The Science & Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are talking about obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD we are also going to talk about obsessive compulsive personality disorder which as you will soon learn is distinct from obsessive compulsive disorder in fact many people that refer to themselves are others as obsessive or compulsive or quote unquote having OCD or OCD about this or OCD about that do not have clinically diagnosable OCD rather many people have obsessive compulsive personality disorder however there are many people in the world that have actual OCD and for those people there is a tremendous amount of suffering in fact OCD turns out to be number seven on the list of most debilitating illnesses not just psychiatric illnesses but of all illnesses which is remarkable and somewhat frightening the good news is thanks to the fields of Psychiatry psychology and Science in general there are now excellent treatments for OCD and we're going to talk about those treatments today those treatments range from behavioral therapies to drug therapies and brain stimulation and even some of the more holistic or natural therapies as you'll soon learn for certain people they may want to focus more on the behavioral therapies whereas for others more on the drug based therapies and so on and so forth one extremely interesting and important thing I learned from this episode is that the particular sequence that behavioral Andor drug Andor holistic therapies are applied is extremely important in fact the outcomes of studies often depend on whether or not people start on drug treatment and then follow with cognitive behavioral treatment or vice versa we're going to go into all those details and how they relate to different types of OCD because it turns out there are indeed different types of obsessions and compulsions and the age of onset for OCD and so on and so forth what I can assure you is by the end of this episode you'll have a much greater understanding of what OCD is and what it isn't and what obsessive compulsive personality disorder is and what it is not and you'll have a rich array of different therapy options to explore in yourself or in others that are suffering from OCD and if neither you or others that you know suffer from OCD or obsessive compulsive personality disorder the information covered in today's episode will also provide insight into how the brain and nervous system translate thought into action generally and also you're going to learn a lot about goal directed Behavior generally my hope is that by the end of the episode you will both understand a lot about this disease state that we call OCD you will have access to information that will allow you to direct treatments to yourself or others in better ways and that you will gain greater insight into how you 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that as well you can cover any mattress with it you can start sleeping as cool as 55° Fahrenheit or as warm as 110° Fahrenheit and that range is available to you simply because eight sleep understands that people have a tremendous range in natural body temperatures and sleeping environments if you want to try eight sleep you can go to 8sleep.com huberman and check out their propod cover and save $150 at checkout eight sleep currently ships within the USA Canada and in the United Kingdom again that's 8sleep.com huberman to save $150 at checkout let's talk about OCD or obsessive compulsive disorder first of all as the name suggests OCD includes thoughts or obsessions and compulsions which are actions the obsessions and the compulsions are often linked in fact most of the time the obsessions and the compulsions are linked such that the compulsion the behavior is designed to relieve the obsession however one of the Hallmark themes of obsessive compulsive disorder is that the obsessions are intrusive people don't want to have them they don't enjoy having them they just seem to pop into people's minds and they seem to pop into their mind recurrently and the compulsions unlike other sorts of behaviors provide brief relief to the obsession but then very quickly reinforce or strengthen the obsession this is a very key theme to realize about obsessive compulsive disorder so I'm just going to repeat it again these two features first the fact that the obsessions are intrusive and recurrent as well as the fact that the compulsions the behaviors provide if anything only brief relief for the obsessions but in most cases simply serve to make the obsession stronger are the Hallmark features of obsessive compulsive disorder it turns out to be very important to keep these in mind as we go forward not just because they define obsessive compulsive disorder but they also Define the sorts of treatments that will and will not work for obsessive compulsive disorder and then once you understand a little bit about the neural circuitry underlying obsessive compulsive disorder which we'll talk about in a few moments then you will clearly understand why being a quote unquote obssessive person or having obsessive compulsive personality is not the same as OCD in fact we can leap ahead a little bit and compare and contrast OCD with obsessive compulsive personality disorder along one very particular set of features again I'll go into this in more detail later but it's fair to say that OCD is characterized by these recurrent and intrusive obsessions and as I mentioned before or the fact that those obsessions get stronger as a function of people performing certain behaviors so unlike an itch that you feel and then you scratch it and it feels better OCD is more like an itch that you feel you scratch it and the itch intensifies that Contour or that pattern of behaviors and thoughts interacting is very different than obsessive compulsive personality disorder which mainly involves a sense of delayed gratification that people want and somewhat enjoy because it allows them to function better or more in line with how they would like to show up in the world so again OCD has mainly to do with obsessions that are intrusive and recurrent whereas obsessive compulsive personality disorder does not have that intrusive feature to it people do not mind or in fact often invite or like the particular patterns of thought that lead them to be compulsive along certain Dimensions so leaving aside obsessive compulsive personality disorder for the moment let's focus a bit more on OCD and Define how it tends to show up in the world first of all OCD is Extreme L common in fact current estimates are that anywhere from 2.5% to as high as three or even 4% of people suffer from True OCD that is an astonishingly High number now the reason the range is so big 2.5% all the way up to three or maybe even 4% is that a lot of the features of OCD go unnoticed both in the clinician's office and simply because people don't report it and don't talk about it in fact it is possible to have recurrent and intrusive obsessions and not engage in the sorts of behaviors that would ever allow people to notice that somebody has OCD that can be because some of the intrusive thoughts don't actually lead to overt behaviors like handwashing or checking that other people would notice it can also be because people learn to disguise or hide their obsessions and their compulsions out of shame or fear of looking strange or whatever it might be such that they have these exessive and intrusive thoughts and they do little micro behaviors like they might tap their fingers on their thigh as a way to avoid at least in their own mind something catastrophic happening that might seem crazy to you it might seem bizarre but this is the sort of thing that operates in a lot of people and I really want to emphasize this because the clinical literature that are out there really point to the fact that many people have OCD full-blown OCD and never report it because of the kind of Shame and hiding associated with it another thing to point out is that OCD is extremely debilitating I mentioned this a few minutes ago but OCD is currently listed as number seven in terms of the most debilitating illnesses not just mental illnesses or disorders but all types of illnesses including things like asthma and cancer Etc so you can imagine with that standing at number seven that it is both extremely common and extremely debilitating and as a consequence it's now real realized that many hours days weeks months or even years of work performance or showing up at work of relational interactions really suffer as a consequence of people having OCD so this is a vital problem that the scientific and psychiatric and psychological communities understand and it's one of the reasons that I'm doing this podcast and of course I received a ton of interest in OCD because of this incredibly High incidence of OCD and how debilitating it is we could go really deep into why it's so debilitating I don't want to spend too much time on that because I think most of that is pretty obvious but some of it is not for instance one of the things that makes OCD so debilitating is of course the shame that we talked about before but it's also the fact that when people are focusing on their obsessions and their compulsions they're not able to focus on other things that's simply the way that the brain works we're not able to focus on too many things at once the other thing is that OCD takes a lot of time out of people's lives with recurrent intrusive thoughts happening at very high frequency or even moderate frequency people are spending a lot of time thinking about this stuff and they're thinking about the behaviors they need to engage in and then engaging in the behaviors which as I mentioned before just serve to strengthen the compulsions and so they're not actually doing the other things that make us functional human beings like commuting to work or doing homework or doing work or listening when people are talking or interacting or sports or working out all the things that make for a rich quality life are taken over by OCD in many cases so while that might be obvious to some I'm not sure that it's obvious to every everybody just how much time OCD can occupy another thing you'll soon learn is that sadly a lot of the obsessions and compulsions in OCD often relate to Taboo topics and that's because the general categories of OCD fall into three different bins checking obsessions and compulsions repetition obsessions and compulsions and Order obsessions and compulsions the checking ones are somewhat obvious checking the stove or checking the locks which I think we all tend to do I'm somebody typically I'll heading off to the car to you know commute to work and I'll think I lock the front door and I'll go back once but I won't go back twice or 50 times people with OCD will often go back 20 or 30 times before they'll actually allow themselves to drive off and then it's a real challenge for them to continue to drive off and discard with the idea that they didn't check the stove or they didn't check the locks or they didn't check something else critical repetition obsessions and compulsions obviously can dovetail with the the checking ones but those tend to be things like counting off of a certain number of numbers like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7654 3 21 people perform that repeatedly repeatedly repeatedly or feel that they have to I remember years ago watching a documentary about the band The Ramones right most people heard of The Ramones right jeans t-shirts aviator glasses everyone had to change their last name to Ramone they weren't actually all related to one another by the way you had to change your last name to Ramon The Ramones had one band member who was admittedly and known to others as having o CD and during that documentary which I forget the name I think it was called can't remember anyway can't remember uh hippocampo laps there but in this documentary the band members describe Joey raone as leaving hotels walking down the stairs to the parking lot but then having to walk up and down them seven or eight times and sometimes getting out of the van again and walking up down them seven or eight times and it always had to be a certain number of times given a certain number of stairs this appears quote unquote crazy but of course we don't want to think of this as crazy this is somebody who very likely had full-blown OCD now that particular example believe it or not is not all that uncommon it just so happens that that example entailed certain compulsions and behaviors that were overt and that other people could see and you can imagine how that would prevent somebody from moving about their daily life easily a lot of people as I mentioned before have obsessions and compulsions that they hide and they do these little micro behaviors or they'll just count off in their head as opposed to generating some sort of walking up and down stairs or tapping or things of that sort so we have checking we have repetition and then there's order order often times is thought of as putting cleanliness or making sure everything is aligned and perfect and orderly and often times that is the case but there are other forms of order that people with OCD can focus on in a obsessive and compulsive way things like incompleteness the idea that one can't walk away from something or stop doing something because something's not right or complete in that picture it could be the way the table is set it could be the way that something's written on a page it could be an email again now we're still talking about OCD the disorder we're not talking about obsessive compulsive personality disorder I'm aware of well I'll just be direct several colleagues of mine it's just remarkable the order in their emails every email is perfect punctuated perfect grammar perfect everything spaced perfect are do they have OCD well they might they might not how would I know uh unless they disclose that to me but they might have obsessive compulsive personality disorder or they just might be able to generate a lot of order and they have a lot of discipline around the way they write and the way they present any communication with anybody at all so if somebody has a OCD that's in the domain of order it could be incompleteness and the constant feeling of something not being completed and a need to complete it it can also be in terms of symmetry that everything be aligned and symmetric in some way that could be uh seen perhaps in young kids this is one example that I read in the literature of children that need to arrange their stuffed animals in exact same order every day and in a particular order uh to the point where if you were to move the little stuffed frog over next to the stuffed rabbit that the child would have a an anxiety reaction to that and feel literally compelled driven to fix that maybe even multiple times over and over again we'll talk about OCD and children versus adults and a little bit and then the other aspect of order which is a little bit less than intuitive is this notion of disgust this idea that something is contaminated so we often think about OCD and handwashing behavior in response to people feeling that something is contaminated a space a towel Etc or even simply somebody else's hand and so they're unwilling to shake somebody's hand you can imagine how these different bins of obsessions and compulsions checking repetition and order could be extremely debilitating depending on how severe they are and how many different domains of life they show up in because often times in movies and even the way I'm describing it now it sounds as if okay well somebody has to check the locks but they don't have to also check the stove or somebody has the need to count a seven back and forth up to seven and down to seven seven times seven times a day or something of that sort or they need symmetry in very specific domains of life but it turns out that this recurrent and intrusive aspect of obsessions leads people with OCD to have checking repetition Andor order compulsions everywhere so whether or not somebody is at work or in school or trying to engage in sport or trying to engage in relationship or just something simple like walking down the street the obsessions are so intrusive that they show up and they compel people to do things in that domain independent of whether or not they happen to be in one location or another in other words the thought patterns and the behaviors take over the environment as opposed to the Environ enironment driving the thought patterns and behaviors so it therefore becomes impossible to ever find a room that's clean enough to find a bed that's made well enough to find anything that's done well enough to remove the obsession and I know I've said it multiple times now but I'm going to say it many times throughout this episode in a somewhat obsessive but I believe Justified way that every time that one engages in the compulsion related to the obsession the obsession simply becomes stronger so you can imagine what a what a powerful and debilitating Loop that really is so let's drill a little bit deeper into how the obsessions and compulsions relate to one another if we were to draw a line between the obsessions and the compulsions that line could be described as anxiety now we need to Define what anxiety is and to be quite honest most of psychology and science can't agree on exactly what anxiety is typically the way we think about fear is that it's a heightened state of autonomic Aral so increase heart rate increase breathing sweating Etc in response to an immediate and present threat or perceived threat whereas anxiety generally speaking in the scientific literature relates to the same sorts of thought patterns and somatic bodily responses heart rate breathing Etc but without a clear and present danger being in the environment or right there so that's the way that we're going to talk about anxiety now and anxiety is really what binds the obsessions and compulsion such that someone will have an intrusive thought so for instance someone will have the thought that if they turn left on any street that something bad will happen Okay that's an obsession it's actually not all that uncommon now how bad and what the specificity of that bad thing really is will vary some people will think if I turn left something generally bad will happen it just makes me feel anxious so they always insist on going right whereas other people will think if I turn left so and so will die or I will die or something terrible will happen I'll get a disease or someone else will get a disease or I'll be cursing myself or somebody else in some very specific way this is unfortunately quite common in people with OCD so they have this feeling and the feeling can be generally or specifically related to a particular outcome but beneath that is a feeling of anxiety a quickening of the heartbeat a quickening of breathing a narrowing of one's visual Focus I've talked about this before on another podcast the master stress and other podcasts but if you haven't heard those let me just briefly describe that when we are in a state of increased so-called autonomic arousal alertness stress Etc our visual field literally Narrows the aperture of our visual field gets smaller and that's because of the relationship between the autonomic nervous system and your visual system so you start seeing the world through sort of soda straw view or through binocular like view as opposed to seeing the big picture why is that important well it literally sharpens and narrows your focused toward the very thing that the obsessions and the compulsions are focused on so the person walking down the street who sees the opportunity to go left or right will only see the bad decision their visual field Narrows very tightly along that possibility of taking a left turn and I know as I describe this seems totally irrational but I want to emphasize that the person with OCD knows it's irrational they might feel crazy because they're having these thoughts but they know it makes no sense whatsoever that left somehow would be different than right in terms of outcomes in this particular case and yet it feels as if it would in fact in some cases it feels as if they went left they would have a full-blown panic attack so the idea here is that the obsessions and compulsions are bound by anxiety but then by taking a right-hand turn again in this one particular example by taking a right-and turn there's a very brief I should mention very brief relief of that anxiety at the time of the decision to go right not left and there's an additional drop in anxiety while one takes the right hand turn as opposed to the leftand turn and then as I alluded to before there's a reinforcement of the compulsion in other words by going right it doesn't create a situation in the brain and psychology of the person that oh you know what I'm not anxious anymore left would have probably been okay it reinforces the idea that right made me feel better or turning right made me feel better and going left would have been that much worse again it reinforces the obsession even further and again we could swap out right turns and left turns with something like handwashing the feeling that something is contaminated and the need to wash one's hands even though one already washed their hands 20 30 50 times prior we're actually going to go back to that example a little bit later when we talk about one particular category of therapies that are very effective in many people for o CD which are the cognitive behavioral and exposure therapies I think some of you have heard of cognitive behavioral and exposure therapies but the way they are used to treat OCD is very much different than the way they're used to treat other sorts of anxiety disorders and other sorts of disorders generally so it's fair to say that up to 70% of people with OCD have some sort of anxiety or elevated anxiety either directly related to the OCD or indirectly related to the OCD and it's really hard to tease those apart because OCD can create its own anxiety as I mentioned before it can even increase its own anxiety and there's also an issue of depression having OCD can be very depressing right especially if some of these OCD thoughts and behaviors start to really impede people's ability to function in life at work in school and relationship they can start feeling less optimistic about life and in fact some people can become suicidally depressed that's how bad OCD can be for us so we have to be careful when saying that 70% % of people with OCD also have anxiety or X number of people with OCD are also depressed because we don't know whether or not the depression led the OCD or the other way around or whether or not they're operating as we say in science in parallel some of the drug treatments for OCD and depression and anxiety can tease some of that apart and we'll talk about that but I think it's fair to say that what binds the obsessions and compulsions is anxiety that there's a feeling of a or I should say an urgent feeling of a need to get rid of the obsession and the person feels as if the only way they can do that is to engage in a particular compulsive Behavior some people are probably wondering if there's a genetic component to OCD and indeed there is although the nature of it isn't exactly clear and often times when people hear that something has a genetic component they think it's always directly inherited from a parent and that's not always the case there can be genes that surface in siblings or genes that surface in children that are not readily apparent in terms of what we call a phenotypes you genotype the Gene and then you have a phenotype the way it shows up as a body form or like eye color or how it shows up in terms of a behavior or behavioral pattern based on twin studies where researchers have examined identical twins fraternal twins even identical twins that share the same sack in utero the what we call monochorionic so sitting in the same little bag during pregnancy or in different little bags you can see different levels of what's called genetic concordance but if we were to just sort of cut cut a broad swath through all of the genetic data it's fair to say that about 40 to 50% of OCD cases are have some genetic component some mutation or some inherited aspect that's genetic and that one could point to if they got their genome mapped now while that's interesting I don't think it's terribly useful for most people first of all you can't really control your genes at least at this point in history even though there are things like epigenetic control and people are very excited about Technologies like crisper for modifying the genome in humans at some point most people can't control their genetics right you can't pick who your parents were as they say so just know that there is a genetic component in about half of people with OCD but not always now as is typical for this podcast I want to focus on some of the neural mechanisms and chemical systems in the brain and body that generate obsessive compulsive disorder in fact if you've watched this podcast before listen to this podcast before this is always how I structure things first we introduce a topic and we explore that topic in detail really Define what it is and what it isn't and then it's very important that we focus on what is known and what is not known about the biological mechanisms that generate whatever that thing happens to be in this case OCD and obsessive compulsive personality disorder now I want to emphasize that even if you don't have a background in biology I will make this information accessible to you and I also want to emphasize that for those of you that are interested in treatments and are anxiously awaiting the description of things that can help with OCD I encourage you if you will to please try and digest some of the material about the underlying mechanisms because understanding even just a little bit of those biological mechanisms can really help shed light on why particular drug and behavioral treatments and other sorts of treatments work and don't work this is especially important in the case of OCD where it turns out that the order and type of treatment can really vary according to individual and that's something really special and important about OCD that we really can't save for a number of the other sorts of disorders that we've described on previous podcasts so let's take a step back and look at the neural circuitry what's going on in the brain and body of people with OCD why the intrusive recurrent thoughts why the compulsions why is that whole system Bound by anxiety and in some ways in thinking about that I want you to keep in mind that the brain has two main functions the brain's main function are to take care of all the housekeeping stuff make sure digestion Works make sure the heart beats make sure you keep breathing no matter what make sure that you can see you can hear you can smell Etc the basic stuff and then there's an enormous amount of brain real estate that's designed to allow you to predict what's going to happen next either in the immediate future or in the long-term future and largely that's done based on your knowledge of the past so you also have memory systems and of course you have systems in the brain and body that are designed to bind what's happening at the housekeeping level like your heart rate to your anticipation of what's going to happen next so if you're thinking about something very fearful your body will have one type of reaction if you're thinking about something very pleasant and relaxing your body will have another type of reaction so whenever I hear about the brain body distinction I have to just remind everybody that there really is no distinction between brain and body when you think about it through the nervous system the nervous system is the brain the eyes the spinal cord but of course all their connections with all the organs of the body and the connections of all the organs of the body with the brain the spinal cord Etc so as I describe these neural circuits I don't want you to think of them as just things happening in the head they are certainly happening in the head in fact the circuits I'll describe most in detail do exist within the confines of your cranial Vault that's nerd speak for skull but those circuits are driving particular predictions and therefore particular biases towards particular actions in your body they're creating a state of Readiness or a state of desire to check or desire to count or desire to avoid etc etc so what are these circuits well there's been a lot of wonderful research exploring the neural circuits underlying obsessive compulsive disorder and that's mainly been accomplished through a couple of methods most of those methods when applied in humans involve getting some look into which brain areas are active when people are having obsessions and when people are engaging in compulsions now that might seem simple to do but of course of course your brain is housed inside the cranial Vault and in order to look inside it you have to use things like magnetic resonance imaging which is just fancy technology for looking at blood flow which relates to activation of neurons nerve cells or things like pet pet Imaging which has nothing to do with the verb pet and has nothing to do with your house pet has everything to do with positron emission tomography which is just another way of seeing which brain areas are active and then you can also use pet to figure out what sorts of neurochemicals are active like dopamine Etc many studies we can fairly say dozens if not hundreds of Studies have now identified a particular circuit or Loop of brain areas that are interconnected and very active in obsessive compulsive disorder that Loop includes the cortex which is kind of the outer shell of the the human brain the lumpy stuff as it sometimes appears if the skull is removed and it involves an area called the striatum which is involved in action selection and holding back action the striatum is involved in what's commonly called go and NOCO types of behaviors so every type of behavior like picking up a pen or a mug of coffee involves a go type function it involves generating an action but every time I resist an action my nervous system is also doing that using this brain structure the striatum which includes among other things the basil ganglia talked about that before I'm not trying to overload you with terminology here but I know some people people are interested in terminology so you have go behaviors and you have no-o resisting of behaviors not going toward Behavior the cortex and the striatum are in this intricate back and forth talk it's really Loops of connections the cortex doesn't tell the striatum what to do the strium doesn't tell the cortex what to do they're in a cross talk like any good relationship there's a lot of back and forth communication there's a third element in this cortico strial loop as it's called and that's the thalamus now the thalamus is not a structure I've talked a lot about before on this podcast but it's one of my favorite structures to think about and teach about in neur anatomy which I teach uh back at Stanford and have taught for many years elsewhere because the thalamus is this incredible egg-like structure in the center of your brain that has different channels through it channels for relaying visual information or auditory information or touch information from your environment up into your cortex and as a consequence making certain things that are happening to you and around you apparent to you makinging you aware of them making you perceive them and suppressing others so for instance right now if you're hearing me say this your Thalamus has what are called auditory nuclei those are just collections of neurons that respond to soundwaves that are of course coming in through your ears and your Thalamus is active in a way that those particular regions of your Thalamus are allowed literally permitted to pass the information coming from your ears through some other steps but then to your Thalamus your auditory Thalamus then up to your cortex and you can hear what I'm saying right now at the same time your Thalamus is surrounded by a kind of a shell something called the thalamic reticular nucleus again you don't have to remember the names but this thalamic reticular nucleus also sometimes called the reticular thalamic nucleus this is Believe It or Not a subject of debate in science there are people that literally hated each other probably still hate each other even though one of them's dead for decades because they would argue it was thalamic reticular nucleus the other was reticular thalamic nucleus anyway these are scientists they're people they tend to debate but the the lamic reticular nucleus as I'm going to call it serves as a sort of gate as to which information is allowed to pass through up to your conscious experience and which is not and that gating mechanism is strongly regulated by the chemical Gaba Gaba is a neurotransmitter that is inhibitory as we say it serves to shut down or suppress the activity of other neurons so the phic reticular nucleus is really saying no touch information cannot come in right now you should not be thinking about the contact of the back of your legs with the chair that you're sitting on Andrew you should be thinking about what you're trying to say and what you're hearing and how your voice sounds and what you see in front of you Etc whereas if I'm about to get an injection from a doctor or I'm in pain or I'm in pleasure I'm going to think about my sematic sensation at the level of touch and I'm probably going to think less about smells in the room although I might also think about smells in the room or what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing we can combine all these different sensory modalities but the the lamic reticular nucleus really allows us to funnel to direct particular categories of sensory experience into our conscious awareness and suppress other categories of SE sensory experience in addition the thalamic reticular nucleus plays a critical role in which thoughts are allowed to pass up to our conscious perception and which ones are not so much so that some neuroscientists and indeed some neuro philosophers if you want to call them that have theorized or philosophized that the thalamic reticular nucleus is actually involved in our Consciousness now Consciousness is in a topic that I really want to talk about this episode and it's a very kind of mushy murky as we say in science it's a shoy term because it doesn't really have clear definition so arguments about it often get lost in the fact that people are arguing about different things but when I say Consciousness what I mean is conscious awareness so let's Zoom out and take a look at the circuit that we've got and that we now know based on neuroimaging studies is intimately involved in generating obsessions and compulsions in OCD we have a cortex or neocortex which is involved in perception and understanding of what's Happening we have the striatum and basil ganglia which are involved in generating behaviors go and suppressing behaviors no go and we have the thalamus which collects all of our sensory experience in parallel hearing touch smell Etc not so much smell through the the thalamus I should mention but the other sensor senses that is and then that Thalamus is encased by the thalamic reticular nucleus which serves as a kind of a a guard saying you can pass through and you can pass through but you you you can't pass through up to conscious understanding and perception so that Loop this corticothalamic loop corticothalamic loop is the circuit thought to underly OCD and dysfunction in that circuit is what's thought to underly by OCD now again this circuit exists in all of us and it can operate in healthy ways or it can operate in ways that make us feel unhealthy or even suffer from full-blown OCD how do we know that this circuit is involved in OCD well there we can look to some really interesting studies that involved bringing human subjects into the laboratory and generating their obsessions and compulsions and then Imaging their brain using any variety of techniques that we talked about before what would such an experiment look like well in order to do that sort of experiment first of all you need people who have OCD and of course you need control subjects that don't and you need to be able to reliably evoke the obsessions and the compulsions now it turns out this is most easily or I should say most simply done because it can't be easy for the people with OCD but this is most straightforward that's the word I was looking for most straightforward when looking at the category of obsessions and compulsions that relate to order and cleanliness so what they do typically is bring subjects into the laboratory who have a Obsession about germs and contamination and a compulsion to handwash and they give these people believe it or not a sweaty towel that contains the sweat and the odor and the liquid basically from somebody else's hands in fact they'll sometimes have someone wipe their own sweat off the back of their neck and put it on the towel and then they'll put it in front of the person which as you can imagine for someone with OCD is incredibly anxiety Prov and almost always evokes these obsessions about oh this is really uh this is really bad this is really bad I need to I need to clean I need to clean I need to clean now they're doing all this while someone is in a brain scanner or while they're being imaged for patronous and tomography and then they can also look at the patterns of activation in the brain while the person is doing handwashing although sometimes the apparat associated with these Imaging studies make it hard to do a lot of movement they can do these sorts of studies they have done these sorts of studies in many subjects using different variations of what I just described and lo and behold what lights up and when I say lights up what what sorts of brain regions are more metabolically active more blood flow more neural activity well it's this particular cortico strial thalamic Loop in addition to that some of the drug treatments that are effective in some and I want to emphasize some individuals at suppressing obsessions Andor compulsions such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or ssris which we'll talk about in a little bit when people take those drugs they see not just a suppression of the obsession and compulsion but also a suppression of these particular neural circuits they become less active now I want to emphasize and Telegraph a little bit of what's coming later these drugs like ssris do not work for everybody with OCD and as many of you know they carry other certain problems and side effects for many but not all individuals but nonetheless what we have now is an observation that this circuit the cortical statamic Loop is active in OCD we have a manipulation that when people take a drug that at least in those individuals is effective in suppressing or eliminating the obsessions and compulsions there's less activity in this Loop and thanks to some very good animal model studies that at least at this point in time you really couldn't do in humans although soon that may change we now know in a causal way that the equivalent circuitry a exists in other animals such as mice such as cats such as monkeys and that activation of those particular corticostriatal thalamic circuits in animal models can indeed evoke OCD in an individual that prior to that did not have OCD so I'm just going to briefly describe One S study this is a now classic study published in the journal science one of the three Apex journals in 2013 the first author on this paper is uh suzan Mari ah m a r i I will provide a link to this in the show notes as a truly Landmark paper done in Rene hens Lab at Columbia University and the title of the paper is repeated cortico stal stimulation generates that's the key word here generates persistent OCD like Behavior what they did is they took mice mice do mouse things they move around they play with toys they eat they pee they mate they do various things in their cage but they also groom humans groom animals with fur groom well you hope most people groom some people overg Grom some people underg Grom but most people groom they'll comb their hair they'll clean etc those are normal behaviors that humans engage in I'm not aware that mice comb their hair but mice adjust their hair so they'll kind of pet their hair and they'll do this so sometimes even do it to each other we used to have mice in the lab now we only do human studies but the the mice will groom themselves and typical what we call Wild type mice not because they're wild but because they're typical will groom themselves at a particular frequency but not to the point where their hair is falling out not constantly they are grooming some of the time and they're doing other Mouse things other Mouse times so in this particular study what they did is they used some technology which actually was discussed on a previous episode of The hubman Lab podcast this is technology that was developed by a psychiatrist and bioengineer by the name of Carl daero one of my colleagues at Stanford school of medicine this is a technology that allows researchers to use the presentation of light to control neural activity in particular brain areas in a very high fidelity way you control the activity in the cortex or the striatum or the thalmus when you want and how you want it's really a beautiful technology in any event what they did in this study is or I should say what Susan Amari and colleagues did in this study was to stimulate the corticostriatal circuitry in animals that did not have any OCD like behavior and when they did that those animals started grooming incessantly to the point where their hair was falling out or they even you know they didn't take the experiments this far fortunately but the animals would have a tendency to almost rub themselves raw in the same way that somebody who has a compulsion to handwash would sadly people will hand wash to the point where their hands are actually bleeding and raw it's really that bad I know that's tough imagery to imagine and you can't even imagine why someone would self harm in that way but again that's that incredible anxiety relationship between the compulsion excuse me the obsession and the compulsion and the fact that engaging the compulsion simply strengthens the obsession and therefore the anxiety so that collection of studies of data fmri pet scanning in humans the treatment with ssris and these experiments where researchers have actively triggered these particular circuits in animal models that previously did not have too much activity in these circuits and then they observe OCD emerging really points squarely to the fact that the corticothalamic loop is likely to be the basis of OCD now of course other circuits could also be involved but the cortical strial thalamic circuit seems to be the main circuit generating OCD like Behavior that's a lot of mechanism hopefully it was described in a way that you can digest and understand and some of you might be thinking well so what why why does that help me I mean I can't reach into my brain and turn off my cortex I can't reach into my brain and turn off my Thalamus and indeed on the one hand that's true but as you'll next learn when thinking about the various behavioral treatments and drug treatments and holistic treatments for OCD what you'll notice is that each one Taps into a different component of this corticostriatal thalamic Loop and by understanding that you can start to see why certain treatments might work at one stage of the illness versus others you will also start to understand why obsessive compulsive personality disorder does not have the same sorts of engagements of these neural loops and yet relies on other aspects of brain and body and therefore responds best to other sorts of treatments or in some cases people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder are not even seeking treatment as I alluded to before the point here is that by understanding the underlying mechanism why certain drugs and behavioral treatments work and don't work will become immediately apparent and in thinking about that in knowing that you'll be able to make excellent choices I believe in terms of what sorts of treatments you pursue what sorts of treatments you abandon and most importantly the order the sequence that you pursue and apply those treatments before we go any further I'd like to give people a little bit of a window into what a diagnosis for OCD would look like give you a sense of the sorts of questions that a clinician would ask to determine whether or not somebody has OCD or not now I want to be clear I'm not going to do this in an exhaustive way I wouldn't want anyone to self diagnose although I'm hoping that by sharing some of this that some of you might get insight into whether or not you do have obsessions and compulsions that might qualify for OCD and perhaps even to seek out help the most commonly used test of OCD or for OCD I should say is called the Yale Brown obsessive compulsive scale and this is uh you know scientists love acronyms as do the military and it's the Y box the y-bocs the ybx so typically someone will go into the clinic either because a family member encouraged them to or because they that they're suffering from obsessions and compulsions and before the clinician would proceed with any kind of direct questions they would very clearly Define what obsessions and compulsions are and here I'm actually reading from the Y box so quote obsessions are unwelcome and distressing ideas thoughts images or impulses that repeatedly enter your mind they may seem to occur against your will they may be repugnant to you you may recognize them as senseless and they may not fit your personality then there are compulsions quote compulsions on the other hand are behaviors or acts that you feel driven to perform although you may recognize them as senseless or excessive at times you may try to resist doing them but this may prove difficult you may experience anxiety that does not diminish until the behavior is completed and as I mentioned before in many cases immediately after the behavior is completed the anxiety doesn't just return it indeed can strengthen now there are tremendous number of questions on the Y box so I'm just going to highlight a few of the general categories typically the person will fill out a checklist so they will designate whether or not currently or in the past they have for instance aggressive obsessions fear that one might harm themselves fear that one might harm others fear that they'll steal things fear that they will act on unwanted impulses currently or in the past or both that's one category the other one are contamination Obsession so concerned with dirt or germs bothered by sticky substances or residues etc etc so there a bunch of different categories that include for instance sexual obsessions what are called saving obsessions even moral obsessions right excess concern with right or wrong or morality concerned with sacrilege and blasphemy obsession with need for Symmetry and exactness again all these questions being answered as either present in the past or not present in the past present currently or not present currently and then the the test generally transitions over to questions about Target symptoms they really trying to get people to identify if they have obsessions what are their exact obsessions now this turns out to be really important because as we talk about some of the therapies that really work I'll just give away a little bit of why they work best in certain cases and why they don't work as well in other cases it turns out that it becomes very important for the clinician and the patient to not just identify the obsessions and the compulsions generally in a kind of a generic or top Contour way but to really encourage or even Force the patient to Define very precisely what the biggest most catastrophic Fe is what the obsession really relates to that turns out to be very important in disrupting this cortico strio thalamic Loop and getting relief from symptoms one way or the other so the Y Brown obsessive compulsive scale this y box again is very extensive it goes on for dozens of pages actually and has all these different categories not so much designed to just pinpoint what people obsess about or what they feel compelled to do but to also try and identify what is the fear that's driving all this right in the way that we've set this up thus far we've been talking about obsessions and compulsions as kind of existing in a vacuum you're obsessed about germs and you're compelled to wash your hands obsessed about germs compelled to wash your hands or obsessed about symmetry compelled to put right angles on everything or obsessed about counting and therefore counting Etc but beneath that is a cognitive component that is not at all Apparent from someone describing their Obsession and from from someone describing or displaying their compulsion the deeper layer to all that is what is the fear exactly if one were to not perform the compulsion meaning what is the fear that's driving the obsession so that brings us to a very powerful category of treatments that I should say does not work in everybody with OCD but works in many people with OCD and really speaks to the underlying neural circuitry that generates OCD and how to interrupt it and that is the treatment of cognitive behavioral therapy and in particular exposure based cognitive behavioral therapy so we're going to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy now but right at the outset I wanted distinguish the kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapies that are done for obsessive compulsive disorder the sorts of cognitive behavioral therapies that are done for other types of mental challenges and disorders because cognitive behavioral therapy for OCD really has everything to do with identifying the utmost fear in some sense we can think of fears as kind of along a hierarchy right in the example earlier of somebody being afraid to turn left and therefore feeling compelled to turn right you would want to take that person and really understand what do they fear most about turning left now they might not be aware of it they might not be conscious to what that really is but if you were to probe them in a clinical setting you would eventually get to an answer that answer could be at first I don't know just it's just bad I I don't know why it's bad it makes no sense but I it's just bad I do not want to go left I don't know why I don't know why but if you were to push that person a little bit in a respectful and kind and caring way aimed at their treatment if you were to push them and say well what do you mean my bad if you turn left you think um the world would end they might say no the world's not going to end but you know someone is going to die suddenly I know that sounds crazy but somebody's going to die suddenly it almost this almost sounds like Superstition we'll talk about supers later but indeed it is somewhat superstitious so for instance you would say who's going to die and they'd say I don't know and you'd say no really who's going to die if you think about this are you going to die is so and so going to die and very often very often what you find is that people will start to reveal the underlying Obsession at a level of detail that both to the clinician and to them can be somewhat astonishing even though they've been living with that detail in their mind for a long time now how could somebody start to reveal detail about something that's existed in their mind for a very long time but not known about it right not been aware of it now some of you might think oh it's repressed or something that's not at all what's happening if you think about the architecture of OCD typically people will have an obsession and then they'll engage in the compulsion as quickly as they can to relieve that Obsession so in many ways the disease itself prevents people from Ever Getting to the bottom of that trough ever getting to the point where they really clear clearly articulate to themselves exactly what it is that they fear but it becomes so essential to articulate exactly what it is that they fear for a somewhat counterintuitive reason you might think oh the moment they realize exactly what they fear everything lifts the circuit turns off and they just feel better because they realized it I wish I could tell you that's the case but it turns out it's the opposite what the clinician is actually trying to do is get people to feel more anxiety not less what they're trying to get them to do is to Short Circuit no pun intended to intervene in their own neural circuit I should say with that relief of anxiety however brief brought on by engaging in the compulsion related to the obsession so whereas typically someone would feel the obsession with oh I don't want to turn left because something bad's going to happen someone's going to die and then they turn right they never get the option or the opportunity to really explore what would happen were they to turn left or to not be able to turn right by forcing them down the path of inquiry that leads them to the place where they very clearly identify the fear the anxiety it raises the anxiety in them and that's actually what the clinician is after cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy in the context of OCD most often involves trying to get people to tolerate not relieve their anxiety this is extremely important and I realize there's variation to this depending on the style of cognitive behavioral therapy the style of exposure therapy but almost across the board the goal again is to get people to feel the anxiety that normally they are able to at least partially relieve however briefly by engaging in the compulsion so if we think back to that circuit of corticostriatal thalamic what's going on here where is CBT intervening what part of the circuit is getting interrupted well as you recall the cortex is involved in conscious perception the thalamus and that thalamic reticular nucleus are involved in the passage of certain types of experience up to our conscious perception not others and the strium is involved in this go noo type behavior when OCD is really expressing itself in its fullness people feel an anxiety around a particular thought and they either have a go for instance wash hands or a no-o do not turn left type reaction by having people progressively in a kind of hierarchical way reveal their precise source of anxiety their utmost fear in this context what happens is they feel enormous amounts of autonomic arousal now in the context of anxiety treatment or other types of treatments the goal would be to teach people to dampen to lessen their anxiety through breathing techniques or through visualization techniques or through selft talk or through through social support any of the number of things that are well known to help people self-regulate their own anxiety here it's the opposite what they're trying to get the patient to do is to really feel the anxiety at its maximum but then do the exact opposite of whatever the normal compulsion is so if normally the compulsion is to wash one's hands then the idea is to suppress handwashing while being in the experience of the utmost anxiety or in the case of not turning left the person is expected to or would hope be able to actually turn left and as you can imagine that would evoke tremendous anxiety and yet to tolerate that anxiety now I want to be very clear this is not the sort of thing you want to do on your own this is not the sort of thing you want to do for a friend this is done by trained licensed psychologists and psychiatrists but nonetheless it really points to the fact that as a anxiety related disorder OCD is distinct from other types of anxiety and anxiet Related Disorders things like PTSD and panic disorder Etc because the goal again is to bring the person right up close to the thing that they fear the most and then to interrupt the circuit and now you should be able to know just intuitively because you understand the mechanisms that the circuit you're trying to disrupt is the pattern of information flow from the thinking part of the brain the perception part of the brain which is the the cortex to the striatum right the striatum has these neurons which are active that essentially are know it sounds a little bit like a discussion about free will but they're trying to get some the person to generate a certain Behavior or suppress a certain behavior and as anxiety ramps up it's sort of a hydraulic pressure to do that very thing that they've done for so long and they suffer from so much we talked about hydraulic pressure in the context of aggression in the aggression episode this is very similar right there's a kind of a now when I say hydraulic pressure it's not actual hydraulic pressure it's the Confluence of a lot of different systems it's neurochemical as we'll soon learn it's hormonal it's electrical it's it's a lot of different things operating in parallel so we can't point to one chemical or transmitter what's happening is the person is feeling compelled to act act act to relieve the anxiety and through a progressive type of exposure right you don't throw people in the deep end in this kind of therapy right off the bat you gradually ratchet them toward or move them toward the discussion of exactly what they fear the most and then eventually move them toward the interruption of the compulsion as they're feeling this extremely elevated anxiety of course within the context of a supportive clinical setting but in doing that what you are teaching people is that the anxiety can exist without the need to engage in the compulsion now some of this might sound to people like oh this is a lot of kind of fancy psychological Neuroscience speak around something that's kind of intuitive but I think for most people this is not intuitive and for people with OCD the there's no really other way to put it the impulse the the compulsion to avoid anxiety is such a powerful driving force that it should now make sense to you as to why being able to tolerate anxiety and really sit with it and do the exact opposite of what you're normally compelled to do is going to be the path to treatment and indeed CBT has been shown to be enormously effective again for a large number of people with OCD but not all of them and oftentimes it requires that it also be used in concert with certain drug treatments which we're going to talk about in a moment next let's talk about some of the really unique features of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy in the context of OCD that you often don't see in the use of CBT that is cognitive behavioral therapy for other types of psychiatric challenges and disorders the first element is one of staircasing and I already mentioned this before but this gradual and Progressive increase in the anxiety that you're trying to evoke from the patient from the person suffering from OCD that's done in the context of the office or the laboratory Again by a trained and licensed clinician but then the person leaves right they leave the office they leave the the laboratory and a very vital component of CBT and exposure therapy for people with OCD is that they have and perform what's called homework it's literally what they call this might be seen in other sorts of treatments but for OCD homework is extremely important because within the context of a laboratory experiment or the clinic patients often feel so much support that they can tolerate those heightened levels of anxiety and interrupt their compulsions whereas when they get home often times the familiarity of the environment brings them to a place where all of a sudden those obsessions and compulsions start interacting the same way and they have a very hard time suppressing the behaviors why would that be well in Neuroscience we have a phrase It's called condition Place preference and condition Place avoidance there's some other phrases too but basically it all has to do with a simple thing which is when you feel something repeatedly in a given environment or sometimes even once within a given environment you tend to feel that same thing again when you return to that or similar environments okay so condition Place Blank or condition place that is simply fancy nerd speak for the fact that when you're in a place and something good happens you tend to feel good if you return to that place or a place like it or if something bad happens in a given place you tend to feel bad when you return to that place or a place like it I think that most Alan example that leaps to mind is in unfortunately the category of bad but I had some friends years ago uh visit San Francisco there's been a ongoing it seems like it's been happening forever but this is really in the last decade of of daytime break-ins and nighttime break-ins into cars to steal anything from computers to what seems to be like a box of tissues and there are numerous reasons for this I don't want to get into it's not the topic of today's podcast but I will use this as an opportunity to say if you're visiting anywhere in the Bay Area do not leave anything in your car because the window will get broken into sometimes in Broad day daylight some good friends of mine were visiting the Bay Area and I texted them and said um hey by the way when you're headed to dinner guys make sure you bring in all your luggage and computers however con inconvenient that might be they wrote back too late everything got stolen so was some years ago now I think five six years ago this happened uh sadly all everything got stolen most of it could be replaced but some of it was very sentimental to them every time we talk every time we consider having a meeting in a particular City this comes up as I don't want I don't want to be there I don't like that City anymore Etc and of course San Francisco has some wonderful redeeming features but it only takes one bad incident in one location to kind of color the whole um picture dark so to speak the brain works that way the brain generalizes it it's not a very specific organ again it's a prediction machine in addition to other things so in the case of CBT therapy the reason there's homework is that when people go home often times that's when they relapse if you want to call it that back into their obsessions and compulsions and that location that conditioned place is where it becomes most important to challenge the anxiety and to deal with the anxiety to not try and suppress the anxiety through compulsions or other means and when I say other means I want to highlight something we'll come up again a little bit later in the podcast that substance abuse is very common in people with OCD because of the anxiety component and also because of people's feelings that they just can't escape from the thoughts or behavioral patterns that are so characteristic of OCD so alcohol abuse or cannabis abuse or other forms of Narcotics abuse are very common in OCD later we'll talk about whether or not cannabis can or cannot help with OCD but needless to say suppressing anxiety is exactly the wrong direction that one should take if the goal is to ultimately relieve or eliminate the OCD so we now have two characteristics of CBT exposure therapy that are extremely important for OCD and somewhat unique to the treatment of OCD and that's the staircasing up towards the really bad fear the really severe and specific articulation and understanding and feeling of how bad things really would be if someone engaged in a particular Behavior or avoided a particular Behavior then there's the component of homework given by the clinician for the person to be able to create a broader set of contexts in which they can deal with the anxiety not engage in the compulsions and then a very unique feature of treatment of OCD That You Don't See in many other psychiatric disorders are home visits I find this fascinating I think that the field of Psychiatry and psychology traditionally doesn't allow for or invite home visits but this component of context location and context being so vital to the treatment and relief of OCD has inspired many psychiatrists and psychologists to get permission to do home visits where they actually go visit their patients in their native setting in their home cages right they're not mice but in their home home cages right I'm being factious here but people mice live in cages at least in the laboratory and um humans generally live in houses or elsewhere so they visit them in their home in order to see how they're interacting and the particular locations that evoke the most anxiety and the least anxiety some of the I don't want to call them crutches but some of the tools that that people are using to confront and deal with the obsessions and compulsions and in particular to try and identify some of the tools and tricks that people are using to try and avoid that heightened anxiety because once again and I know I'm repeating myself but I think this is just so vital and so unique about OCD and the treatment of OCD the critical need for the patient to be able to tolerate extremely elevated levels of anxiety is so crucial so if people are avoiding certain rooms in the house or if people are avoiding certain Foods or certain locations in the kitchen the clinician can start to identify that by mere observation and I should mention here that patients are not always aware of how they are interacting with their home environment some of these patterns are so deeply ingrained in people that they don't even realize that they're constantly turning to the left or they don't even realize that they're only washing their hands on one side of the sink and so the clinician by visiting the home can start to interrogate a bit in a polite way in a friendly in a supportive way as to hey do you ever think about why you always you know flip the faucet to the left or flip the faucet to the right Etc now we all do a lot of things that are habitual we all do things that are somewhat regular from dayto day in fact I would invite you to ask yourself do you always put your toothbrush in the same location do you always cap the toothbrush before or after you use it what sorts of things do you do you wipe the the little um threading on the toothpaste or not I'm somebody I I confess that um I have well I have about 3500 pet peeves but one of my pet peeves is is toothpaste kind of on the thread of the the toothpaste it really bothers me I don't know why almost as much as trying to wipe it off bothers me which creates a certain Challenge and if I talk about this any further then I think I would qualify for obsessive compulsive personality disorder but I have to say I don't experience a ton of anxiety about it it doesn't govern my life in fact I realize that right now there are tubes of toothpaste that have toothpaste along the thread everywhere in the world and doesn't really bother me I can still sit here and um provide some information about OCD to you it's not intrusive at least not to my awareness so by the home visit the therapist can really start to explore through direct questioning and can allow the patient to explore through direct questioning of themselves the things that they might be conscious of and the things that they might not be conscious of that would qualify for OCD so I'd like to just Briefly summarize the key elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy and how they can be combined with drug treatments that are very effective much of what I'm going to talk about next relates to the data and indeed the practice of an incredible research scientist and clinician so this is Helen Blair Simpson or I should say Dr Helen Blair Simpson because she is indeed an MD medical doctor and a PhD research scientist at Columbia University School of Medicine and one of the world's foremost experts if not the expert I would put her in a category of maybe just one to three people who is most knowledgeable about the mechanisms of OCD is actively researching OCD in humans trying to find new treatments trying to unveil new mechanisms and expand on our current understanding and who also treats OCD quite actively in her own Clinic Dr Simpson gave a beautiful presentation which she summarized some of the core elements of CBT and exposure therapy for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorders she describes that the key procedures are exposures of course done in person and with the actual thing that evokes the obsessions and compulsions so this could be the sweaty towel as described earlier or could be any number of different triggers done with the patient in real time so in Vivo as we say and it could also be things that are imaginal sitting somebody down in a chair in an office and saying okay I want you to imagine the the thing that triggers the intrusive thought or let's just focus on the intrusive thought as it arises and then to explore and expose the patient to their obsessions and compulsions that way so it can be real or it can be imaginal and the goal of course then is to gradually and progressively increase the level of anxiety but then to intervene in so-called ritual prevention to prevent the person from engaging in the compulsion the goals again I'm paraphrasing here are to as she states disconfirm fears and challenge the beliefs about the obsessions and compulsions to they intervene in the thoughts and the behaviors and to break the habit of ritualizing and avoiding now how is this typically done what what are the nuts and bolts of this procedure typically this is done through two planning sessions with the patient so describing to the patient what will happen and when it will happen and how long it will happen so they're not just thrown into this out of the blue and then 15 exposure sessions done twice a week or more so the one thing to really understand about cognitive behavioral therapy is that it can take some period of time several or more weeks as many as 10 or 12 weeks however as you'll soon learn many of the drug treatments that are effective in treating OCD either alone or in combination with behavioral therapies also can take 8 10 12 weeks or longer and many of those never work at all so even though 10 to 12 weeks seems like a long period of time it's actually pretty standard if you'd like to see more complete description of the protocols for cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy for OCD I'll provide links to two papers kak and fo foa which is published in 1997 which might seem like a long time ago but nonetheless the the protocols are still very useful and then the second paper is by that last author fo fo at all in 2012 and we'll provide links to both of those in addition Dr Blair Simpson and others have explored what are the best treatments for patients with OCD by comparing cognitive behavioral therapy alone Placebo so no intervention or something that takes an equivalent amount of time but is not thought to be effective in treatment as well as selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors so what is an SSRI an SSRI is a drug that prevents the re-uptake of Serotonin at the synapse what are synapses they're the little spaces between neurons where neurons communicate with one another by vomiting little bits of chemical into the space the synapse and then those chemicals either evoke or suppress the electrical activity of the next neuron across the synapse and in this case the neurotransmitter the chemical that we're referring to is serotonin SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors prevent the reuptake of the chemical that's left in this case the serotonin that's left in the synapse after that I called it vomiting to be dramatic but it's not actually a vomiting the Extrusion of the chemical into the synapse and as a consequence there's more serotonin around ground to have more of an effect over time the net effect being more serotonergic transmission more serotonin overall so not more serotonin being made more serotonin being available for use that's what an SSRI does so they compared cognitive behavioral therapy ssris they also had the placebo group and they had cognitive behavioral therapy plus the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor this was a 12-week study done as described before two times a week over the course of 12 weeks first of all the most important thing of course Placebo did nothing it did not relieve the OCD to any significant degree right how did they know that they gave them the ybox test that we talked about before the W the Yale Brown test with all those questions of which I read a few so the OCD severity that one has to have on the Y box is measured in terms of an index that goes from any here from eight all the way up to 28 that shouldn't mean anything so the number eight is kind of meaningless here it's in terms of an index that's only only meaningful for the ybx but if somebody has a threshold of 16 or higher it means that they're still having somewhat debilitating symptoms or very debilitating symptoms Placebo did not reduce the obsessions or compulsions to any significant degree however and I think quite excitingly cognitive behavioral therapy had a dramatic effect in reducing the obsessions and compulsions such that by four weeks that score that in this case ranged from 8 to 28 dropped all the way from 25 down to about 11 so it's a huge drop in the severity of the symptoms now what's really interesting is that when you look at the effects of ssris in the treatment of OCD symptoms they had a significant effect in reducing the symptoms of OCD that showed up first at four weeks and then continued to eight weeks in fact there was a progressive and further reduction in OCD symptoms from the 4 to 8 we period again these are the people just taking the SSRI and then it sort of flattened out a little bit such that by 12 Weeks there was still a significant reduction in OCD symptoms for people taking ssris as compared to Placebo but the severity their symptoms was still much greater than those receiving cognitive behavioral therapy alone so at least in this study and I should tell you which study it is this is faux lioet at all 2005 in the American Journal of Psychiatry we also provide a link to this so you can peruse the data if you like but at least in this study cognitive behavioral therapy was the most effective selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors less effective so what happens when you combine them well they explored that as well and the combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and the ssris together did not lead to any further decrease in OCD symptoms this points to the idea that cognitive behavioral therapy is the most effective treatment and again when I say cognitive behavioral therapy now I'm still referring to cognitive behavioral SL exposure therapy done in the way that I detailed before twice a week for 12 weeks or more so all of the data at least in this study point to the fact that cognitive behavioral therapy is really effective and the most effective does it alleviate OCD symptoms for everybody no is it very timec consuming yes twice a week for um you know two sessions or more of 15 minutes sometimes in the office plus there's homework plus there can in an ideal case there's also home visits from the psychiatrist or psychologist that's a lot of investment a lot of time investment to say nothing of the potential Financial investment now Dr Blair Simpson has given some beautiful talks where she describes these data and also emphasizes the fact that despite the demonstrated power of cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of OCD most people are given drug treatments simply because of the availability of those drug treatments now when I say most people I want to emphasize that I'm referring to most people who actually go seek treatment because a really important thing to realize is that most people with OCD do not actually go seek evidence-based treatment I want to repeat that most people with OCD do not seek evidence-based treatment which is a tragic thing one of the motivations for doing this podcast episode is to try and encourage people who think they may have persistent obsessions and compulsions to seek treatment but most people don't for a variety of reasons we spelled out earlier shame Etc of those that do the first line of attack is typically a prescription most often an SSRI although not always just ssris because soon we'll talk about um the somewhat common use of also prescribing a low dose of a neuroleptic or an antipsychotic not always but often so the important thing to understand here is that excellent researchers like Dr Simpson understand that while there are treatments that we could say are best or are ideal based on the data that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's being deployed most often in the general public as a consequence Dr Simpson and others have explored in a very practical way whether or not it matters if somebody is getting SSRI treatment and is experiencing that reduction in OCD symptoms that as you may recall is more than what they would experience with Placebo alone but not as dramatic a reduction in OCD symptoms as they would get with cognitive behavioral therapy and as I mentioned before there was this exploration of combining drug treatment cognitive behavioral therapy from the outset but they also quite impressively explored what happens when people who are already taking ssris initiate cognitive behavioral therapy this is a really wonderful thing that they've done this because in doing that first of all they're acknowledging that there are many people out there who have sought treatment and are getting some relief from those ssris but it perhaps is not as much relief as they could get and they are actively acknowledging that many people are getting these drug treatments first in fact most often people are getting these drug treatments first so what happens when you add in cognitive behavioral therapy well the good news is when you add cognitive behavioral therapy to someone who's already taking ssris that further improves their symptoms now that's different than the results that I described before from the same laboratory in fact that if you combine cognitive behavioral therapy with ssis from the outset there's no additional benefit of SSRI however as I just described if someone is already taking an SSR and they're experiencing a reduction in their OCD symptoms by adding in cognitive behavioral therapy there is a further reduction in the symptoms of OCD so it's very important so for those of you that have sought treatment and you're taking a SSRI or if you're thinking about treatment and you're prescribed an SSRI the ideal scenario really would be to combine the drug treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy or in some cases maybe cognitive behavioral therapy alone although that's a decision that you really have to make with the close advice and oversight of of a licensed uh physician because of course these are prescription drugs and anytime you're going to add or remove a prescription drug or change dosage you really want to do that in close discussion with and on the advice of your physician I don't just say that to protect me I say that to protect you and because it's just the right thing to do so again cognitive behavioral therapy is extremely powerful drug treatments seem less powerful though if you're already on a drug treatment adding cognitive behavioral therapy can really help so I've been talking about ssris and I described a little bit about how they work at a kind of superficial level of keeping more serotonin in the synapse so that more serotonin can be in action as opposed to gobbled back up by those neurons I should just mention what some of the selective serotonin rupic Inhibitors are so things like um clomipramine um which is not entirely selective I should say that that one in general falls into a category of less selective so it can impair or or can enhance some of the other neurotransmitter neuromodulator systems like epinephrine Etc The Selective serotonin retic Inhibitors are at least the classic ones are fluoxitine proac fluvoxamine fluox perotin ceraline Citalopram etc etc there are about six or classic ssris some of them like Citalopram are used in children and are available in pediatric doses some like Prozac may or may not be used in children the details of which ssris um Etc is a very extensive literature and discussion and I think it's safe to say that which drugs to use and which dosage and whether or not to cont continue excuse me the same dosage over time depends a lot on the individual variation that people Express and the responses that they have all of these drugs in fact I think we can say all drugs have side effects the question is how detrimental those side effects are to daily life the ssris are well known to have effects on appetite in some cases they abolish appetite in some cases they just reduce it a little bit in some cases they increase appetite really is highly individual they can have effects on libido for instance they can reduce sex drive depend sometimes in a dose dependent way sometimes in a way that's more like a step function where people are fine at say 5 or 10 milligrams but then they get to 15 milligrams and there's a cliff uh for their libido um that can happen it really depends please don't take those dosages as exact values because this is going to depend on the what they're being used for depression or anxiety or OCD and it's also going to depend on the drug Etc I just throughout those numbers as a way to um illustrate what a kind of a step function would look like it's not gradual it's immediate at a given dose is what that means the other thing is that some of these drugs will have transient effects so side effects that show up and then disappear here or sadly people will sometimes take these drugs for a while and then side effects will surface later that weren't there uh previously depending on life factors nutrition Factor so it's a very complicated landscape overall and that's why it's really important to explore any kind of drug treatment SSRI or otherwise really in close communication with a psychiatrist who really understands the pharmakinetics and has a lot of patient history and experience with them so what I'm about to tell you next is most certainly going to come as a big surprise which is that despite the fact that the selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors can be effective in reducing the symptoms of OCD at least somewhat and certainly more than Placebo there is very little if any evidence that the serotonin system is disrupted in OCD and I have to point out that this is a somewhat consistent theme in the field of Psychiatry that is a given drug can be very effective or even partially effective in reducing symptoms or in changing the overall landscape of a psychiatric disorder or illness and yet there is very little if any evidence that that particular system is what's causal for OCD or anxiety or depression Etc this is just the landscape that we're living in in terms of our understanding of the brain and Psychiatry and the ways of treating brain disorders so as a consequence there are a huge number of academic reviews that clinicians and research scientists have generated and read and share one of the more I think uh thorough ones in recent years was published in 2021 I'll provide a link to this this is by an excellent truly excellent researcher from Yale University School of Medicine I should say not just a researcher but a clinician scientist again an mdphd this is um Christopher pittinger and the title of the review is Pho pharmacotherapeutic strategies and new Targets in OCD and again we'll Pro provide a link to it as this is a just gorgeous review describing as I just told you that the serotonin system isn't really disrupted in OCD and yet ssris can be very effective the review goes on to to explore even what sorts of receptors for serotonin might be involved if it's in fact the case that serotonin is uh a culprit in the creation of OCD symptoms um talk about the serotonin 2A receptor and the serotonin 1A receptor why am I mentioning all that detail if uh in fact it's not clear serotonin is involved because I'll just tell you right now there is currently a lot of interest in whether or not some of the psychedelics in particular psilocybin can be effective in the treatment of OCD psilocybin has been shown in various clinical trials in particular the clinical trials done at John's Hopkins School of Medicine by Matthew Johnson and others Matthew was on the hubman Lab podcast he's been on the Tim Faris podcast he's been on the Lex Friedman podcast he's a world-class researcher on the use of psychedelics for depression and other psychiatric challenges and there psilocybin treatment has been seen at least in those trials to be very effective in the treatment of certain kinds of major depression currently the exploration of psilocybin for the treatment of OCD has not yielded similar results although the studies are ongoing again has not yielded similar Effectiveness but the studies are ongoing and the serotonin 2A receptor and the serotonin 1A receptors are primary targets for the drug psilocybin so I figured there were going to be some questions about whether not psychedelics help with OCD um thus far it's inconclusive if any of you have been part of clinical trials or have knowledge or intuition about this uh relationship or potential relationship I should say between psilocybin or other psychedelics and OCD please put them in the comment section we love to love to hear uh from you um one thing I should point out is that even though seratonin has not been directly implicated in OCD serotonin and the general systems of Serotonin the circuits in the brain that carry serotonin and depend on it have been shown to impact cognitive flexibility and inflexibility which are kind of Hallmark themes of OCD so in animals that have their serotonin depleted or in humans that have very low levels of Serotonin you can see evidence of cognitive inflexibility challenges in task switching challenges in switching the rules by which one performs a game challenges in any kind of sort of cognitive domain switching and so that does indirectly implicate uh serotonin in some of the aspects of OCD again when one starts to explore the different transmitter systems that have been explored in animal models and in humans it's a vast vast landscape but serotonergic drugs do seem to be the most effective drugs in treating OCD despite the fact again despite the fact that there's no direct evidence that serotonin systems are the problem in OCD if you recall the cortico strio thalamic loop that is so Central to the ideology the presence and the the patterns of symptoms in OCD of course serotonin is impacting that system serotonin is impacting just about every system in the brain but there's no evidence that tinkering with serotonin levels specifically in that network is what's leading to the improvements in OCD however if people go into a fmri scanner and those people have OCD and they evoke the obsessions and compulsions you see activity in that cortico stri oamic Loop treatments like ssris that reduce the symptoms of OCD equate to a situation where there is less activity in that Loop and I should point out cognitive behavioral therapy which we have no reason to believe only Taps into the serotonin system I think it would be an extreme stretch it would be false actually to say that that cognitive behavioral therapy Taps only into the serotonin system clearly it's going to affect a huge number of circuits and neurochemical systems well people who do cognitive behavioral therapy and find some relief for OCD they also show reductions in those cortico strial thalamic Loops so basically we have a situation where we a behavioral therapy that works in many people not all and we have a pretty good understanding about why it works it increases anxiety tolerance and interference with pattern execution getting people to not engage in the same sorts of behaviors that are detrimental to them and we have drug treatments that work at least to some degree but we don't know how they work or where they work in the brain one of the things that really unifies the behavioral treatments and the drug treatments is that they take some period of time some relief from symptoms seems to show up around four weeks and certainly by 8 weeks for both cognitive behavioral therapy and the ssris but it's really at the 10 to 12 week stage when someone's been doing these twice a week cognitive behavioral sessions where they've been taking a SSRI for 10 to 12 weeks that the really significant reduction in OCD symptoms starts to really show up now up until now I've been talking about the fact that people are getting relief from these treatments but sadly in the case of OCD there is a significant population that simply does not respond to CBT or to ssris or to their combination which is why psychiatrists also explore the combination of ssris and neuroleptics or drugs that tap into the so-call dopamine system or the glutamate system these are other neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that impact different circuits in the brain and just to really remind you what neurotransmitter and neuromodulators do because this is important to contextualize all this neurotransmitters are typically involved in the rapid communication between neurons and the two most common neurotransmitters for that are the neurotransmitter glutamate which we say is excitatory meaning when it's released into the synapse it causes the next neuron to be more active or active and Gaba which is a neurotransmitter that is inhibitory meaning when it's released into the synapse typically not always but typically that Gaba is going to encourage the next neuron to be less elect electric Al active or even silence its activity the neuromodulators by contrast so not neurotransmitters but neuromodulators like dopamine serotonin epinephrine and acetylcholine and others operate a little bit differently they tend to act a little bit more broadly they can act within the synapse but they can also change the general patterns of activity in the brain making certain circuits more likely to be active and other circuits less likely to be active so when we say you know dopamine does X or dopamine does y or serotonin does X or serotonin does y they don't really do one thing they change the sort of overall tonality they make it more likely or less likely that certain circuits will be active you can think of them as kind of activating playlists or genres of activity in the brain uh rather than being involved in the specific communication or specific songs if you will in this analogy or discussions between particular neurons so when we hear that ssris increase serotonin and reduce the symptoms of OCD or neuroleptic reduces the amount of dopamine and makes people feel calmer for instance or can remove some um stereotype repetitive Mo motor Behavior Uh which they can either generate or reduce motor Behavior it turns out so when I say that what I'm referring to is the fact that these neurom modulators are of turning up the volume on certain circuits and turning down the volume on other circuits I say that because if you are going to explore drug treatments again with a a licensed physician if you're going to explore drug treatments for OCD and in particular if you are not getting results from ssris or you're not getting results from cognitive behavioral therapy or the side effect profiles of the drugs that you're taking for OCD are causing problems that you don't want to take them well then it's important to understand that anytime you take one of these drugs they're not acting specifically on the corticostriatal thalamic circuit that would be wonderful that's the future of Psychiatry but as now when you take a drug it acts systemically so it's impacting serotonin in your gut it's also impacting serotonin in other areas of the brain hence the effects on things like digestion or libido or any number of different things that serotonin is involved in likewise if you take a neuroleptic like haloperidol or something that reduces dopamine transmission well then it's going to have some motor effects because dopamine is involved in the generation of motor sequences and smooth limb movement that's why people with Parkinson's who don't have much dopamine will get a resting Tremor have a hard time generating smooth movement and so the the side effects start to make sense given the huge number of different neural circuits that these different neurom modulators are involved in I don't say that to be discouraging I say that to encourage patience and careful systematic exploration of different drug treatments for OCD always again with the careful and close guidance and oversight of a psychiatrist because psychiatrists really understand which side effect profiles make it likely that you can or cannot or will never or maybe someday will be able to take a given drug at a given dose they are the ones that really have that knowledge this is not the sort of thing that you want to Cowboy and go try and figure out yourself now I also want to acknowledge that there are other forms of drug treatments we touched on silus ibin briefly but there are other forms of drug treatments that have been explored for OCD earlier we talked a little bit about cannabis why would cannabis be a place of exploration at all well first of all a number of people try and self-medicate for OCD there is some clinical evidence right I'm not talking about recreational use I'm talking about clinical evidence that cannabis can reduce anxiety now earlier we were talking about not reducing anxiety but learning anxiety tolerance in order to deal with and treat OCD in the context of cognitive behavioral therapies that doesn't necessarily rule out cannabis as a candidate for the treatment of OCD and in fact this is been explored a study from Dr Blair Simpson herself looked at this this was a fairly small scale study so first of all I'll give you the title and again we'll provide a link this is entitled acute effects of cannabinoids on symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder a human laboratory study very briefly this was 14 adults with OCD they had prior experience with cannabis this was randomized Placebo controlled the Cannabis was smoked um they had different varietal as they're called they had a placebo so this is basically a um a condition in which certain subjects um consumed a cigarette that had 0% THC others had 7% THC other groups that is or um some had 4% CBD and THC so they looked at CBD I know a lot of people out there are interested in CBD this one of the few studies I could find where uh they explored different percentages of th and CBD in these um uh cannabis or marijuana cigarettes basically uh the total amount that they consumed I believe was 800 mgrs these again are not suggestions uh these are just simply reporting what's in this study you can again I'll provide a link um they looked at OCD symptoms ratings they looked at cardiovascular effects they had a a large number of different things that they explored and I should say this study was done in 2020 and it was the first Placebo controlled investigation of cannabis in adults with obsessive compulsive disorder pretty interesting and I'm just reading from their conclusions here the data suggest that smoked cannabis whether containing primarily THC or CBD remember they looked at different concentrations of those has little acute impact meaning immediate impact on OCD symptoms and yield smaller reductions in anxiety compared to Placebo so they did not see a a when I say A positive effect I mean a um ative effect an effect in reducing symptoms of OCD from Cannabis or or CBD which um you know it's unfortunate I think it's unfortunate anytime a treatment doesn't work but nonetheless those are the data I'm sure they're going to be other studies I'm sure there are also going to be people in the YouTube comments section saying that cannabis and CBD helps their um OCD symptoms at least I anticipate they probably will almost everything I say here somebody will contradict it with something from their experience which I encourage by the way I want to hear about your experience with certain things even if it's not from randomized Placebo controlled studies I still find it very interesting to know what people are doing and what they're experiencing I think that's one of the better uses of social media comment sections is to be able to share some of that not in an viice giving way or prescriptive way but simply as a way to share and encourage different types of exploration there are other sorts of drug treatments that are gaining popularity for OCD at least in the research realm one treatment that is a legal L G right sometimes when I say legal sometimes people think I say illegal but that is legal at least by prescription in the United States is ketamine uh the actions of ketamine are somewhat complex although we know for instance that ketamine acts on the glutamate system it tends to disrupt the transmission or the relationship I should say between glutamate all right not glutamine not the amino acid but glutamate the neurotransmitter and the so-called nmda the n-methylaspartate receptor which is a receptor that's very special in the nervous system because when glutamate binds to the nmda receptor it tends to offer the opportunity for that particular synapse to get stronger so-call neuroplasticity and ketamine is a essentially an antagonist although it works through a complicated mechanism it tends to block that binding of glutamate to the nmda receptor or the effectiveness of that ketamine therapy is now being used quite extensively for the treatment of trauma and for depression it leads to a dissociative State it's a so-called dissociative analgesic and there are a variety of ways in which that happens we did an episode on depression we're going to do another entire episode all about ketamine describing the networks that ketamine impacts Etc ketamine therapies are being explored for OCD as of now the data look somewhat promising but there's still a lot more work that's needs to be done my read of the data are that the more extensive clinical trials have not happened yet the smaller studies that have happened reveal that some patients do get some relief from ketamine therapy for OCD but there was nothing overwhelmingly pointing to the fact that ketamine is a Magic Bullet for OCD treatment so cannabis CB at least now even though it's one smaller study there's no real evidence that it can alleviate OCD symptoms if there are new studies published soon I'll be sure to update you and if you see those studies please send them to me ketamine therapy the jury is still out psilocybin the jury is still out these are early days another treatment that's becoming somewhat common or at least people are commonly excited about is transcranial magnetic stimulation so this is the use of a magnetic coil this is completely nonin invasive placed on one portion of the skull and one can direct magnetic energy toward particular areas of the brain to either suppress or nowadays you can also activate particular brain regions there are some interesting data showing that if TMS is applied to areas of the brain involved in the generation of motor action so the so-called motor areas or supplementary motor areas as they're called while people think about or have intrusive thoughts we know that the TMS coil can interrupt the motor behaviors the compulsive behaviors and at least in a small cohort of studies and a small number of patients within those studies this has been shown to be effective not just while the coil is on the head of course but act after the study has been performed or the treatment's been performed in reducing OCD symptoms by disrupting the tendency for the compulsive Behavior to be so automatic one of the key features of obsess and compulsive disorder is that you know especially if it's been around for a while the person's been dealing with it for a while there isn't a pattern in which the person thinks oh I have this you know contamination fear or I need symmetry or I'm kind of obsessed to count to the number seven and then they pause and they go and then they do it no typically there's a very close uh pairing of the obsession and the compulsion in time so that somebody's walking down the street thinking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 they're do and they're doing this in such rapid succession because the obsessions are coming up so quickly right thoughts can be generated very quickly and then they're generating the compulsions as a way to beat down or to try and suppress that anxiety and then it comes right back up again at even stronger as I described earlier so transcranial magnetic stimulation seems to intervene in these very fast processes right now I don't think it's fair to say that TMS is a Magic Bullet either I think there's a lot of excitement about TMS and in particular I really want to nail this point home in particular there's excitement about the combination of TMS with drug treatments or the combination of TMS with cognitive behavioral therapy and this is a really important Point not just for sake of discussion about obsessive compulsive disorder but also depression uh ADHD uh schizophrenia any number of different psych psychiatric challenges and disorders in most cases are going to respond best to a combination of Behavioral treat that's ongoing that occurs in the laboratory and clinical setting but also in the home setting where there's homework maybe even home visits drug treatments often not always are a terrific augment to those cognitive behavioral therapies or other behavioral therapies and then now we are living in the age of brain machine interface you have companies like like neurolink that I think it's fair to say are going to enter the brain machine interface world first through the treatment of certain syndromes Right Movement syndromes or Psych atric syndroms probably before they start putting electrodes into the brain to stimulate enhanced memory or enhanced cognition who knows I don't know exactly what they're doing Behind the Walls of neurolink but I have to imagine in fact I would wager maybe not both arms but I'll wager my left arm that the first set of FDA approved Technologies to come out of companies like neurolink are going to be those for the treatment of things like Parkinson's and movement disorders and cognitive disorders rather than uh shall we say kind of recreation um cognitive enhancement or things of that sort so trans cranial magnetic stimulation is non-invasive it doesn't involve going down Bel below the skull can have some effect but most Laboratories that I'm aware of at Stanford and elsewhere are com that are exploring TMS for things like OCD and other types of psychiatric challenges are using TMs in combination with drug therapies are using in some cases for instance a laboratory at Stanford hope to get them on the podcast uh psychiatrist Nolan Williams is exploring TMS and in combination with psychedelic therapies not necessarily at the same time but nonetheless combining them or exploring how they impact brain circuitry so if you have OCD should you run out and get TMS or should you try ketamine therapy of course with a licensed physician I think it's too early uh to say yes I think the the answer is yet we need to wait and see I think cognitive behavioral therapy the ssris and some other drug treatments like neuroleptics combined with ssris and cognitive behavioral therapy are where the real bulk of the data are I want to make one additional point about cannabis CBD as it relates to obsessive compulsive disorder to me it's not at all surprising that cannabis CBD did not improve symptoms of OCD because in my discussion with Dr Paul kti a few weeks ago and I you mentioned Dr kti is indeed a medical doctor psychiatrist we were talking about cannabis and its various uses because it does have some clinical applications and he mentioned that one of the main effects of cannabis is to tighten focus and to enhance concentration on and thoughts about one particular thing and in some cases that can be clinically beneficial and in other cases that can be clinically detrimental if you accept the idea that canabus increases focus and you think about OCD and the networks involved and you think about the anxiety and the relationship between the obsession and compulsion well then it shouldn't come as any surprise that cannabis did not improve the symptoms of OCD because if anything it would increase focus on the obsessions and the compulsions now that's not what they observed they did not see an exacerbation or a worsening of the symptoms of OCD with cannabis at least that's not my read of the data but they did not see an improvement in OCD symptoms with cannabis or CBD and to me that's not surprising given that cannabis CBD seems to increase Focus next I'd like to talk about some of the research on and the roles of of hormones in OCD because it turns out to be a very interesting relationship there but before I do I want to point out something that I realize I probably should have said earlier which is one of the key things for someone with OCD to come to understand if they're going to experience any relief of their symptoms whether or not they're doing drug treatments or behavioral treatments or otherwise is that thoughts are not as bad as actions right thoughts are not as bad as actions one of the kind of rules that people with OCD seem to adopt for themselves is that thoughts are really truly the equivalent of actions so they'll have an intrusive thought and we haven't spent too much time on this today but earlier I touched on the fact that some of the intrusive thoughts that people have in OCD are really disturbing they can be really gross or at least gross to that person they can evoke imagery that is you know toxic or infectious or is highly sexualized in a way that is disturbing to them can be very taboo this is not uncommon when you start talking to people with OCD and you start pulling on the thread again this would be a psychiatrist who would train to ask the right questions and gain the comfort and Trust of a patient they start to reveal that these these thoughts are really intrusive and kind of disturbing which is why they feel so compelled to try and suppress them with behaviors one of the powerful elements of treatment for OCD is to really support the patient and make them realize that thoughts are just thoughts and that everyone has disturbing thoughts and that often times those disturbing thoughts Arise at the most inconvenient and sometimes what seems like the most inappropriate circumstances and this relates to a whole larger discussion that we could have about what are thoughts and why do they surface and how come when you stand at the edge of a bridge even if you do not want to jump off you think about jumping off and you know this has to do with the fact that your nervous system as a prediction machine is oftentimes testing possibilities and sometimes that testing goes way off into the um Netherlands of the thought patterns and emotional patterns that we all have inside of us the big difference between a thought and an action is that of course the nervous system is one case not translating those patterns of thinking into motor sequences that nerdy way of saying thoughts aren't actions believe it or not can be helpful for people if they really think about that and use is an opportunity to realize that first of all they're not crazy they're not thinking and feeling this stuff because they're bad or evil and of course sometimes this can cross over with other other elements of life where we place moral judgment on people for certain behaviors I think that's part of a healthy Society of course that's why we have laws and punishments and and rewards for that matter for certain types of behaviors but this idea that thoughts are not as bad as actions and that thoughts can be tolerated and the anxiety around thoughts can be tolerated and over time can diminish that's a very powerful Hallmark theme of the treatment of OCD so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it thoughts are not actions actions can harm us they can harm other people they can soak up enormous amounts of time thoughts can soak soak up enormous amounts of time they can be very troubling they can be very detrimental we of course want to be sensitive to that but when it really comes down to it the first step in treatment for OCD is this realization or the approach to the realization that thoughts are not as bad as actions so what about hormones in OCD well this has been explored albeit not as extensively as I would have liked uh to find but when I went into the literature I found um one particularly interesting study entitled neurosteroid levels in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder for Sor Erb and as always we'll provide a link to the study the objective of the study was to explore serum within blood neurosteroid levels in people with OCD why well because of the relationship between OCD and anxiety and the fact that in stress related disorders such as anxiety and depression the hormones have been extensively explored but not so much in OCD at least until this study so they compared serum levels of a number of different hormones progesterone pregnanolone DHEA um cortisol and testosterone this was done in 30 patients with OCD and 30 healthy controls so it's not a huge study but it's enough to draw some some pretty nice conclusions these subjects were 18 to 49 years old and the controls were age and sex matched um healthy volunteers again no OCD what was the basic takeaway from the study the basic takeaway from the study was that in females with OCD there was evidence for significantly elevated cortisol and DHEA now that's interesting because cortisol is well known to be associated with the stress system although every day should mention we all male or female everybody experiences an increase in cortisol shortly after Awakening that's a healthy increase in cortisol late shifted I mean late late in the day peaks in cortisol or a shift in that cortisol Peak to later in the day is a known correlate of depression and anxiety disorders so the fact that cortisol is elevated in DHE are elevated in uh female patients with OCD suggests that the cortisol is either reflective of or causal for the increase in anxiety we don't know the direction of that effect now in the male patients with OCD there was evidence for increased cortisol again not surprising given the role of anxiety and cortisol or I should say given the role of cortisol in anxiety and the increasing anxiety seen in OCD but there are also significant reductions in testosterone which should also not surprise us because cortisol and testosterone more or less compete in some fashion for uh their own production both are derived from the molecule cholesterol and there are certain biochemical Pathways that can either direct that cholesterol molecule toward cortisol synthesis or testosterone synthesis but not both so they compete so when cortisol goes up in general not always but in general testosterone goes down and vice versa if you want to learn more about the relationship between cortisol and testosterone and there even some tools to try and optimize those ratios in both males and females you can find that in our episode on optimizing testosterone and estrogen that's at huberman lab.com now I would say the most interesting aspect of this study is not that dhaa and cortisol are elevated in females with OCD or that cortisol and testosterone have this opposite effect cortisol up and testosterone down in males with OCD but rather the relationship between all of those DHEA cortisol and testosterone in terms of Gaba Gaba again being this inhibitory neurotransmitter that tends to quiet certain neuronal Pathways it's does different things at different synapses but in general the more Gaba that's present the more inhibition that's present and therefore the more suppression of neural activity and DHEA is known to be a potent antagonist of the Gaba system okay so here we have elevated DHEA in females and I should also mention that testosterone is also known to tap into the Gaba system typically when testosterone is elevated Gaba transmission at least is slightly elevated so here we have a a situation in which the pattern of hormones in females and males with OCD are are different from those in people without OCD such that Gaba transmission is altered and the net effect would be an overall reduction in Gaba now Gaba as an inhibitory neurotransmitter and broadly speaking is associated with lower levels of anxiety and it tends to create balance within various neural circuits now that's a very broad statement but we know for instance in epilepsy that Gaba levels are reduced and therefore you get runaway excitation of certain circuits in the brain and therefore seizures either petite Mall mini seizures or Grand Mall massive seizures or even drop seizures where people completely collapse to the floor in seizure you may have seen this before um I certainly have it's very dramatic and it actually is quite um debilitating for people because obviously they don't know when these seizures are coming on most often and then they you know they can fall into a stove or while driving Etc so the situation with OCD is one in which for whatever reason we don't know the direction of effect certain hormones are elevated in females and certain hormones are elevated in males and those hormones differ between males and females and yet they both funnel into a system where Gaba ergic or Gaba Transmission in the brain is reduced because of this ability for those particular hormones to be antagonists to Gaba and as a consequence there's likely to be overall levels of increased excitation in certain networks in the brain and that brings us back to this corticostriatal thalamic Loop this repetitive Loop that seems to reinforce or we can say reinforces Obsession leads to anxiety leads to compulsion leads to transient relief of anxiety but then increase in anxiety increase Obsession anxiety compulsion anxiety compulsion anxiety compulsion and so on and so forth so I have not found studies that have explored adjusting testosterone levels through exogenous Administration cream or injection or otherwise or that have focused on reducing DHEA in females if anyone is aware of such studies please put them in the comment section on YouTube or send them to us we have a contact site at the website at hubman lab.com but the comment section on YouTube would be um best but because we know that hormones impact neuromodulators and neurotransmitters as I just described and that those neuromodulators and neurotransmitters play an intimate role in the generation and the treatment of things like OCD it stands to reason that manipulations of those hormone systems however subtle or dramatic might I want to highlight might prove useful in adjusting the symptoms of OCD and I hope that this is an area that uh researchers are going to pursue in the very near future because many of the treatments for reducing DHEA or increasing testosterone or reducing cortisol have already made it through FDA approval they're out there um they're readily prescribed many of them are already in generic form which means that the patents have already lapsed on the uh on the first versions of those drugs so when they're available as generic drugs very often they're available at significantly lower cost right there's a whole discussion to be had there about patent laws and and um prescription drugs but because these drugs are largely available in prescription yet generic form I think there's a great opportunity to explore how hormones not just cortisol testosterone and DHA but the hor a huge category of hormones might impact the symptoms of OCD especially since many of the symptoms of OCD show up right around the time of puberty we haven't talked a lot about childhood OCD because we're going to do an entire series on childhood psychiatric disorders and challenges but many children develop OCD early as as young as you know three or four believe it or not or even six or seven and 10 and in adolescence and certainly around puberty and in young adulthood it is rare although it does happen that people will develop OCD very late in life around 40 or older just kind of spontaneously most often when you look at their clinical history you find that either they were hiding it or was being suppressed in some way or if it does spontaneously show up late in life like mid-30s or in 40 On's 40s typically there's a traumatic brain injury iny could be due to stroke or um physical injury to the head or something of that sort nonetheless there is a interesting correlation between the onset of puberty in certain forms of OCD there's certain forms of or I should say there's certain aspects of menopause that can relate to OCD you can find all these things in the literature all this to say that hormones impact neurotransmitters and neurom modulators which clearly impact the kinds of circuits that are involved in OCD and it makes sense that and I would hope that there would be an exploration of how these hormones impact OCD in the not too distant future now there is an extensive literature exploring how testosterone therapy both in males and females can be effective in some cases in the treatment of anxiety Related Disorders but not at least to my knowledge and OCD in particular so this whole area of the use of testosterone and estrogen therapies DHEA cortisol suppression or maybe even enhancement for the treatment of OCD is essentially a big black box that very soon I believe will be lit I realized that a number of listeners of this podcast are probably interested in the non-typical OR holistic treatments for OCD Dr Blair Simpson's lab has at least one study exploring the role of mindfulness meditation for the treatment of OCD there the data are a little bit um complicated and I should mention that good things are happening at least in the the United States probably elsewhere as well but good things are happening in terms of the exploration of things like meditation and other let's call them non-traditional or holistic forms of of treatment for psychiatric disorders because of the division of compliment Health that's now been launched by the National Institutes of Health so whereas before people would think about uh meditation or Yoga Nidra or even CBD supplementation for that matter as kind of Fringe maybe or kind of woo or non traditional at the very least the National Institutes of Health in the United States has now devoted an entire division right an entire Institute purely for the exploration of things like breathing practices meditation Etc so there's a cancer institute there's a hearing and deafness institute there's a Vision Institute and now there's this complimentary Health Institute which I think is a wonderful um addition to the more traditional um aspects of medicine I think uh no possible useful treatment should be overlooked or unresearched in my opinion provided that can be done safely and as I mentioned Dr Blair Simpsons lab has looked at the role of mindfulness meditation and the treatment of OCD now we should all keep in mind no pun intended that most of the data on mindfulness meditation shows that it increases the ability to focus now this brings us back to a kind of repeating theme today which is that increased Focus may not be the best thing for somebody with OCD because it might increase focus on the obsession Andor compulsion turns out that mindfulness meditation can be useful in the treatment of OCD but mainly by way of how it impacts the focus on and the ability to engage in cognitive behavioral therapies so it's very unlikely at least by my read of the data to be a direct effect of meditation on relieving the symptoms rather it seems that meditation is increasing focus on things like cognitive behavioral therapy homework and to not focus on other things and therefore indirectly improving the symptoms of OCD now somewhat surprisingly at least to me there have also been a fairly large number of studies exploring how neutraceutical as they're sometimes called supplements that are available over the counter can impact the treatment of obessive compulsive disorder now there's such an extensive number of different compounds and supplements that fall under the category of neutrals and that have been explored in the treatment of OCD that I'd like to point you to a review that is entitled neutraceuticals in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder a a review excuse me of mechanistic and clinical evidence this was published in 2011 so it's over 10 years old and so by now I have to imagine that there are an enormous number of additional substances that could be explored but there's just one or two here that I want to focus on here in this review they describe effects of 5htp and tryptophan so things that in the serotonin pathway which would make sense given what we know about the ssris that people would explore how different supplements that increase serotoninergic transmission might impact OCD what you find is that they do have significant effects in improving or reducing the symptoms of OCD in somewhat similar way to some of the ssris but you of course have to be careful anything that's going to tap into a given neurochemical system to the same degree may very likely have the same sorts of side effects that a prescription drug would one compound that I like to focus on in a little more depth however because it's exciting and interesting to me is inositol inositol is a compound that we are going to talk about in several future podcasts because well first of all it seems it can have pretty impressive effects on reducing anxiety it also can have pretty impressive effects in improving fertility in particular in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome and here I'm referring specifically to myoinositol because it comes in several forms and it does appear that 900 milligrams of inositol can improve sleep and can reduce anxiety perhaps when taken at that dosage or higher dosages I will just confess first of all I don't have OCD although I will also confess that when I was a child I had a transient tick I've talked about this on podcast before it was a grunting tick so when I was about six or seven I recall a trip to Washington DC with my family where I was feeling a strong desire or need even as I recall to to Grunt in order to clear something in my throat but I didn't have anything in my throat it was I didn't have a cold or any postnasal drip it was really just the feeling that I needed to do that to release some sort of tension and I remember my dad at the time telling me don't do that you know don't do that it's not not good to grunt or something like that I think he saw that it was It was kind of compulsive behavior and so I would actually hide in the backseat of the rental car and do it or I'd hide in my room fortunately for me it was transient I think about 6 months or a year later it disappeared although I did notice actually an ex-girlfriend of mine pointed out that when I get very tired and I've been working very long hours sometimes that grunting tick will reappear what does that mean do I have Tourette's I don't know maybe I was never diagnosed with tourettes do I have OCD maybe um I certainly could be accused of having obsessive compulsive personality disorder which we'll um talk about still in a few minutes but the point here is that many children transiently Express ticks or low-level tourettes or OCD and again transiently and it disappears over time so inositol has been explored in a bunch of different contexts including for tick and OCD Etc uh going back to to inositol and its current use or I should say my current use I've been taking 900 milligrams of inositol as an addition to my existing toolkit for Sleep which I've talked about many times on this podcast and other podcasts consists of magnesium 3 and8 appenine and theanine if you want to know more about that kit you can go to our newsletter neural Network newsletter at hubman lab.com the toolkit for sleep is there you don't even have to sign up for the newsletter but it'll give you a flavor of the sorts of things that are in the newsletter in any case I've been um experimenting a bit uh with taking 900 milligrams of myoinositol either alone or combination with that sleep kit and I must say the sleep I've been getting on in ocl is extremely deep um and does seem to lead to enhanced levels of focus and alertness during the day and perhaps you're noticing that because I'm talking more quickly on this podcast than in previous podcast no I'm just kidding I don't think the two things related any kind of causal way the point here is that inositol is known to be pretty effective in reducing anxiety but when taken at very high dosages can it do the same at low dosages we don't know I would consider 900 milligrams a low dose most of this given the fact that most of the studies of vosol have explored very high dosages like even 10 or 12 grams per day which I must say seems exceedingly high and they do report that some of the subjects in those EXP expent actually sto taking the inositol because of gastric discomfort or gastric distress as it's called so I've reported my results with sleep in a kind of anecdotal way um they certainly aren't peer-reviewed studies that I described about my own experience in an anecdotal way but nonetheless it's been explored that um you know things like glycine which is another uh which is an amino acid which also acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain taking at very high dosages 60 grams per day that is a absolutely astonishing high amount of glycine I would not recommend taking that much glycine unless you're part of a study where they tell you to and you know it's safe um 18 Mill 18 gram excuse me of inositol these are very very high dosages used in these studies nonetheless there's some interesting data about inositol leading to um some Al alleviation of OCD symptoms or partial alleviation of OCD symptoms in as little as 2 weeks after initiating um the supplement protoc so I think there's a great future for these neutrals meaning I think more systematic exploration in particular of lower dosages in the context of of OCD treatment and as we saw before for the ssris and other prescription drug treatments I think there really needs to be an exploration of these neutraceuticals in combination with behavioral therapies and who knows maybe with brain machine interface like trans cranial magnetic stimulation as well now way back at the beginning of the episode I alluded to the fact that OCD is one thing obsessive compulsive disorder and it's truly a disorder and it's truly debilitating and it's extremely common and then there's this other thing called obsessive compulsive personality disorder which is distinct from that does not have the intrusive component so people don't feel overwhelmed or overtaken by these thoughts rather they find that the obsessions can sometimes serve them or they even welcome them I think many of us know people like this I perhaps even could be accused or who knows maybe have been accused of having an obsessive compulsive personality at times why do I draw this distinction well first of all we've come to a point in human history I think in large part because of social media but also in large part because there are a number of discussions being held about mental health that have brought terms like trauma depression OCD Etc into the common vernacular so that people will say ah you're so OCD or someone will say I was traumatized by that or I was traumatized by this we should be very careful right I'm certainly not the word police but we should be very careful in the use of certain types of language especially language that has real psychiatric and psychological definitions because it can really draw us off course in providing relief for some of these syndromes for instance the word trauma is thrown around left and right nowadays I was traumatized by this or that caused trauma or you're giving me trauma listen realize that many people are traumatized by certain events including things that are said to them I absolutely acknowledge that hence our episodes on trauma and Trauma treatment several of them in fact Dr kti Dr uh David Spiegel and then dedicated solo episodes with just me blabbing about trauma and Trauma treatment but as Dr Ki so appropriately pointed out trauma is really something that changes our neural circuitry and therefore for our thoughts and our behaviors in a very persistent way that is detrimental to us not every bad event is traumatizing not everything that we dislike or even that we hate or that feels terrible to us is traumatizing for something to reach the level of trauma it really needs to change our neural circuitry and therefore our thoughts and our behaviors in a persistent way that is maladaptive for us similarly just calling someone obsessive is one thing saying that someone has OCD or assuming one has OCD simply because they have a personality or a phenotype as we say where they need things in perfect order like I find myself correcting these pens making sure that the Caps are F facing in the same direction for instance right now that is not the same as OCD if for instance I can tolerate these pens being at different orientation or even throw the cap on the floor or something it doesn't create a lot of anxiety for me I confess it creates a little bit in the moment but then I can forget about it in move on that's one of the key distinctions between obsessive compulsive personality disorder and obsess compulsive disorder in its strictest form now once one hears that OCD is different than obsessive compulsive personality disorder because of this difference in how intrusive the thoughts are or not then that's useful but it really doesn't tell us anything about what is happening mechanistically in one situation or another fortunately there are beautiful data again from Dr Blair Simpson's lab and you can tell based on the number of studies that I've referred to from her laboratory that she's truly one of the luminaries in this field that there really are some fundamental wiring differences and behavioral differences and psychological differences between people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and those who have obsessive compulsive Personality Disorder so this is a study first author Pinto p i n t o entitled capacity to delay reward differentiates obsessive compulsive disorder and obsessive compulsive personality disorder and the methods in this study were to take 25 people with OCD and 25 people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder and 25 people who have both because it is possible to have both and that's important to point out and 25 so-called healthy controls people that don't have obsessive compulsive personality disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder they take clinical assessments and then they took a number of tests that probed their ability to defer gratification something called in the laboratory we call it delayed discounting so their ability to defer gratification ation through a task where they can either accept reward right away or accept reward later some of you may have heard of the two marshmallow task this is a based on a study that was performed years ago on young children at Stanford and elsewhere where they take young children into a room they offer them a marshmallow kids like marshmallows generally and you say you can eat the marshmallow right now or you can wait some period of time and if you are able to wait and not eat the marshmallow you can have two marshmallows and in general children want two marshmallows more than they want one marshmallow so really what you're probing is their ability to access delayed gratification and they're very entertaining um even truly um amusing uh videos of this on the internet so if you just do two marshmallow task video and you go into YouTube what you'll find is that the children will use all sorts of strategies to delay gratification some of the kids will cover the marshmallow others will talk to the marshmallow and say I know you're not that delicious you look delicious but no you're not delicious they'll engage with the marshmallow in all sorts of cute ways they'll turn around and try you know avoidance which actually speaks to a whole category of behaviors that people with OCD also use I'm not saying these kids at OCD but avoidance behaviors are very much a component of OCD people really trying to avoid the thing that evokes the uh the obsession well some kids are able to delay gratification some aren't and it's debatable as to whether or not the kids that are able to delay gratification go on to have more successful lives or not initially that was the conclusion of those studies there's still a lot of debate about it we'll bring an expert on to give us the final conclusion on this because there is one and it's very interesting and not intuitive nonetheless adults are also faced with decisions every day all day as to whether or not they can delay gratification and this study used a not a two marshmallow task but a game that involved rewards where people could delay in order to get greater rewards later what is the conclusion well first of all obsessive compulsive and obsessive compulsive personality disorder subjects both showed impairments in their psychosocial functioning and quality of life they had compulsive Behavior so these are people that are suffering in their life because their compulsions are really strong so it's not just being really nitpicky or really orderly in one case and having full-blown OCD in the other both sets of subjects are challenged in life because they're having relationship issues or job related issues ETC because they are that compulsive however the individuals with obsessive compulsive personality disorder they discounted the value of delayed gratification significantly less than those with obsessive compulsive disorder what do I mean they are both impairing disorders that are marked by compulsive behaviors here I'm I'm paraphrasing but they can be differentiated by the presence of obsessions in OCD so obsessions in OCD people with OCD are absolutely fixing on certain ideas and those ideas are intrusive again that's the Hallmark theme and by an excessive capacity to delay reward in obsessive compulsive personality disorder that is people who have obsessive compulsive personality disorder are really good at delaying gratification so they are able to concentrate very intensely and perform very intensely in ways that allow them to instill order such that they can delay rewards now you can see why this Contour of symptoms meaning that the people with OCD are experiencing intrusive thoughts whereas the people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder show an enhanced ability to defer gratification you could see how that would lead to very different outcomes people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder can actually leverage that personality disorder to perform better in certain domains of life life not all domains of life because remember again these people are in this study and they're showing up as experiencing challenges in life because of their obsessive compulsive personality disorder nonetheless people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder you could imagine would be very good at say architecture or anything that involves instilling a ton of order Maybe sushi chef for instance maybe a chef in general I know chefs that just kind of throw things around like the um like the chef on The Muppets and just like throw things everywhere and still amazing food and then there are some people that are incredibly exacting they're just incredibly precise I think that movie what is it hero Dreams of Sushi that movie is incredible certainly not saying he has obsessive compulsive personality disorder but I think it's fair to say that he is obsessive or extremely meticulous and orderly about everything from start to finish you can imagine a huge array of different occupations and life endeavors where this would be beneficial science being one of them where data collection and Analysis is exceedingly important that want to be precise or mathematics or physics or engineering anything where Precision has a payoff and gaining Precision takes time and delay of immediate gratification you can imagine that obsessive compulsive personality disorder would synergize well with those sorts of activities and professions whereas obsessive compulsive disorder is really intrusive it's preventing functionality in many different domains of life so the key takeaway here is that when we use the words obsessive compulsive or we call someone obsessive compulsive or we are trying to evaluate whether or not we are obsessive compulsive it's very important that we highlight that obsessive compulsive disorder is very intrusive it involves intrusive thoughts and it interrupts with normal functioning in life whereas obsessive compulsive personality disorder while it can interrupt normal functioning in life it also can be productive it can enhance functioning in life not just in work but perhaps at home as well if you are somebody and you have family members that really Place enormous value on having a beautiful and highly organized home well then it could lend itself well to that it's going to be a matter of degrees of course none of these things is an absolute it's going to be on a Continuum but I think it is fair to say that obsessive compulsive disorder whether or not in mild moderate or severe form is impairing normal functioning whereas obsessive compulsive personality disorder there's a range of expressions of that some of which can be adaptive some of which can be maladaptive captive and again it's all going to depend on context before we conclude I do want to touch on something that I think a lot of people experience and that's superstitions superstitions are fascinating and there's some fascinating research on superstitions one particular study that I'm a big fan of is the work of Beno lki at Harvard he studies motor sequences and motor learning and he has beautiful data on how people learn for instance a tennis swing and the patterns that they engage in early on and then the patterns of swinging that they swinging the racket that is that they engage in later as they acquire more skill and basically the takeaway is that the amount of error or variation from swing to swing is dramatically reduced as they acquire skill that's all fine and good and there's some beautiful mechanistic data that he and others have discovered um to support how that comes to be but they also explore animal models in particular rats pressing sequences of buttons and levers to obtain a reward Believe It or Not rats are pretty smart I've seen this with my own eyes you can teach a rat to press a lever for a pellet of food rats can also learn to press levers in a particular sequence in order to gain a piece of food and they can actually learn to press an enormous number of levers in very particular sequences in order to obtain pellets of food you can also give them little butt buttons to press or um even a paddle to or I should say a pedal excuse me to stomp on with their foot in order to obtain a petal of food basically rats can learn exactly what they need to do in order to obtain a piece of food especially if they're made a little bit hungry first B's lab has published beautiful data showing that as animals and humans come to learn a particular motor sequence very often they will introduce motor patterns in that sequence that are irrelevant to the outcome and yet that persist if you've ever watched a game of baseball you've seen this before oftentimes the pitcher up on the mound will bring the ball to their chin they'll look over their shoulder they'll look back over the other shoulder and then they will of course reel back and pitch the ball but if you watch closely often times there are components in the motor sequence which are completely unrelated to the pitch they're not looking necessarily to see if someone's stealing a b they're not necessarily looking down at home plate where the batter is they're also doing things like touching the back of their ear before they bring the ball to their chin or adjusting their hat and if you watch individual pictures what you'll find is that they'll do the same sequence of completely irrelevant motor patterns before each and every single pitch similarly rats that have been trained to for instance hit two levers and step on a pedal with their left hind foot and then Tap a button up above that is the red button will do that to gain a piece of food but sometimes they'll also introduce a pattern into that motor sequence where they will shake their tail a little bit or they'll turn their head a little bit or they'll move their ears a little bit Etc motor patterns that have nothing to do with obtaining the particular outcome in mind in other words you could eliminate certain components of the motor sequence and it would not matter the rat would still get the pellet the pitcher would still be able to pitch and yet that can produced because somehow because they were performed again and again prior to successful trials the rat or the human baseball pitcher comes to believe in some way that it was involved in generating the outcome hence Superstition right I confess I have a few superstitions I occasionally will knock on wood I'll say something that I want to happen and I'll say well knock on wood and I'll just do it and occasionally I'll challenge myself and think I don't want to knock don't knock on wood Andrew don't do that you know no one I I don't think anyone wants to be superstitious I certainly don't and so every once in a while I'll just challenge it and I I won't actually knock on wood I'm admitting this to you to kind of um I guess normalize some of this some people have superstitions that border on or even become compulsions they really come to believe that if they don't knock on wood that something terrible is going to happen maybe something in particular or in the case of the baseball pitcher they come to believe believe that if they don't touch their right ear before they reel back on the pitch that the pitch won't be any good or that they're going to lose the game I don't know what their thought process is now I also don't know what the rat is thinking but the rat is clearly doing something or thinking something is related to the final outcome I don't know of any studies where they've intervened with the particular Superstition like behaviors of the Rat to see whether or not the rat somehow doesn't continue to do the sequence to get the pellet we don't know they rats I don't speak rat most people don't or if you speak to a rat if it speaks back it's not in English anyway the point is that superstitions are beliefs that we on an individual scale come to believe are linked to the probability of an outcome when in fact we know we actually know in our rational minds they have no real relationship to the outcome superstitions can become full-blown compulsions and obsessions when we repeat them often enough that they become automatic and I think this is what we observe most of the time when we see a pitcher touching their ear or for instance in tennis you see this a lot you'll see someone um they they'll slap their shoes often I see this they'll like slap the their unders sides of their souls they may tell themselves that this is I don't know maybe moving out some of the dust or something in the bottoms of their souls that gives them more traction and they want that to be ready for the serve or something like that and maybe there's some truth to that but here what we're referring to are behaviors that really have no rational relationship to the outcome and yet we perform in a compulsive way people with OCD yes tend to have more superstitions people with more superstitions yes tend to have a tendency towards OCD and I should mention obsessive compulsive personality disorder if you think way back to the first part of this episode when I was just describing what the brain does right what does your brain do housekeeping functions to keep you alive and it's a prediction machine your neural circuits you have an enormous amount of biological investment of real estate literally cells and chemicals that are there to try and make your world predictable and to try and give you control or at least the sense of control over that world and that's a normal process low-level superstitions moderate superstitions represent a kind of a healthy range I would say of behaviors that are aimed at generating predictability that don't disrupt normal function obsessive compulsive personality disorder provided it's not too severe would I think represent the next level along that Continuum and then obsessive compulsive disorder as I pointed out earlier is really a case of Highly debilitating highly intrusive really overtake of neural circuitry over our thoughts and behaviors that requires very dedicated very persistent and very effective treatments in order to stop those obsessions and compulsions and the anxiety that links them somewhat counterintuitively by teaching people to tolerate that level of increased anxiety and interrupt those patterns and fortunately as we described earlier such treatments exist cognitive behavioral therapy drug treatments like ssris Al though also drug treatments that tap into the glutamate system and into perhaps also the dopamine system the so-called netics and then as we described there's now an extensive exploration of things like ketamine psilocybin cannabis the initial studies don't seem to hold much promise for cannabis and CBD and the treatment of OCD but who knows maybe more studies will come along that will change that story then of course brain machine interface like transcranial magnetic stimulation and then just to remind you what I already told you before combinations of Behavioral and drug treatments and brain machine interface I think is really where the future lies fortunately good treatment exist we cannot say that any one individual treatment works for everybody there are fairly large percentages of people that won't respond to one set of treatments or another and therefore one has to try different ones and then there are the so-called supplementation based or more holistic therapies today I've tried to cover each and all of these in a fairly substantial amount of detail I realize this is a fairly long episode that is intentional much like our episode on ADHD on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder I received an enormous number of requests to talk about OCD and my decision to make this a very long and detailed episode about OCD really doesn't stem from any desire to subject you to too much information or to avoid the opportunity to just list things off but what I've tried to provide is an opportunity to really drill deep into the neural circuitry and an understanding of where OCD comes from how OCD is different from things like like the personality disorders that I described and also to give you a sense of how the individual behavioral and drug treatments work and perhaps don't work so that you can really make the best informed choices again highlighting the fact that OCD is an extremely common extremely common and yet extremely debilitating condition and one that I hope that if any of you have or that you know people that have it that you'll both gain sympathy and understanding for what they're dealing with perhaps as a consequence of some of the information presented today and maybe help them direct their treatment find better treatment and of course apply those treatments for some relief if you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can also leave us up to a fstar review and give us feedback the best place to give us written feedback however is on the YouTube 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for the use of cold for the use of heat in health and Etc all of that's there and if you sign up for the newsletter you'll get the monthly newsletter sent to you we don't share your email information with EV anybody and we have a very clear privacy policies there so again it's the neural network newsletter available within the newsletter tab under the menu at huberman lab.com in closing I'd like to thank you for this in-depth discussion about the mechanisms and various treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder and some of the Related Disorders and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]