What Is Colour OCD?
For some, colours are a preference or a personality trait. However, when colours become tied to fear, anxiety, and rituals, it may be a form of OCD.
Colour OCD is a manifestation of OCD in which obsessions, anxiety, and compulsions revolve around colours, colour arrangements, colour meanings, or colour-based rules.
Many individuals with OCD report significant distress related to colours. These experiences commonly overlap with symptoms seen in symmetry OCD, magical thinking OCD, and “just right” OCD (McKay et al., 2004). For someone with Colour OCD, colours hold great value. They are important, emotionally charged, and connected to outcomes/consequences. Some colours are seen as “safe”, while others are regarded as “wrong”, “bad”, contaminated, unlucky, or dangerous.
Like all forms of OCD, the problem is not the colour itself. The problem is the fear, uncertainty, and compulsive behaviours that become attached to it. The fear is being maintained by the story that the person attributes to the trigger.
What Does Colour OCD Look Like?
Colour OCD, and the colours involved, can appear differently for each person. Though the underlying cycle remains the same.
Examples include:
Feeling intense anxiety when objects are not organized according to a specific colour pattern.
Avoiding certain colours due to fear of negative connotations.
Believing that wearing certain colours can cause harm to oneself or others.
Repeatedly rearranging belongings according to colour.
Feeling that a colour combination is “wrong” and changing it until it feels “right”.
Associating colours with specific thoughts, emotions, memories, people, etc.
Colour OCD causes individuals to face intense anxiety and distress while interfering with daily functioning (Radomsky & Rachman, 2004). This can include obsessions, behavioural compulsions, and mental compulsions. All of which strengthen the OCD cycle and increase anxiety over time (Vellozo et al., 2021).
Interconnecting and affecting a range of facets in an individual's life, they will spend hours attempting to achieve certainty or eliminate uncomfortable feelings surrounding colours.
Why Do Colours Feel so Important in OCD?
Many individuals with Colour OCD acknowledge the fact that colour cannot cause physical harm, generate bad luck, or be associated with negative outcomes. Yet despite this awareness, the colour still feels extremely important.
This occurs because OCD attaches significance to things that most people view as objective. Through processes such as magical thinking, emotional reasoning, and intolerance of uncertainty, colours can evolve to become associated with fear, responsibility, safety, or danger (Abramowitz et al., 2009).
For some individuals, a colour may become associated with a specific thought, memory, person, or event. Others may experience an intense sense that certain colours are “right” while others feel “wrong.” Over time, like many other OCD manifestations, these beliefs are reinforced through encouraged avoidance, checking, reassurance-seeking, and other compulsive behaviours.
The colour itself is not the source of the problem; instead, it is the OCD convincing that person that the colour holds great meaning and needs to be taken seriously.
Emotional Contamination and Colours
Some individuals with Colour OCD experience emotional or mental contamination, in which a colour becomes associated with a distressing memory, person, thought, or object that has “tainted” you internally (Rachman, 2004).
For example, a person may have been wearing a green shirt during a stressful experience. Afterward, the colour green may begin to feel contaminated by that memory. This can eventually spread beyond the original green shirt to any green clothing, green objects, and even the colour green itself.
Even though the colour has not changed or morphed into anything physically, it now has a negative emotion tied to it. Furthermore, just as OCD generalizes fear, it also makes the fear feel real.
OCD has a tendency to attach emotional meaning to colours, numbers, words, thoughts, and even sensations, strengthening the feelings of discomfort and worry.
The Role of “Just Right” Feelings
Not everyone with Colour OCD fears a specific consequence; for many, the discomfort comes from a feeling of incompleteness.
For instance, colours may feel uneven, out of place, or simply "not right”, and this discomfort can become more and more overwhelming until things are rearranged to be “just right.” This can occur through repeated reorganization of items, changing clothing, or restarting activities until the colours feel correct.
In these situations, the goal is often to tolerate that uncomfortable feeling; unfortunately, giving in to these urges does more harm than good. Although this may give temporary relief, over time it reinforces the OCD cycle, leaving the individual with more fear (Vellozo et al., 2021).
Colour OCD vs. Personal Preference
While some people enjoy colour coordination or have favourite colours, the difference is that with Colour OCD, these preferences are not generally flexible or enjoyable. Colour OCD creates fear, distress, and a sense of obligation rather than simple preference.
A strong indicator of Colour OCD can be seen in the way the individual's decision-making has been affected. For individuals with simply a preference for colour, they won't have difficulty getting through simple tasks such as choosing clothing colours, purchasing household items, or decorating rooms. However, for those with Colour OCD, these endeavours appear daunting and time-consuming (Abramowitz et al., 2009).
In Colour OCD, the individual's decision-making process is motivated by a need to reduce anxiety and achieve certainty. As a result, Colour OCD can impede daily functioning and quality of life, showcasing that it is in fact much different than personal preference for colours.
Treatment for Colour OCD
Colour OCD can be treated by using the same evidence-based approaches as used for other forms of OCD (Abramowitz et al., 2009)..
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Colour OCD can feel isolating, especially when the fears seem difficult to explain. While the focus may be on colours, the underlying OCD cycle is the same as in other forms of OCD. With effective treatment, people can learn to manage these fears, reduce compulsions, and regain confidence in their daily lives.
Sources
Abramowitz, J. S., Taylor, S., & McKay, D. (2009). Obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Lancet, 374(9688), 491–499.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60240-3
McKay, D., Abramowitz, J. S., Calamari, J. E., Kyrios, M., Radomsky, A., Sookman, D., Taylor, S., & Wilhelm, S. (2004). A critical evaluation of obsessive-compulsive disorder subtypes: Symptoms versus mechanisms. Clinical Psychology Review, 24(3), 283–313.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2004.04.003
Rachman, S. (2004). Mental contamination. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42(11), 1227–1255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2003.10.009
Radomsky, A. S., & Rachman, S. (2004). Symmetry, ordering and arranging compulsive behaviour. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42(8), 893–913.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2003.07.001
Vellozo, A. P., Fontenelle, L. F., Torresan, R. C., Shavitt, R. G., Ferrão, Y. A., Rosário, M. C., Miguel, E. C., & Torres, A. R. (2021). Symmetry dimension in obsessive-compulsive disorder: Prevalence, severity and clinical correlates. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 10(2), Article 274.https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm10020274