I wash my hands compulsively

What this looks like

You wash your hands by rules: a specific length, a specific number of repetitions, sometimes a specific order. If you break the rules, the wash doesn’t count and you start again. The skin between your fingers is breaking open. The lotion you apply gets stripped by the next wash.

You’re washing because washing quiets the thought for a few minutes. That’s why the thought keeps coming back.

What you’ve already tried

• Setting a daily wash limit
• Switching to gentler soap
• Wearing gloves to “minimize contact”
• Hand sanitizer instead of washing (and now using more sanitizer than soap)
• A timer to keep each wash short
• Therapy that asked you to delay the wash
• An SSRI that took the edge off

You’re still washing.

What kind of OCD do you have?

Why washing makes the thought worse

You very likely picked up the contamination thought during a stretch in your life when you needed something to control. You may have come out of a household where you couldn’t control much else and your body became one of the few things you could keep clean. You may have started washing during a period when you were genuinely sick or genuinely scared, and the system never recovered the resting baseline. You may have inherited the pattern from a parent who modeled it, and built on what you absorbed.

Each wash delivers brief relief from the thought. You teach your mind that washing is the correct response. The next thought arrives because you’ve trained the response to be reliable. The more reliably you respond, the more often the thought comes.

If your fear is specifically about contamination from objects or places, see I’m afraid I’m contaminated .

You’re using the washing to make the thought go away. The washing is what trains the next thought to come.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy works the second the thought arrives at the sink. You don’t fight the thought and you don’t perform the wash. You let the discomfort sit for the time it takes to crest, with assignments structured so you can do this without flooding. The thought arrives less reliably because the response has stopped being reliable.

Your hands get washed when they’re dirty. The skin between your fingers gets to close.