Thought tics

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I think I have tics and some obsessive-compulsive behaviors. One compulsion is symmetry, a need to even-up things on both sides, which I most often apply to my thoughts. I'll be thinking, and one of my thoughts'll be off-centered, closer to one side of my head than the other. I immediately notice this lack of frequency, and will immediately try to produce another thought on the opposite side of the head, with the same distance from the center, and will try to give it the same amount of weight as the preceding thought. Often, however, I will find that I did not give the second thought enough weight, and will try to think it more, evening out the weight. But then I will find that too much weight had been given to this side of the head, and will try to correct for the imbalance on the other side of the head, and so on.

Basically, sometimes my thoughts are like rocks which I try to balance on a scale.

My daughter does/has this sort of meta-OCD, too. Problem was, it started getting a life of it's own because like you she's pretty intelligent and that ended up working against her. At some point, a part of her mental energy was always dedicated toward not only policing actions but also thoughts, feelings, etc.. And since those are partially not in her control it began to cause her great stress.

The emotional solution for us (her and her parents) was to accept that this trait had strengths and weaknesses and it was intrinsic. That allowed us to work on the practical aspect because trying to eradicate it therefore was senseless.

For us, the practical solution was several long talks about probability theory and the universe. Luckily she also had a habit on our morning walks of having to equalize the number of times each of her feet stepped on cracks, and was trying to do it in realtime. That is, if her left foot stepped on a crack then immediately afterward she'd make her right foot step on the next one. It resulted in several near falls and an uncomfortable walking gait as she began trying to also avoid cracks. We spent about a week discussing probability on those walks and keeping track of crack-steps. Eventually she learned and accepted - because it is true - that the universe is very partial to following the rules of probability. The longer she let her steps fall where they may, the closer to absolute perfect symmetry her steps became. Within that week the universe/probability was doing a far better job of it than she could do, so she was able to let it go and trust that the more walks we took the more it would surpass what she could do manually as it had already done so within a few walks. And that allowed her to stop having to dedicate so much mental energy to making it so or even checking up on it.

I have that thing with the cracks, too, though I didn't know how unusual it was, thanks to the phrase, "If you step on a crack, you break your mother's back."

Do you know if she has the same issues with the thoughts in her head?

In my case, it seems to arise from my schizotypal personality disorder, which can cause aspects of the self like thoughts to seem like external objects, where they have a certain size, weight, appearance, sound, location, etc., combined with a symmetry-compulsion.

Oh my god. I do EXACTLY this same thing, except not with my thoughts, but with my body, usually my eyes. In childhood I began calling it "playing even". If I do something with one eye, I have to do it with the other to even things out. The need to do it is incredibly strong.