What It Feels Like to Live With Compulsive Checking

A nurse who gets to the car park and cannot drive away. She needs to go back and check the medication cabinet – not because she thinks she left it open, but because she cannot leave with the uncertainty of not being certain. She goes back. The cabinet is locked. She already knew this. And she drives away, only to arrive at the motorway junction and wonder about the window she left open on the ward. She pulls over. She calls the ward. The window is closed. She drives on. Fifteen minutes later: but the call I made – did I actually hear the answer correctly?

A software developer who cannot send a message. Every email gets read four times before sending – not because he is slow, but because each reading surfaces a possible error that wasn't there before. The reading is not improving the email. It is fuelling the doubt. He sends it. Immediately checks his sent folder. Re-reads it. Finds the thing he was sure was wrong. It isn't wrong. He closes the sent folder. Five minutes later, opens it again.

A mother who lies awake at midnight running through a list. Back door. Front door. Cooker. Oven. Kettle. Upstairs windows. She has checked all of these – some of them twice – before bed. She knows she has checked. The list still runs. She goes downstairs. She checks the doors again. She comes back to bed. Within ten minutes, the list begins again from the back door.

These are different lives, different concerns, different objects and routines. What they share is a specific kind of exhaustion – the exhaustion of attention that is never allowed to rest, of a mind that cannot finish, of a system running on alert that has forgotten what rest feels like. The checking is not the whole of these lives. But it is present in all of them, every day, taking time and attention and leaving less of both for everything else.