I Thought Climbing Would Make My OCD Worse. Then It Forced Me Out of My Head.

People like to joke that they “have OCD” when they straighten a crooked picture frame or color-code their closet. I’ve heard it at work, in coffee shops, and hanging out with my friends. Someone laughs, “Ugh, my OCD is acting up,” because their notes look messy or their phone apps aren’t arranged just right. The room laughs with them. I usually do, too, out of habit. But every time, something in me curls in on itself, the way a body does when bracing for an impact only it can see coming.

And then there are celebrity moments, the ones that ripple wider. Recently, Khloé Kardashian admitted she “loves” her OCD, discussing how satisfying it feels to keep her home neat. The internet flipped, people debated, experts weighed in but what stayed with me was not the outrage. It was a reminder of how Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is reduced to an aesthetic, stripped into something quirky, far from the reality it carries in my day-to-day life.​

I get it. That version of OCD, the one Hollywood jokes about, sounds harmless. Articles, TikToks, and Instagram stories all show how OCD gets reduced to clean closets, neat pantries, or organized cookie jars.​

But for me?​

For me, OCD isn’t cute, or quirky, or a preference for neatness. Mine looks more like a smoke alarm that never turns off. It’s being ambushed into fear by my own mind, constantly.

A threat. The kind that impacts every waking moment of my life. The kind that makes me skip meals, bail on plans last minute, isolate myself from loved ones, and lose sleep.​

OCD is a condition in which intrusive, unwanted thoughts or fears called obsessions create significant anxiety. To ease this distress, a person may feel driven to perform repetitive behaviors or mental rituals, known as compulsions. These cycles of obsessive thoughts and ritualistic actions can interfere with daily life. Even when someone tries to dismiss the troubling thoughts, they often return, reinforcing the urge to repeat the same behaviors and continuing the cycle of OCD.

I have what my therapist calls the “Pure O” form of OCD, which is mostly mental and invisible. So one would never think I would have it. Certainly not after looking at my messy closet or crowded cabinets.

“Pure O” OCD is when one experiences obsessive, intrusive, distressing thoughts, images, or urges and often engages in mental rather than physical compulsions. Yes, sometimes I have to physically act on my compulsion, like washing my hands exactly three times to dismiss my brain’s certainty that I’ll get ill. Other times, I have to wipe down the counter every single time something touches it. I often blame the COVID pandemic for those compulsions.

Most of the time, the battle happens internally. I get pulled into long, exhausting spirals of overthinking–not about cleanliness or order, but about danger, responsibility, and loss. My OCD doesn’t fixate on one thing; it latches onto whatever matters most to me at the moment. One intrusive thought can catch and multiply: What if this meal makes me sick? Did I cross-contaminate? What if I gain weight? A simple thing like eating became a minefield for me, so bad it developed to the start of an eating disorder in 2024 that I still navigate to this day.

Other days, I find the thoughts attaching themselves to my relationships. I replay conversations until they blur, dissecting my tone, my words, intentions. Terrified I’ve hurt someone or ruined something without realizing it. I’ve sabotaged recent romantic relationships this way—trapped in a loop of needing certainty about how I feel, how they feel, whether something is “right” or “wrong,” until the relationship inevitably collapses under the weight of my own doubt. And the cycle repeats.

Threaded through everything is constant fear of death—my own, or someone else’s. My father passed away suddenly when I was young, and since then my brain has learned to scan for danger everywhere. I fixate on illnesses, on accidents, on the idea that a normal day could turn catastrophic without warning.

My brain tries to “solve” these fears the only way it knows how: through endless attempts at control and reassurance. Checking, rechecking, replaying conversations, analyzing my own intentions, calling family members asking for reassurance, scanning through memories frame by frame like some sort of internal detective.

I can lose hours inside those loops, trying to outthink danger or uncertainty, convinced that if I just think hard enough, I can keep myself safe. But that’s never the case. It only grows louder the more I tend to it.

The World Health Organizations considers OCD to be one of the ten most debilitating health conditions. In fact, about 1 in 40 adults and 1 in 100 children in the United States have OCD.

It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting.

Before I started climbing in 2021, I lived almost entirely in my head. It felt like my body existed only as a vessel for fear – something dragged behind the machinery of my thoughts always working overtime. Which is the space my mind occupied when I wound up at a local climbing gym in San Francisco with a friend I recently met.​

I didn’t go looking for clarity or healing; I wasn’t expecting anything except for sore forearms and maybe some new friends. I had just moved to California after living in Florida my whole life. Fresh from graduating college, with no job lined up, and far from all my friends, my life during the pandemic was a breeding ground for my OCD.

For the first time, control meant something entirely different. Climbing didn’t calm my thoughts. But it did give me a new way to relate to fear.​

At first, climbing felt like the last thing someone with my kind of brain should try. It expects you to embrace uncertainty, commit to movement without rehearsing every possible outcome, and let go of the illusion of perfect control. Basically, everything OCD doesn’t allow me.

But maybe that contradiction was what I needed.

I felt it first in the gym, halfway up a top-rope route under the fluorescent lights, chalk dust everywhere, the chattering of climbers below. My feet slipped on plastic holds, my forearms burned, and I couldn’t stop long enough to inventory every thought I had going on. If I hesitated, I’d pump out. If I overthought the move, I stalled. The only way forward was to move.

On the wall, control doesn’t mean safety in the way my brain tries to manufacture it. Control becomes something quieter, steadier. It’s trusting my feet to stick, trusting my belayer to catch me, trusting the rope to do its job – and trusting myself to take the next move without demanding certainty first. In that space, the hundred outcomes my brain wants to catastrophize collapses into one simple question: Can I make this move right now?

​Climbing demands presence, and that is something OCD rarely allows me to experience. I can be lying in my bed and feel miles away from my body, trapped in my own mental reruns. So bad that I often experience the phenomenon of depersonalization.

But when I’m 50 feet up and trying to move from a sloper to a crimp, the here-and-now is the only place I can be.

There is no room for rituals or reassurance-seeking when gravity is insisting I commit. The rock doesn’t care about my fears or the catastrophes playing in my head. It cares only about what I do next, the angle of my knee, the chalk on my fingers, the tension in my core, and the tiny shifts in my center of gravity. It pulls me back into reality when my mind wants to escape it.

And sometimes, that tiny shift in attention feels like relief.

There’s a route I’ll never forget, Crossbow Chaos Theory (5.11) in Ten Sleep, Wyoming. Probably one of my favorite routes to this day. Steep overhung limestone, sharp pockets, and tension foot placements that force you to commit. It’s a route that doesn’t just test your body; it tests every part of your mind.

I pulled through the opening sequence feeling solid, but as I approached the first overhung crux, the intrusive thoughts all went off at once:

What if you slip? What if you get a pulley injury? If you get hurt, you won’t be able to climb again. What if you embarrass yourself? What if the rope gets cut from the overhang? What if you fall to your death this time?

It was the exact kind of spiraling that usually derails me—the sudden rush of catastrophic what-ifs that feel louder than my own breath.

On that trip, my one and only goal was to send a 5.11 after recovering from an Ulnar Nerve injury on my left arm. I’ve spent months working on recovery and finally felt strong enough to push myself. I couldn’t let my OCD get in the way of that.​

But this time, I did not let it. I neither down climbed nor asked to be lowered.​

I stayed.

My friends were supporting me below. My belayer said something simple: “Noura, you’re strong. You got this.” For a moment, it cut through the noise just enough to reach me.

I took one shaky inhale, placed my foot on the world’s tiniest limestone nub slightly above my waist, slotted my fingers into the pocket, and moved through the roof.

“Holy shit!” I shouted. Not because I felt brave—I absolutely did not—but because in that exact second, doing the move felt easier than obeying the panic in my head.

My hand landed on the sloper, my body followed, and suddenly I was through the crux. The intrusive thoughts dissolved into background static as the rest of the route unfolded above me.

No lowering, no reset. No second attempt. I sent the climb in the same go, with the obsessions still in the room but not in charge.

I truly never felt so proud of myself.

My intrusive thoughts didn’t disappear after that day. They still show up, often uninvited and aggressively. But climbing gave me proof that I can keep going even when my mind is trying to convince me otherwise.

On the wall, I practice choosing action over rumination, breath over panic, presence over the disaster my brain loves to script. Those lessons follow me down to the ground.​

I know OCD will still be a part of my life. But so is that memory in Ten Sleep, where I learned that the thoughts and uncertainty can still come with me—they just don’t get to lead.

Climbing doesn’t erase my OCD, but it shows me how to move with it.

What it offers me, each time I tie in, is something quieter but more useful than a solution: space. Hanging on a hold, feeling the rock bite back, I get just enough distance to recognize my intrusive thoughts as only thoughts, not truths.

In that small gap between my thoughts and movement, the fear loosens. And for a moment, sometimes only a breath, I feel free.

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