Involves unwanted thoughts, images, urges, or doubts about causing harm to yourself or someone else. These thoughts can feel deeply disturbing and inconsistent with who you are, which may leave you wondering what they mean or whether you could somehow act on them.

You may avoid knives, driving, being alone with someone, or other situations that trigger these fears. Compulsions can also include checking whether someone is okay, reviewing your memories to make sure you didn’t cause harm, seeking reassurance, testing your reactions, or repeatedly analyzing whether you’re a safe person.

Persistent doubts and fears about a romantic relationship. You may find yourself repeatedly asking, “Do I really love my partner?” “Are they the right person for me?” “What if they don’t love me enough?” or “What if I’m overlooking a serious problem?”

You might closely monitor your feelings around your partner, compare your relationship with other relationships, repeatedly evaluate your partner’s qualities, seek reassurance, test the relationship, confess doubts, or replay interactions looking for evidence that something is wrong. Even moments of feeling disconnected, annoyed, or uncertain can seem as though they must mean something important.

Involves unwanted and deeply distressing thoughts, images, sensations, or doubts about being sexually attracted to children. These experiences can feel completely inconsistent with your values and sense of self, yet OCD may leave you questioning what they mean and searching for absolute certainty about who you are.

You may monitor your physical or emotional reactions around children, review past interactions, compare your responses, research online, seek reassurance, or repeatedly test yourself. You might also avoid children, family gatherings, public places, certain media, or caregiving responsibilities because you’re afraid of having an intrusive thought or noticing a bodily sensation.

Can create a powerful sense that something is uneven, incomplete, out of order, or simply doesn’t feel right. The discomfort may come with anxiety or fear, but sometimes it feels more like tension, irritation, or an internal sense that you can’t move on until things are corrected.

You may arrange and rearrange objects, repeat actions, rewrite words, touch something equally on both sides of your body, or redo a task until it feels complete. You might also need numbers, movements, sounds, or routines to follow a particular pattern.

Completing the ritual may bring temporary relief, but the “not right” feeling often returns. Over time, these patterns can make ordinary tasks take much longer and interfere with work, school, sleep, or daily routines.

Can create a strong sense that something feels incomplete, off, or wrong even when you can’t explain exactly why. The discomfort may feel like tension, irritation, uneasiness, or an inability to move forward until things feel complete.

You may repeat words, movements, or everyday tasks; reread or rewrite something; touch objects in a particular way; or start an activity over until it feels right. Sometimes the ritual has to happen a certain number of times or follow a specific sequence.

A form of OCD involving persistent fears about morality, religion, or being a “good” person. You may worry that you’ve sinned, offended God, violated an important belief, acted dishonestly, or caused harm by making the wrong moral choice.

In response, you might pray or confess repeatedly, seek reassurance from religious leaders or loved ones, review your intentions, avoid religious practices or morally complicated situations, or follow rules with extreme precision. Even after receiving reassurance or completing a ritual, the doubt may quickly return.

Scrupulosity can affect people from any religious or spiritual tradition, as well as people whose fears center on morality without being religious. The issue isn’t having deeply held beliefs or wanting to live according to your values it’s the exhausting pressure to achieve complete certainty that you haven’t done anything wrong.

Can make everyday objects, places, people, or sensations feel unsafe or unclean. Fears may involve germs, illness, bodily fluids, chemicals, toxins, or the possibility of spreading contamination to someone else. For some people, the fear is less about becoming physically ill and more about an overwhelming feeling of disgust or being emotionally “contaminated.”

You may wash your hands or shower repeatedly, clean belongings, change clothes, avoid touching certain objects, separate “clean” and “dirty” areas, or ask others to follow particular safety rules. You might also retrace your steps or seek reassurance to make sure you haven’t exposed yourself or someone else to danger.

Involves persistent, intrusive questions about life, death, identity, existence, or the nature of reality. You may become caught in questions such as, “What is the meaning of life?” “How do I know anything is real?” “What happens after death?” or “What if I never figure out who I truly am?”

These are questions many people wonder about from time to time. With existential OCD, however, the questions can feel urgent, frightening, and impossible to set aside. You may spend hours analyzing them, researching philosophy or science, checking whether the world feels real, seeking reassurance, or mentally reviewing possible explanations.

These efforts may provide a brief sense of clarity, but another doubt often appears and pulls you back into the search for an answer. Because many existential questions cannot be resolved with complete certainty, the search itself can become exhausting and interfere with your ability to feel present in your life.

Sexual orientation OCD involves persistent doubts and intrusive thoughts about sexual orientation that create anxiety and an urgent need for certainty. You may find yourself repeatedly asking, “What if I’m attracted to someone I don’t expect?” or “What if I’ve misunderstood my orientation?”

In response, you might analyze past relationships, monitor your physical reactions around different people, mentally test your attraction, compare your responses, research sexuality, avoid potential triggers, or seek reassurance from others. These strategies may briefly reduce anxiety, but the doubt usually returns.

Questioning or exploring your sexual orientation is not itself a symptom of OCD. The concern is the distressing cycle of intrusive doubt, compulsive checking, and the feeling that you must reach absolute certainty.

Sometimes called sensorimotor OCD, involves becoming intensely focused on bodily sensations or automatic processes that most people notice only occasionally. This may include breathing, swallowing, blinking, your heartbeat, the position of your tongue, eye contact, or other sensations.

Once your attention becomes fixed on a sensation, you may worry that you’ll never stop noticing it, that you’ll have to control it consciously, or that it will prevent you from concentrating, sleeping, or feeling normal again.

You might repeatedly check whether you’re still aware of the sensation, try to control or suppress it, distract yourself, research the experience, or seek reassurance that your attention will eventually shift. Unfortunately, trying hard not to notice something often makes it even more difficult to ignore.

Can develop during pregnancy or after a baby is born. It involves unwanted and distressing thoughts, images, urges, or doubts about something terrible happening to the baby or about accidentally or intentionally causing harm.

You may repeatedly check whether the baby is breathing, research health and safety risks, seek reassurance, or follow increasingly rigid routines to prevent something bad from happening. You might also avoid holding, bathing, feeding, or being alone with the baby because you’re frightened by the thoughts that arise.

These intrusive thoughts can feel especially upsetting because they often target what matters most to you. Having an unwanted thought is not the same as wanting it to happen or acting on it but OCD can make that distinction feel difficult to trust.