Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

You need to flip the light switch seven times before leaving a room. You need to rub your feet together seven times before putting on your shoes. You've never touched a revolving door. If you hit three red lights on your way to the grocery store, you need to turn around and cancel your trip. You'll try again tomorrow.

You might have OCD. It's a mental disorder that forces people into sometimes strange compulsive activity. Sufferers have certain behaviors they feel compelled to do in certain situations. In the worst-case situations, people with OCD can get stuck in distracting and harmful behavioral loops.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is an actual mental illness that can be diagnosed by a phyciatrist, and treated using medicine and other kinds of therepy. In popular discourse, though, it's often used as a term for people who really just have garden variety anal-retentiveness. A persnickety person doesn't necessarily have OCD. But people often throw the term around when describing someone who demands significant control over most situations.

Someone who spends 15 minutes every morning making sure that the bathroom towels are lined up perfectly on the towel rack might have mild OCD. They might also just be excessively tidy. It's a matter of degrees.

Meanwhile, having every minute of every day planned out in an exact manner might serve as a symptom of OCD. Or it might mark a busy, high-functioning professional trying to run their day as efficiently as possible. Again, a matter of context.