment is helpful for OCD because it disrupts the cycle of OCD at the two points that you can bring under control. Learning to resist compulsions stops the reinforcement driven by short-term relief that fuels the cycle. Learning you can tolerate anxiety and discomfort teaches you that even the most distressing obsessions aren’t important to pay close attention to.
If obsessions or compulsions are impacting your life, contact us today to begin working with an ERP therapist so you can break free from the cycle of OCD.
