Dear LPG, 

I read a poem on your pages recently, which got me thinking, although I seem to do a lot more thinking about various things these days.  Now that I am older and live alone, I think I do quite a bit of what the poem terms ‘Just in case’ thinking

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I bet that there are a fair few pensioners in the country who have not left the house at least once in their lives and got halfway down the road before wondering if they left the iron on: a gas ring burning, a tap running, or the front door ajar.  I challenge anyone who says differently.  

And then there are the things that we have arguably learned to anticipate and guard against over the years.  These can become quite bizarre daily habits that stick, while the reason that you first adopted them gets well and truly lost over time.   I don’t think that I am a candidate for an OCD diagnosis just yet. Still, my friends do question my habitual ritual of getting to the front door and shutting it behind me, only to feel the need to open it again so that I can walk through the length of the whole house to the back door, just to check if it is securely locked one more time.  If any of my friends are with me when I leave home, they know I am going to do it, and I know I am going to do it.   I can’t explain why, but the need only ever kicks in once I have heard the click of the lock.  I feel in control, but I think it is getting worse because I have, on occasion, found myself outside a friend’s house, having visited before our plan to go out together, and insisting that they do the same.

The saddest thing is that I know how odd my behaviour is, but if I didn’t do it, and although I don’t think that paranoia would take hold, I know I would spend the whole time I was out worrying about burglars getting in through the back of my mind.

Then there are the times when you do your odd thing so habitually, subconsciously and to the point when, having done it, you need to do it a second time because you have forgotten if you did or didn’t on that occasion.  Yes, quite often I have been known to do it twice, just in case I forgot the first time.

In my opinion, the habit of overthinking tends to worsen as we age, especially for those who spend a lot of time alone.  I think that if you live alone, you only have your thoughts to focus on and argue with, and perhaps, too many of us use the time to worry about the future in ways that we cannot control.  Too much thinking and not enough doing is not very good for us, so perhaps it is sometimes better to focus on what we can do something about, concentrating on the controllable worst, and then doing a bit of contingency planning, while hoping for the best. 

I know that I am a bit odd, but I can’t be the only fairly normal person with a somewhat unusual ‘just in case’ habit, can I?

GE, Lewisham.

Even though a lot of it might be over your head, GE shares what she found on the internet about the subject…

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