Obsession

Okay, I admit it, I'm obsessive. Have a personality that leans towards obsessive- compulsive sometimes. Not noticably; I mean, I can't resist straightening a pile of papers on my desk, but the usual chick things like chocolate don't really do it (although I do have to finish the box, I don't have to do it immediately, and I have a lovely team at work who'll happily sacrifice their waistlines to help). No, what I obsess over is relatively-simple puzzles. I can spend hours piecing together online jigsaws, pretending to myself that I'm learning things about colour, whilst listening to tv detective puzzles, and I daren't keep any card games on my PC lest I start playing them repeatedly. And this puzzles me: why do I do this? What part of my personality can it possibly be satisfying. And if it doesn't satisfy (and it doesn't), how can I program myself to stop before I start? I know that sometimes the absence of thought is comforting but unsatisfying, and that obsessive puzzling usually happens when I'm tired. But I'm puzzled (to pardon the pun) about the mechanisms of this.

So today's topic for analysis is obsession. Possibly even obsessively.
Hmmm... the psych definition of OCD is obsession = involuntary, repetitive, and unwelcome thoughts or images that upset or interfere with an individual's life, and compulsion = action that temporarily relieves the anxiety caused by obsession. Which immediately broadens my own naive repetition-based definition. And at that point, my ability to sit playing games for hours deviates from the psych definitions of obsession. These include a sense of reality about the obsession (most people know that the obsessed topic is unreal; those that don't are said to have poor insight), and an underlying fear of "what if" scenarios. There's a subset of OCD, impulse control disorders, that could match, but right now my going-to-sleep obsession is kicking in. Maybe more later, but I may have just cracked the puzzling obsession by using the analysis obsession. Hmmm... I can feel a top-trumps-style game developing here...