Feeling anxious is enough to drive anyone to trying almost anything to take the symptoms away, and if you found that this action helped once, then you are likely to try it a second time. Even if it doesn't work as well the second time as it did the first, the thought occurs that perhaps it's worth trying again, just in case.
The fact that the anxious feeling returns, even though you are doing this action, and the realisation that doing this action is often irrational does not prevent you from doing it if you have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
To complicate matters, doing this ritual causes the person with OCD a lot of stress because it interferes with their social life, or their education or work.
The start of OCD is complex, and not the same for everyone. It seems likely to be genetic, so if a close family member has it, then you are more likely to also develop the disorder.
A second proposed trigger for OCD is a problem with serotonin because it is proposed that people who have OSD may not be able to react to serotonin properly, which causes anxiety.
People who have OCD often already have another anxiety disorder, and so it is possible that the problem occurs from the stress of having panic attacks for instance.
This may be linked into an abnormal stimulation of the fight or flight response. The fight or flight response enables a person to focus on the problem at hand. For instance if a snake is about to bite your ankle, then what your bank manager said this morning about your mortgage is totally irrelevant at the moment, and so it is blanked out.
In extreme cases, this ability of the fight or flight response can cause a physical reaction of 'tunnel vision', and perhaps in a similar way this intense focus can lead to what is perceived as obsessive behaviour in an attempt by the person to remain safe.
Most people who suffer from unpleasant symptoms of any kind will go to great lengths to stop the symptoms from occurring. For instance, if a person with hay fever finds that dusting their bedroom before going to sleep will allow them to have a clearer nose, then they are more likely to dust their room every week.
Because the increased mucus and swollen airways are not only linked to a reaction to dust mite particles, but also to hyperventilation that is fuelled by stress, after a while dusting the room once a week doesn't seem to be as effective as it originally was, and so the person begins to dust twice a week.
As the hyperventilation increases due to life's long-term stress, the blocked and running nose gets worse, and because the person mistakenly believes that it is caused by the dusty room, he or she begins to dust practically every day. And it may lead up to the point, where this person cannot sleep until every single item in the room has had its surface wiped clean, including every page of every book, every night. This takes up a lot of time, and can lead to the person not getting enough sleep, which leads to more stress...
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