The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

Since this is Hacker News, I'm surprised that you haven't come up with some more elaborate system, e.g., properly locking the door closes a circuit, and you can check the status of the circuit remotely.

You'd expect this would transfer to the "well, are you sure you counted", but I'm never actually anxious about that. I think it works similarly to mnemonics, where the simple act of making a mnemonic for something makes it memorable, and it doesn't matter if it's a good mnemonic or not. In this case, I have "proof" I have done the things that make me anxious, and it doesn't matter if it's "good" proof or not, I just don't feel the anxiety.

Because I stick to the 'mental rules' of only rubbing it off once the task is completed, if I'm uncertain if I've done the thing / task I can look down to my hand to see if that mark is still there or not. If it is - U-Turn time!

It Works pretty well (as always, mileage may vary) even for multiple things if needed although the random letters/marks on the back of your hand can make people curious but if it does I simply say - It's a list of stuff I need to do.

Me, being unused to how their alarm worked, was unsure if I set it.

I set the alarm, locked the door, hear it beep, waited outside until it stopped beeping, then I thought to myself "was the alarm really on?". I unlocked the door, opened it, setting off the alarm, which I turned off with my code.

Goto 10

This repeated a few times until some larger alarm somewhere else in the house started blaring loudly that could probably be heard across the neighborhood. So I disabled it one more time, and just left it well enough alone since I couldn't get out of the loop without some other way of verifying things.

Nowadays, maybe an electronic lock would be an easier solution, though I'm not sure that would satisfy the urge to be sure it was locked, would he trust it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

I think it works by recruiting more of your body & brain to the task of attending to something.

Maybe the anxious could video themselves doing it, and watch it back later.

One of my roommates in college was carrying in groceries, put his keys down on the counter, and went out to get a second load. I was reading a book, passed the door, locked it, and walked upstairs, completely oblivious, stranding my roommate outside.

They referred to this as "getting Lars'ed out" from then on.

But what seems to have cured me for good is having children. I'm just waaaay too tired now to even consider going back to check the door. Screw it, what am I gonna do? Oh dear, baby #1 was sick on me again. Hey, baby #2, don't run off without me! Baby #1, put that hat back on again. No more snacks until it's back on. Baby #2, what did I say about running off? What is it I was worrying about? Can't remember. Goto 1

I will say that after going through CBT and becoming an amature expert on OCD as a sufferer, a therapist would argue that this behavior of checking your photo is a form of compulsion. It works for dam sure but you're never really going to be able to go to sleep without some form of checking when the obsessive thoughts start.

Anyone who has gone through treatment knows the ultimate goal is to weaken the reaction of the obsessive thoughts which is what exposure therapy is all about.

Just a quick story, my laddering technique for achieving peace was to eventually get to a comfort level where I can sleep with the door wide open all night. Well, I didn't get that far but I did sleep with all my doors unlocked for a couple nights.

Lastly, I can safely say that I now check all my doors once these days with the exception when I'm stressed at work. I'll check them once before going to bed and if I brush my teeth between checking the door and actually walking to bed, I might check them once more. But this is a seldom occurrence these days.

I still remember one time when I was staying at a friends place in a different city, I took his key to get back early and the key broke in the lock so he came back to me trying to get the bit of key out of the door so someone else could open it. We were all very drunk. It was quite traumatic!

You've illuminated the key point I think. I struggled with this as well, and finally just forced myself to abandon the door, and struggle with the feelings. If you can do it ONCE, it gets easier from there. I admit I was a light case compared to the hair dryer, but the more times you can push through the compulsion -- with the aid of whatever tricks you can come up with -- the easier it gets.

This may overstate the point a little bit. But there's a kernel of truth here: if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g. this is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD include: "There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with or reduce the quality of social, academic, or occupational functioning."

Because ADHD is a real situation for some people, and for others it's a way to legally take class-B stimulants.

Yes, people really do try their friends' ADHD medication, enjoy it, and then shop around doctors to find someone who will prescribe it. It's called "drug seeking," and doctors do flag patients who do it.

This, BTW, is what happens with medical marijuana. There are people who really need it, there are people who think they need it, and then there are people who who tell everyone but their doctor that it's recreational.

IANAP, but that sounds correct to me. I recall the DSM requiring negative impact on one's lifestyle as one of the criteria for diagnosis of any mental disorder. And even if I'm misremembering that, that's what psychiatrists look for in practice. They not only query what symptoms you're feeling, but also the impact they have on your day to day life.

Which makes total sense. Treatment of any disorder, especially mental ones, carries a (sometimes significant) risk. It would be unethical to subject someone to that risk for no possible benefit.

Those same doctors are probably perfectly fine with handing out methadone prescriptions to addicts.

You can't say "ADHD is this" and point at a definitive cause, tis just a bag of related symptoms that is geared more towards consistent diagnoses (i.e. you go to five different doctors and they all diagnose the same thing) rather than attachment to a common underlying cause or consistent treatment plan and success phase.

This isn't to say psychology is useless, many people find great help in it... but when it comes down to it, it is scientists (who as a whole have some of the biggest problems in being good at being scientists) trying to describe malfunctions of the highest abstraction on the most complicated class of things known to exist... and just scratching the surface.

The last D is for Disorder... it's a value judgment and the question does need to be asked: if something isn't causing significant problems, is it a disorder? The answer isn't clear cut and people are going to draw the line in the wide grey area in different places.

The solution must be neuroscience continuing to advance to higher levels and replacing the vagueries of psychology with justifiable cause and effect explanations. It is advancing but still a far way off.

There's a law that governs the treatment of mental illness and basically, it's not against the law to be mentally ill, and as long as you're a not "a danger to self or others" they will have to leave you alone, even if you clearly need help.

This is particularly heartbreaking for many people with some form psychosis, because anosognosia is frequently correlated with it. This is basically an inability to have insight into your own mental illness (sort of like a powerful form of denial).

So there are lots of mentally ill people in california, and they usually end up homeless, or eventually in jail.

one can speculate why addiction hasn't been selected out - may be because it probably provides significant advantage when channeled right. Some achievements/mastery/etc. require tremendous focus and huge amount of persistent work which probably may be not doable on rational motivation alone, without the primal dopamine [over]drive.

"Substance use disorder (SUD) is complex a condition in which there is uncontrolled use of a substance despite harmful consequence."

Source: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/addiction/what-...

Most organizations that deal with addiction now operate using a similar definition.

I've been listening to the self-esteem meditations on headspace and this is the same thing that they are recommending. I am amazed at how effective it has been.

I think the world is probably split into pro- and anti-hair dryerism, both among people who do and don't have OCD.

>First, giving into compulsions just legitimizes them and reinforces the patterns that are central to OCD and can ultimately make things worse.

Of course, but that's the whole crux of this story: "She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped." It's paved over for conciseness, but I think it's implied that what you said is definitely not news to the patient.

Of course the first, second, third, and fifteenth thing you should and must try is what you say. I'm sure Scott would agree. This was a Hail Mary when every attempt to do that so far failed.

To give another example: I think ECT is terrible. But if nothing else has remotely helped someone with severe depression over a very long period of time and they hate every waking moment and are close to suicide? Throw that brain in a Tesla coil, I say. Another facet of hair dryerism would be stances on body identity integrity disorder. I won't write at length, but I think anyone can guess my position on it.

>Secondly, OCD has a habit of changing how it manifests.

Yes, this was my first thought, but I think that's also part of this parable, too. It likely will manifest in other ways for the patient, but this is a simple hack that actually helped resolve one immediate issue that was causing her a lot of difficulties at that time.

Some of the other issues will probably cause less severe of a life impact. There's a decent chance some won't, since it could be something thing like an oven, but the point is that this was one method to immediately address one pressing problem that was heavily affecting her life. Obviously you wouldn't just say "okay, you're fine now" and tell her to never come back; this would just be a stopgap while the patient is further treated.

On the topic of OCD, one thing that surprisingly helped me a lot and continues to help me came from what I believe was a random reddit or perhaps HN comment I happened to stumble across a few years ago. It was a short sentence from someone quoting their psychiatrist - essentially a suggestion of a different way of mentally framing things. It actually was "one weird trick" that really did immediately work in my case.

I think it was the precise phrasing of it that helped me, so I don't want to try to roughly paraphrase it from memory, but it definitely made it clear that while OCD is certainly a neurological problem, psychological techniques can help guide your neurology, like the proverbial elephant rider prodding the elephant a bit in one direction or another. Hopefully something like that, or perhaps something entirely different, will help this patient so they don't need to take their hairdryer with them anymore.

[NOTE: This thought got me going on a random train of thought below, not really directed at the person or comment I'm replying to above. Sorry for the slight tangent...]

I've recently started taking on a unique viewpoint of my own psychology. It's more of an interesting way to think of one's mind than an actual theory on the mechanisms of the brain. But basically I started thinking of my mind in terms of the classic conscious/subconscious split, but thinking of the subconscious as less like a ... primitive/instinctive part of myself and more like a separate system with its own thoughts and desires. Kind of like how we imagine the body to be conceptually a separate entity from our minds. Though they're quite intertwined, its easy to imagine that we could transplant our mind into a different body and still be ourselves. I imagine that I could transplant my consciousness into a different brain and still be _me_, but with a different subconscious. That sounds strange, because we're so used to the idea of the subconscious being a part of our us, but hopefully it makes more sense momentarily.

The point of viewing the subconscious like this is then one can say that, like the body, if you don't take care of your subconscious's needs and desires, if you don't give it space to be heard, it will lash out. Trying to repress one's emotions, anxieties, OCDness, etc, you're making your subconscious unhealthy in the same way that you can make your body unhealthy by not eating healthy, not working out, or ignoring pain. Emotions are the way our subconscious tells us its in pain or in need.

More importantly, this allows a subjective _detachment_ from one's emotions and anxieties. To view them objectively. Whereas it's really easy to feel anxious and then believe that that anxiety is _part_ of yourself. That you, yourself, are anxious. But viewing the subconscious as a separate system that must be managed like the body allows one to feel anxiety and acknowledge that it isn't _you_, yourself, that are anxious. It's your brain that's anxious. And it's a signal that you need to do X, Y, and Z to take care of your brain. Much like one would rest when your body is telling you it's hurt.

Again, this is more of a way of viewing the brain, rather than a psychological theory with any basis in reality. It's definitely very derivative of archaic psychology theories like Freud's theories and bicameralism. But I find it helpful none the less. The most important component, and something I think a lot of people with mental disorders have trouble grasping, is that this idea that one's identity is not tied to their disorder. I'm lucky in that I've experienced what my brain is like without anxiety and found out that I'm still the exact same person, just minus anxiety. I know prior to that experience I probably would have said that _I'm_ an anxious person, as if it were some fundamental part of my personality. So that experience has better enabled me to make clearer divisions between self and the flaws of the substrate my conscious mind is running on.

N.B. I'm just sharing a (hopefully) interesting viewpoint. This isn't "do this one weird trick and you won't have a mental disorder anymore!" kind of thing. Anyone who suspects a mental disorder, no matter how small, should seek guidance from a medical professional. Seriously. There's no shame in any of it, and treatments are better today than they've ever been. My little pet theory above is, again, just something I found interesting in the way I view my own psychology.

If the can burning is in a garage, and you're able to move it to the middle of the asphalt (non-flammable) driveway, you still haven't put out the fire, but you've solved one half of the problem and given yourself a lot more time to think and find something that helps.

Driving back home 10 times per day, means that she might lose her job, become homeless and not be able to afford proper care... having a hair dryer in her purse (or wherever), means she can live a pretty much normal life, while slowly working on her problems (eg. start with leaving the hairdryer at the psychs receptionist, and start from there).

It's so interesting how many weird states our brains can get into like that.

Congrats on kicking the habit though!

It's even better when the sorted letters turn out to make any sort of repetitive pattern.

And I count stairs, unless I specifically override the internal voice and say "1", "1", "1", "1,".... to myself.

I really appreciate your disclosure of something so intimate, because it brings a sense of wonder into my world, and it reminds me we never really know what is going on in the minds of our friends (let alone my own mind!). Thank you.

“Then one day it just went away completely. It's a strange thing to try and explain it to someone.”

Fixed that in my mind as usual.

I have a compulsive problem that developed due to an anxious situation I was in. I was taking a nap on the couch, I smelled burning and assumed it was someone in my neighborhood grilling, which was common. I woke up to an apartment filled with smoke, my place was on fire. It was small, I was able to get out the front door (which is where the fire was) and call the fire department, they came and put it out, minimal damage, no loss of life. But still, since then, if I smelled wood burning, even though I know it's probably someone grilling or with a fire in the fireplace I go outside and look around just to be sure. It is irrational and I know while I'm doing it. What helped me was living in a place where some neighbor or other burns wood almost daily. I still get a tinge of "but what if that's not what it is this time" every time I smell it, but I don't compulsively check anymore.

Also for a lot of people these mental illnesses cannot be cured, only managed. I'd think finding simple solutions to reduce compulsive anxiety are more sustainable than long term drug use.

The first goals in DBT therapy are to stop behaviors that may interfere with therapy or kill the patient. Seems like a good approach to me.

On a related note, I knew someone who had some very self-destructive ways of dealing with her stressful life and associated problems. She held down a good professional job at <big company> and most people didn't know about her issues. She found a psychologist that she liked (and I didn't) and after somewhere between 1 and 2 years she ended up dead. You've got to stop self-destructive life-interfering problems any way you can.

When a person might be bleeding to death, the first step is to stop the bleeding even if by tourniquet. You can do surgery to fix things later, but not if the patient is dead. Priorities are a thing.

I would have more sympathy with the other doctors if they actually had a solution for OCD but they don’t. So somebody who has no fix for the problem is criticizing someone who fixes a part of the problem.

The article’s thesis, though, is about how humans get stuck categorizing things, in ways that get canonized, and then have a hard time understanding that there are different legitimate ways to categorize. Transgender was just one example, the Hair Dryer incident another, and among them the whale-fish, and Israel vs Palestine. I love the way he framed transgender rights, and the Napoleon example is hilarious, but I wouldn’t say the story is primarily about trans rights rather than psychologist knowledge. If anything, it’s specifically showing some of the reasons why DSM 5 is so dramatically different from DSM 4, right?

Haven't worried since

Wouldn't necessarily work for OCD, as the obsession can easily morph into "Did the sensor fail?" I can see it being helpful though.

I do have a limit, at least, after which I'll go for the quick fix and then try to follow up with a broader investigation. Depends on how severe the issue is, too.

I have a similar apocryphal story that I use in design. I write about it here[1].

> For many years, I have heard stories about some architect – they never say who – that once designed an office park/university campus/government center, etc., and deliberately did not add any paved walkways. Instead, it is said he had the buildings completely surrounded by lawns. After a year, he came back, and paved the areas of these lawns worn thin by people taking the most effective routes around the buildings. He did this because he decided at the start of the project, he’d never be able to account for human nature, and it was his goal to serve the folks using the campus as best as he could. The users of his system would let him know, organically, how to “tune” it so it can best serve them.

Also, anyone that is familiar with the Granny Weatherwax character, by Sir Terry Pratchett, may remember that she practiced what was termed "Headology." That was sort of "practical" psychology, and it involved things like giving headless ghosts pumpkins, so they would stop moaning (actually, it was another character that did that -from I Shall Wear Midnight[2], but it was definitely Granny's "Headology").

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

[2] https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=6...

This may also be why the manager chastised the person fixing this. Such a drastic improvement can completely undermine any efforts to make even bigger fixes, as well as make the manager look foolish that they couldn’t make these improvements already.

I tend to believe the perfect is the enemy of good, but I’ve certainly worked in some orgs where I might take an improvement like this to the main champion of the problem first and ask if it’s a useful solution. I might even be willing to shelf the solution if I can be convinced it’s not in the long term best interest of the org. If I’m not, though, I’d likely become a champion of this short term pain relief knowing that things may not ever have much chance to get much better.

Pictures is a cheaper way of accomplishing that, not a bad idea.

"Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."

Sure enough, a month into the trip and my downstairs neighbor has his bathroom ceiling fall in due to a leaky drain pipe in my shower. I had photo proof that the water wasn't on or leaking and the building's insurance policy ended up renovating both of our bathrooms. Came back to a brand new rainfall shower and granite countertops.

Using good judgment to figure out when a hard RCA is necessary and when it's not is key to making forward progress without constantly shooting yourself (or your teammates) in the foot.

If people can't go swimming because they are afraid of drowning, you don't give them medication and then throw them out in the deep end. Instead you let them take as small steps into water as possible in a way where they feel in control all the time.

If I don't do that, I might lose uptime. This gives me head room.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex