Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today is an Ask Me Anything episode or AMA.

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And now without further ado, I will answer your questions and as always, I will strive to be as thorough as possible as clear as possible and as concise as possible.

Our first question is about abstaining from thoughts and in answering this question, we're going to skirt right up against a topic that I've covered before on the podcast, which is obsessive compulsive disorder, which is a very serious disorder.

I mean, you can have a range of severity, but people with true OCD suffer a lot from obsessions. These are intrusive thoughts and compulsions, which are the behaviors typically associated with those thoughts.

I think it's really important that we define OCD really clearly so that we can make sure that we're talking about intrusive thoughts and the desire to abstain from thoughts versus OCD and where there might be some overlap there.

The functional definition of OCD that really pertains to the disorder obsessive compulsive disorder OCD as opposed to, you know, we call people neurotic or we say you have OCD or I'm so OCD about this or OCD about that.

That's become kind of common use of the acronym OCD, but true OCD is a situation in which the engaging in a particular compulsive behavior does not serve to reduce

the intensity or the frequency of the obsessions. In fact, it makes it worse. Okay, so the typical thing that we hear these days is, oh, you're so OCD or he's so OCD or she's so OCD or I'm so OCD.

Now, if someone is OCD in that sense, okay, so not the clinical disorder, but OCD in the sense that, you know, they're really clean. They're really fastidious. They need everything perfect.

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