The Relentless Ad-Generator and the Clickbait Pro

For a long time, companies have competed for our attention, hoping to convince us that we need whatever they are trying to sell. In today’s online world, we often have the option to opt in or out of targeted, customized, or personalized ads. Sometimes it makes sense why we’re being shown a particular ad on our web browser or social media platform. If I were searching for health-related topics, I might start seeing ads about protein shakes or anti-aging products. Other times, I get something so random that I think, “Why the heck am I being shown this ad?”

Well, OCD is kind of like a very persistent ad generator. Sometimes it shows us things that seem relevant based on our life situation or personal history, and other times it shows us things so “out there” that we feel compelled to give them attention. Either way, we can learn to treat these ads as irrelevant. We can acknowledge their presence, but we do not have to give them our attention.

Salespeople and marketers need our attention to be successful. We cannot prevent ourselves from encountering ads or sales tactics, but we can learn to notice them without engaging. In the same way, we cannot prevent obsessions from occurring in the first place, but we can stop giving them so much attention. On the flip side, if we keep watching and clicking on ads, we tend to get shown more of them. How much of your life do you want to spend watching and clicking ads?

Modern marketing and sales will go to great lengths to get our attention. They target our insecurities: weight loss, hair loss, skin appearance, muscle mass, sex drive, and more. Like some forms of modern advertising, OCD often takes cheap shots at us. For example:

OCD: “If you don’t attend to this thing over here, that means you’re a bad person,” or “You better do this compulsion so you don’t get contaminated—and contaminate someone else.”

When we start learning to acknowledge these obsessions without giving them our attention, OCD may really up its game, much like a salesperson does. When a salesperson sees that we are not moving toward what they are selling, they may offer a discount or say something like, “Today is the last day of the sale!” These are attempts to get our full attention—attempts to get us to give in so we end up making a purchase.

We can loosen OCD’s grip on us by starting to recognize that it works in a similar way. For example:

OCD: “You sure you locked the front door?”

Me: “I see what you’re doing here, and I’m not going for it.”

OCD: “No, but seriously, if you didn’t, the new cat you adopted might get hurt by an intruder in the night, and it would be your fault.”

Me: “You’re really persistent today.”

OCD: “You realize that if you walk away, you can never take this back, right?”

Me: 

Just like a salesperson who ups their game when we resist, OCD has another tactic: clickbait. Many of us are familiar with the term clickbait—the sensationalized presentation of information designed to get us to click. It’s the kind of thumbnail or headline geared to tug at human curiosity. We usually find that, after we click, what we discover is underwhelming, misleading, or disappointing—sometimes leading us down a rabbit hole of even more clicking.

OCD is a clickbait pro, constantly conjuring up the perfect picture, thought, phrase, question, or mental image to get us to “click” by giving it attention. We cannot prevent ourselves from encountering clickbait, but we can learn to disregard it, just as we do with spam emails and texts. After all, how much of your life do you want to spend clicking on, well, clickbait?