Hi mate, sorry to hear you’re going through this. I have been on my journey of overcoming OCD for over a year now – not saying you have it, but from the knowledge I have learned, I believe this will still help you. A lot of podcasts I’ve listened to all say that thoughts like these tend to happen to people who care a lot about someone or something (i.e. you love your girlfriend). The thing that stuck with me from a particular podcast was “You are human, let yourself be a human.” Meaning, thoughts and feelings will pop up in your mind – they are normal, and the panic feeling is only just your amygdala firing and saying “HEY you gotta pay attention to this right NOW!!”. The best advice I could give is that when you have these thoughts (which are normal), to say to yourself “Okay I recognise this thought has come into my mind, it can stay there as long as it likes, but it doesn’t mean I believe it, and you know what? Maybe the thought is true, maybe it isn’t. And I can handle the uncertainty of not being 100% sure.” And if you want to analyse the thought, set an aim for yourself that you will only analyse it once the panic is over. This is due to when your amygdala fires, it switches off your ability to think clearly, which is why when you’re going through this, you are unable to talk yourself in a calm and rational way – but the good news is that it does run its course and calm down by itself, and this gets quicker and quicker if you practice allowing the thought and the feelings to just sit there without entertaining them.

I understand what you are going through and it’s a horrible thing indeed! It’s also horrible to think that you have to learn to ‘accept’ these thoughts, but accepting them doesn’t mean you agree with them, it means you are training your brain to be happy with the uncertainty of “did I like them by wanting to impress them or not? Maybe, maybe not.”

I know this might be overwhelming, and it does take time – I’m definitely still learning this, but I hope it will be of help to you and I wish you well!

God bless,
Arnz