[Zoom Meeting] OCPD & Getting Lost in Details 🔬

“Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.”

OCPD Diagnostic Criteria (1 of 8)

This diagnostic criteria is often one that folks with OCPD immediately understand, they have implicit experiences – maybe even from the past few days, or in researching resources about OCPD itself – that make this one feel quite familiar. Of course not everyone struggles at the same level, or in the same way, but in our niche, it’s easy to joke about the real results of our obsession with details: endless lists, deep dives, a million Wikipedia tabs open, goals and subgoals and subgoals, etc.

Getting lost in the details is a symptom of OCPD that exists at the cross section of several psychological and therapeutic areas, including: learning how to learn, the science of memory and cognition, decision-making and executive control, emotions and overcontrol, environmental factors (rigid structures in culture, family life, etc) and self-directed habits that are nearly unconscious in how they play out!

Psychologists use phrases like “maladaptive preoccupation with details” to describe this phenomenon. This means that, in many cases, digging into the details can be functional, healthy, and an adaptive part of decision making or learning, but yes, there is the negative flip side to that as well.

When we talk about “getting lost in details” we are talking, in part, about metacognition and cognitive strategies / processes.

Let’s talk a little about metacognition and cognitive flexibility, since flexibility and adaptation are key skills to learn when you struggle with overcontrol. This is why some therapies that work best for disorders of overcontrol (OCPD, eating disorders, hoarding, etc) emphasize psychological flexibility – as in the case of Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO DBT)

OCPD is interesting, again, because maybe you are good at metacognition and flexibility for some tasks, but in other areas you struggle more than other people. This is normal! However, when it starts to heavily reduce your ability to complete things, communicate effectively, enjoy and thrive in your relationships / social life – that’s when taking a closer look at new skills will serve you best. Just because folks with OCPD struggle with procrastination or perfectionism, or getting lost in details, that does not mean that you can’t learn new, more effective ways of going about your daily routines, and pursuing long-term values. In fact, the research shows that metacognition can be learned and improved throughout your life!

Link to the follow article

Background reading about MetaCognition

What Is Metacognition?

Metacognition refers to awareness of one’s own knowledge—what one does and doesn’t know—and one’s ability to understand, control, and manipulate one’s cognitive processes (Meichenbaum, 1985). It includes knowing when and where to use particular strategies for learning and problem solving as well as how and why to use specific strategies. Metacognition is the ability to use prior knowledge to plan a strategy for approaching a learning task, take necessary steps to problem solve, reflect on and evaluate results, and modify one’s approach as needed. Flavell (1976), who first used the term, offers the following example: I am engaging in Metacognition if I notice that I am having more trouble learning A than B; if it strikes me that I should double check C before accepting it as fact (p. 232).

Cognitive strategies are the basic mental abilities we use to think, study, and learn (e.g., recalling information from memory, analyzing sounds and images, making associations between or comparing/contrasting different pieces of information, and making inferences or interpreting text). They help an individual achieve a particular goal, such as comprehending text or solving a math problem, and they can be individually identified and measured. In contrast, metacognitive strategies are used to ensure that an overarching learning goal is being or has been reached. Examples of metacognitive activities include planning how to approach a learning task, using appropriate skills and strategies to solve a problem, monitoring one’s own comprehension of text, self-assessing and self-correcting in response to the self-assessment, evaluating progress toward the completion of a task, and becoming aware of distracting stimuli.

Elements of Metacognition

Researchers distinguish between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation (Flavell, 1979, 1987; Schraw & Dennison, 1994). Metacognitive knowledge refers to what individuals know about themselves as cognitive processors, about different approaches that can be used for learning and problem solving, and about the demands of a particular learning task. Metacognitive regulation refers to adjustments individuals make to their processes to help control their learning, such as planning, information management strategies, comprehension monitoring, de-bugging strategies, and evaluation of progress and goals. Flavell (1979) further divides metacognitive knowledge into three categories:

• Person variables: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information.
• Task variables: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task—for example, knowledge that it will take more time to read, comprehend, and remember a technical article than it will a similar-length passage from a novel.
• Strategy variables: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task; for example, knowing how to activate prior knowledge before reading a technical article, using a glossary to look up unfamiliar words, or recognizing that sometimes one has to reread a paragraph several times before it makes sense.

Livingston (1997) provides an example of all three variables: “I know that I (person variable) have difficulty with word problems (task variable), so I will answer the computational problems first and save the word problems for last (strategy variable).”

Prompts for Reflection

Some tips for taking a step back when you suspect you might be getting lost in details. Ask yourself:

Be curious and a little skeptical of when you begin to think you HAVE to do something exactly as you have decided to, if your slavish devotion yields diminishing returns in health, mood, and other areas you value – it’s time to use some metacognition to take a broader view of the process – perhaps by emphasizing different aspects of the task than you have done in the past. If you pride yourself on your ability to do comprehensive, deep research – but struggle to complete your goals on time – this could be because you feel that to succeed you must meet your self-directed, very high standards. If those standards then cause a lot of anxiety, that can contribute to your procrastination and the feeling that you need to be perfect or not attempt it at all.

We have limited energy in any given day, and a decent chunk of that energy is devoted to cognitive tasks. Learning how to anticipate when you might be at risk for “getting lost in the details” of something means you can help create an environment or support system to improve the outcome. For example, do you have someone in your life that can help remind you when you need to move on / tie a bow on a task? Sure, you can have the best intentions, make a detailed timeline with milestones and tracking systems – but inviting someone into an area where you need help self-regulating is a wonderful opportunity to experience flexibility. The conversation / request will require flexibility, the response to their reminder or help takes flexibility, and the ability to tie a bow on your obsession in response to that support also takes flexibility! It also gives you a chance to practice interpersonal communication.

Again, it’s important to recognize that these suggestions are for those obsessive detail-oriented behaviors that are harming you the most. Identifying those can be hard, or daunting, but focusing those first will yield more results – and won’t spread you too thin. If you ask a support person to help you flexibly tie a bow on tasks / curiosities for EVERY single thing, that is too big of an ask and might cross some of their boundaries. The metacognitive skill here is finding how to set clear, open expectations for what you want relative to that most troubling area where you drown in details that ultimately do not help complete the task, improve your life, or move you in the direction of your values.

OCPD is sometimes not treated with the correct level of attention from therapists, especially because it can be hard to see some of the more subtle functionality loss that results from this rigid personality disorder. If your relationships are blowing up or on the rocks, that’s a lot easier to spot – there are tons of emotions and factors at play that therapy can address. Getting lost in the details is less of an emotional issue and more of a cognitive executive dysfunction one – though emotions still play a role.

Research has shown that the decision making processes for folks with OCPD can be impacted by our struggle to prioritize and other cognitive factors.

Finding good resources on this is difficult, because the verbiage used in many official OCPD texts is referencing essentially a specific niche of obsession, maladaptive overcontrol, cognition in decision-making, the science of memory and learning, etc.