Iām diagnosed with OCD. The obsession part is in the form of constantly looping thoughts, as you described. The clinical term is āintrusive thoughtsā and I think that with me they are thoughts that I repeated over and over until they became automatic, like a habit except itās not responding to anything I do.
Trying to make them go away, or gather enough evidence to falsify them, only directs more attention at them and they become even more entrenched. This is the theory behind ERP - Exposure-Response Prevention. This modality is the most successful OCD treatment that we have data on, so it's at least not entirely wrong.
Regarding strategies for maintaining functionality when these things are spun up to a degree that I'm distressed, I have a few:
1. Listening to a talk/podcast/news - basically someone else's words in my head. I stumbled into this one. I was feeling shitty but I ended up putting some spoken word on and I noticed my distress fell significantly. YMMV
2. "3 mindful breaths" as discussed by Pema Chodron. The technique is to stop whatever you're doing and just take one in-breath and out-breath. That's one. repeat twice more and check your thoughts, or more importantly check your bodily sensations. It does NOT have to be like deep breathing, although it also would be counterproductive to hyperventilate. Just whatever your respiration rate is at that moment. There's no object of focus, either. Just breathe and count to 3. I was skeptical until I tried it. It is not reliable at changing the words of the thoughts, but they seem to fade into the background. The tightness in my chest, however, relaxes significantly and that alone is worth the price of admission.
3. Mantra recitation (either out-loud or just mentally). This is something I do, because it was recommended to me by someone who knows me very well, cares a whole lot about me, and has never given me advice before that I was not intensely grateful for following. So in other words coming from her it's significant to me. She suggested a certain mantra. It's 100 syllables long. Most Buddhist mantras are shorter than one line of text if you print them out. I'm not above believing that this is how it works, though. Recalling a 100-syllable mantra, which is in Sanskrit, definitely resets my inner speech.
There's also something that I do which would not work for everyone, but it's that I leverage my ADHD tendencies for good. I can distract myself with anything. Check an email --> Look up terminology or something --> end up on wikipedia --> read 45 wikipedia articles that, for example start with something related to the terminology question, but at the end is something about the discography of the rock band The Who. This is literally what happened not too long ago. FWIW I can in some cases also leverage my OCD for good. I wish I could crash my ADHD into the OCD in Fermilab with the hope that they would cancel each other out, like matter encountering antimatter. They are basically opposites, right?
However, if I do need to absolutely make sure that I have left nothing to chance, e.g., getting through an airport on time, I can indulge in my desire to check, and re-check every detail while also wondering if there is some other contingency I should be handling.
