Summer is supposed to be fun, right? It’s all about sunshine, swimming, time outdoors—and, for some of us, sudden overwhelming fears that we’ll develop skin cancer as the result of a sunburn, drown during an ocean swim, or get bitten by a tick and contract Lyme disease.
Sound familiar? That could be because obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can and will find things to latch onto under any circumstances, but summer can often provide a particularly robust slate of options. If you feel like the hottest months of the year make your symptoms more difficult to manage, you’re not alone. But OCD doesn’t have to define your summer.
Why summer can supercharge triggers
While struggling in summertime can feel deeply isolating, much of what defines summer in the popular imagination is also perfectly poised to create a specific and predictable set of triggers for many people. OCD attaches to whatever’s around, and summer often changes what’s around and opens up new opportunities for obsession and anxiety.
For example, hot weather can cause physical symptoms like a faster heartbeat or nausea, which may spark feelings of panic, or mimic health concerns or bodily responses your OCD compels you to monitor for. High temperatures might also mean that you change your fashion choices so that you can stay cool, which means more exposed skin and, for some, increased anxieties about skin cancer or physical appearance.
Summer can also be upsetting because it’s supposed to be so much fun. You might scroll through social media or overhear coworkers discussing beach plans and feel like OCD is stealing another season from you while everyone else has a ball. This can feel even more frustrating if you previously felt like your symptoms were well-managed—especially if that feeling led you to forgo the specialized OCD therapy that has worked in the past, meaning you’re trying to take on OCD alone, or without a full toolkit.
Bodies, BFRBs, and the exposure that comes with warm weather
Summer can also supercharge body-focused repetitive behaviors, or BFRBs. These are things like skin-picking, hair-pulling, and nail-biting, and when June, July, and August bring exposed skin and increased sweat, these behaviors can feel harder to manage. More visible skin can mean more picking, more visible marks from picking, and more difficulty hiding those marks—creating intense feelings of shame or the desire to avoid social events where your appearance could be scrutinized. Left unchecked, various BFRBs can cause physical damage including soreness, open wounds, scarring, infections, or hair loss.
When you don’t know how to manage OCD symptoms, you may withdraw from summer activities or decline plans because you’re worried someone will notice these behaviors, or the marks they may have created. This is not an indication that you’re weak, or lacking in self-control. These behaviors are patterns your brain has learned to follow in reaction to specific urges, sensations, emotions, and environments. Spending more time in shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits, often in social situations, can also make you notice your own body more, causing more worry or self-consciousness, which ultimately may feed the urge to engage in BFRBs. This entire process is like a groove carved into your brain.
Grooming compulsions, like shaving, waxing, tweezing, checking your nails, and reapplying makeup, can be amplified in summer for the same reasons. More of you is visible, and this can lead to spiraling thoughts about your appearance and presentation, like, “Do I have too much body hair? Or not enough? Will the people at the family barbecue be weird to me for having armpit hair, or growing out my beard? Can people tell that I’m queer even though I shaved my legs? If I shave, can I even call myself a feminist?”
Summer doesn’t create these behaviors and thoughts, but it amplifies them so that they’re harder to ignore, and to hide.
Season-specific fears—harm, health, and heat as a physical trigger
Along with summer’s heat and sunshine often comes a long list of advice about how to best keep yourself and others safe, and all of these can be prime territory for OCD to elbow its way in.
If you have health concern OCD or contamination OCD, which can cause obsessive fear that you will cause injury or illness to yourself or someone else, even putting sunscreen on can be a trial as you compulsively reapply out of concern that you missed a spot or didn’t use enough. “Touching grass” can feel impossible if you’re obsessively worried about ticks—some people with OCD have elaborate checking rituals and wear three different types of repellent, and it still doesn’t feel like enough. And doesn’t it seem like every summer brings the same terrifying headlines about brain-eating amoebas lurking in popular swimming spots (not to mention this year’s new addition of diarrhea parasites to worry about)?
If you have harm OCD, which makes you terrified you’ve grievously hurt someone, you might have intrusive, obsessive fears that you’ll somehow be responsible for a pet being locked in a hot car (even if you don’t have one), or that someone will drown at a pool or beach while you’re nearby, making you feel you should’ve somehow saved them. If you have responsibility OCD, which causes an outsized sense of your own role in all that happens around you (but especially the bad things), record-high temperatures in the summer could send you spiraling about whether you’re “doing enough” to curb climate change. These kinds of anxieties can drive you to avoid summer activities altogether out of fear that the “worst-case scenario” in your head will come true.
Also important to know and deeply frustrating: heat itself can be a physical trigger. The way the body can behave in extreme heat (elevated heart rate, sweating, dizziness, nausea) is very similar to the way it behaves when you’re in a state of panic—or battling an infection. If you’re afraid of panicking, or getting sick in any way, these responses to the heat can feel especially upsetting.
For people whose OCD includes groin sensations, sweating in the heat can make it harder to discern these symptoms, leading to terrifying spirals for those whose OCD causes sexually intrusive thoughts. And if you and everyone around you is wearing shorts, it can feel like your worst fears are on display for the world. This can also result in more intense compulsive checking to see if you’re attracted to those around you—which can be especially common for people navigating sexual orientation OCD, which causes obsessive concerns that the sexuality you say you are is not your true self.
How evidence-based treatment can help you reclaim your summer
Summer presents its own set of challenges when it comes to OCD. But OCD doesn’t have to be in control. There are specific modes of therapy which, when paired with the attention of a careful and trained therapist, can be very helpful. And if there’s anything that’s “in” this summer, it’s leaning into your values. If you want to swim, hike, and be present at social events, the values that drive those goals—the desire to experience and value nature, the sense of deep importance you place on good relationships—can anchor you as you pursue OCD treatment that gets you closer to them.
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective form of treatment for OCD, can help you with the fear-driven pieces of your summer struggles. ERP works by teaching you how to tolerate the unique anxieties created by summer, without engaging in compulsions in response. Depending on the specifics of your obsessions and compulsions, you might engage in exposures like going near the water even when intrusive thoughts about drowning flood your mind, letting one tick check or application of sunscreen be enough, and setting a limit on the amount of googling climate disasters you’re allowed to do—even though you’re worried about the environment.
Habit reversal training (HRT) is a therapeutic technique that can work in harmony with ERP to decrease the tendency to engage in BFRBs. It works by giving you the tools to be aware of when, where, and how the impulse to engage in your specific habits kicks in. Once you have identified your triggers, you can learn non-harmful competing responses, which reduce the behaviors. Because this type of awareness has the potential to tip over into the OCD compulsion of self-monitoring, it’s important that you work with a therapist who is knowledgeable about both BFRBs and OCD.
At NOCD, our therapists are trained in several evidence-based approaches—including ERP therapy for OCD and HRT for BFRBs—so care can be matched to what you’re experiencing. To learn more and get started with treatment that can help, book a free call with our team.
Whether you want to have a hot girl summer or hunker down in the AC and wait for the heat to dissipate, you deserve to move through these months making choices because you want to, not because OCD is telling you what to do.
