Isn't OCD driven by anxiety? It makes people anxious to see something out of arrangement and so they're compelled to fix it to make themselves comfortable? Whereas normal motivation might be focused on some pleasurable outcome, not just relief from anxiety.

My word of advice is to focus on your habits. Don't worry about the bigger details. Focus on changing your daily routine or habits. If you want to get better at reading regularly, then make a goal to read for 10-15 mins TODAY. Maybe tomorrow, find time to do 20mins. And the next a little more. Eventually your mental state will be reconditioned to *want* to read. You'll prefer to read rather than whatever it is you were in the habit of doing with that time.

lolograde is a blackbelt when it comes to rationalizing these things. I highly recommend any issues you have - you ask and reply to him and you'll get them resolved - and I mean that earnestly - I went to him seeking help and he sort of went back and forth with me on a few topics and this was one that really sticks out - forming bad/good habits and why he quit playing cpma (too addicting :P - his short answer: no - too much of the same).

Miss you man... and keep being inspiring and making nice maps.

I have had OCD most of my life. Until I started meditating. Ocd does not motivate you to do jack shit. In fact some days doing my rituals where so daunting I gave up on doing the things I wanted to. What motivated me to preform my rituals was how horrible my anxiety made me feel physically if I tried to ignore my ocd thoughts. The physical and mental feelings were my skin burning, muscle tension, heart pounding, mind racing, confusion. Your issue has nothing to do with ocd. If anything it is more like addiction. People do the same thing with apps like flip board with there smartphones.

If anyone is interested in OCD go ahead and ask me questions I will probably answer. I feel compelled to explain how I finally rid myself of ocd. Initially psychedelic drugs gave me some relief. When I would take LSD my ocd would go temporarily and comeback over a few days to about a week and a half. This really opened my eyes to how malleable our minds are. But that didn't do much of anything for me at the time and I do not recommend taking drugs of any kind including milder drugs like caffeine and most certainly not pharmaceuticals. I didn't really see any significant improvement until I started to meditate. After I started to meditate I quit consuming cannabis which I was using to cope with the anxiety and for my stomach issues as well. Meditation got rid of my ocd and any kind of anxiety. It also got rid of desire for any kind of drug. The way meditation makes me feel is just so much more powerful than any drug could ever be. I don't really know if I could explain it. I could explain some of the physical aspects. What I notice is my hands and arms begin to feel as though every molecule in them is vibrating. After that my sense of self begins to fade away. After that things get a little weird. I start to feel as though I am part of everything I am hearing, feeling, and sensing. I guess I would have to describe it as though I become one with everything. When I open my eyes everything is just so clear and vibrant and I just feel complete bliss. Also the mental clarity you get from meditating daily is well worth it on its own. I definitely notice if I start slacking.

How often do you meditate? One 10-to-20-minute session per day or more? And it basically gets rid of the ocd for the rest of the day? Asking because I tried meditating a few years ago to deal with my procrastination / self-discipline. I did it almost daily for almost two months (one 10-minute session every day), and I didn't notice any difference and didn't understand how it's supposed to help me (and I think I had the right idea about it, roughly). Like, do you have a way to explain why it works?

No meditation isn't like a pill though you do get a buzz from it that last hours but this can vary a lot. Ocd going away is a side effect of meditation. I can't really explain how it helps ocd. I just don't have to do my rituals anymore and I don't get anxious. I also no longer have obsessive thoughts. I would recommend you also try mindfulness meditation. A good book to read is The Miracle of Mindfulness. Here is a link to it I found on google https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Thich%20Nhat...ulness.pdf I felt I had a lot of trouble meditating at first. I seem to meditate best when I get rid of all the things that weight me down mentally. I think it is key to unravel your unconscious mind so it isn't weighing you down. I don't even feel I was really meditating before I did this. Basically I would begin to meditate and if I had a though or feeling that I couldn't get out of my mind I would thinking about it till I worked through it and resolved it but this whole time I would be following my breath so at no point did I really stop meditating I would just consciously think about the issue till it was resolved. Usually I would just let my mind resolve the issues on it's own. I found Sadhguru to be interesting. https://www.youtube.com/user/sadhguru He is a yogi with no religion and an interest in science who is also a mystic. Meditation works by making you more aware. When you meditate you are becoming more aware of everything including yourself. I don't choose specific times when I meditate or for how long. I usually meditate 1 to 3 times 10 to 20 minutes but it usually ends up being 15 minutes on average.

I think I can understand how meditation helps your OCD. I have suffered with OCD all my life, when I was in University it was the worst, I had so many rituals I could barely operate. Luckily Uni had free counseling and my counselor gave me a really good technique. She said if I felt an OCD thought entering my mind, I had to identify it, push it aside and say to myself "It is just an OCD thought, I don't have OCD'. At first it was really difficult, but after a year or two of persistence I managed to get it under control. 12 years later sometimes I can still find myself putting cutlery in the sink at certain angles to make me feel better, or making sure I touch things three times, but I quickly snap out of it and shout 'I don't have OCD' or 'OCD piss off you bastard' lol :) And then I feel better and in control again.

I think this is similar to how in meditation you become aware and mindful of your thoughts, and the whole idea is to let the thoughts flow through and disappear, which is similar to identifying the bad thoughts and pushing them away.

When I started really getting into meditation I realized the best thing to do is treat your mind the same as your heart. You let them do what they want. It is very important to note there are no bad or good thoughts they are all just thoughts and you shouldn't treat any of them differently.

Well, if we look at the wikipedia pages for OCD and the one for motivation, it seems they are not really similar enough for the question regarding the difference between them to make any sense. Though they are in relation to each other. If we understand motivation to be the underlying reason for people's actions and what drives them to act in a certain manner*, then for people with OCD, you could say that the disorder is their motivation for the way they act, because it drives their actions (even though the conscious part of their psyche disagrees, and they suffer from it).

* which I really don't think is how normal people understand it. E.g. I spend way more time on sites like this one instead of writing a report for uni I should have handed in yesterday, but few people would say I'm motivated to waste my life in front of the screen, because my conscious disagrees with what I'm doing.

It also seems to me that you have a misunderstanding of what OCD is. If you read the wikipedia entry above, you see that OCD doesn't actually have anything to do at all with this very focused and thorough interaction with a field of interest like the term's used in certain online interactions (i.e. "W3sp has gone OCD on defrag"). Probably it's used in this way because the disorder has "Obsessive" in the name, so when someone looks to be obsessed with something, people think "ah, that's OCD", even though the actual disorder is something quite different (and much worse imho). Just noticed this is even noted in the wiki entry.
If we want to stay with ascribing this behavior to psychological conditions, the kind of very fixated and narrow interest for one particular thing and the ignoring of other matters is more a trait of autism (one of many). This doesn't mean that someone who displays this trait does necessarily have to display any of the other traits of the disorder (and I also wouldn't use the term disorder, it's simply a way that minds can function).
We could also say that this "obsessive" behavior is a form of addiction, though it seems silly to say that you're addicted to cooking and supposedly you will probably stop being interested in cooking at some point and will stop, which I don't think is a thing that happens with "proper" addictions (whatever that means). Since you said you ought to be studying, maybe your focus with certain other things is also a form of escapism/procrastination (being online certainly is for me).

With this in mind, if we reframe your question to be about the difference between this narrow focus and "normal" motivation, it makes a whole lot more sense. But I don't know if there really is a meaningful difference at all, i.e. there's no point where the mechanisms behind "normal" motivation stops and some other mechanisms take over. People with this kind of behavior just have much stronger intrinsic motivation. On the flipside, and to get back to autism, this strong intrinsic motivation tends to be very interest driven, meaning they have trouble motivating themselves for things they don't care about (but should care about, like their studies), and extrinsic motivation (e.g. a reward of some kind) for something will never get them to display comparable focus.

Thunderstruck and duel.

Without going in to as much depth as most of the people here regarding OCD; Which is still very misunderstood because the 'signs' are likened to a few 'conditions' out there.

To break it down as simply as possible, we have these said habits to relieve anything from fear, anxiety, failure and many other things.

As humans, we don't like being made to feel bad, we hate failure, we hate not succeeding, depending on the things we want to achieve.

If it doesn't feel good, we generally won't do it, even if it's something temporary, like sex, alcohol, drugs. Well the list goes on.

There's always been a risk and reward situation when doing anything, however one thing people forget to do is tie emotion in to whatever it is they want to achieve.

Prime example;

"I want more money"

Well, why would you want more money? To buy more shit? -- It's clarity you need. We need to get clear on what it is that said thing will do. You need to think bigger, and really get emotional about said outcome.

Tap in to the emotional aspects of what it is you want to get better at and add a good reasoning behind it.

90% of it is all mindset, you need to reprogram your mind and the way you think about EVERYTHING. I can point you in the direction of a few books to read and help you understand it a little more without going all Sigmund Freud on you.

I might come across as a dick on this forum but I'm pretty well versed in this area of getting people to get shit done and better themselves. It's not all rainbows and unicorns, it's a little work that needs doing but it does pay off, as most things in life have been taught to use backwards and it's hard to break away from most things because it's seen as the norm, part of the ol' status quo.