Same obsession for 11 years

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It would be okay if it was something useful but it's not and it's not good for me to have.
I'm not sure if I have an obsession because it's a coping mechanism or something. It's no longer useful to me so how can I change.

Replace it with something else.

Is it a harmful obsession?

Or just a useless time wasting obsession?

I've been obsessed with the weather for almost 50 years.

It's been "useless" for me, frankly.

It only harmed me once: when I ran up a $600 phone bill when I was almost 11. $600 was quite a bit of money in 1971.

Just curious: what are you obsessed with?

Useless and slightly harmful to myself but I don't want to tell on here

That's fine.

The solution, obviously, is for you to be interested in something else.

Are you interested in punk fashions?

Not so much

From my experience there are two good ways of switching obsessions, and they can be used together.

One tactic is to transition to something similar to your current obsession, for example I have been using this lately to help transition between obsessing about autism research and obsessing about lucid dreaming because they are both related to psychology and they share enough common elements that I can transition between them rather easily (although it still takes a few days to make a full transition). Obsessing over lucid dreaming causes my success rate to vastly increase, which is why I like to transition to it often.

The other tactic is to learn so much about something that I have to spend a few days fully processing all the new information (which for me involves a lot of scripting how to explain it to someone else). This recently happened to me because I have been taking a biology class with a really great teacher, and before taking that class I only had a basic grasp of biology. The sheer amount of new information to process caused me to think about the topic for a while and now I find myself thinking about biochemistry in my free time sometimes.

You can mix the tactics by learning a lot about a topic and from there transition to something simelar. An example of this happening to me is when I read Brian Greene's books about super string theory, multiverse theory, and the nature of space-time. This caused me to get obsessed with physics and from there my obsession transitioned to nuclear science and then to chemistry.

That's how it works for me anyway, I'm not sure how well these tactics work for all aspies. I hope they work well for you.

That's good advice. Though my obsession is something I can put off for a while but it always comes back. Other things are just a distraction. I will try tho.

Use the energy of one obsession as a motor to pull another similar interest along thats more useful, or less harmful, or gets you more social cachet. For example if you're obsessed with, and are already an expert on Mozart and Bach, read up about the history of Rocknroll, or of Hip Hop so you can make small talk with other college students easier.

Does your obsession serve some kind of purpose? Is it a form of escape from stress/worry/sadness..? It's hard to change an obsession if it's how we cope with our environment or circumstance. You could try to change your environment or circumstances. If that's not an option try doing what others have suggested and find some new more useful obsessions or behaviours as substitutes.

Try to get to the root of your obsession - maybe if you can understand why you're so obsessed with it, and what parts of your behaviour are reliant on it, you can find alternative useful behaviours that give you a similar result.

For example, I've been obsessed with some mmorpg's to the extent that it's detrimental to my well-being. Apart from it serving the purpose of being entertainment, it's also become a major way I cope with stress in my life. When I feel like I can't cope with things I just log on, and escape into this whole other world. Plus I also get to socialise with people who aren't associated with any of my real life stresses. So it's really hard to replace this mmo obsession - to find something as good at making me cope with stress.

I always used to think that I didn't need ppl and I'm immune to depression, that my role is not to make friends so I shouldn't try. That I'm not a 'real' person and that others are weak because they can't handle being by themselves and are too easily swayed.

Buuut it turns out these thoughts aren't really true it was just a way of functioning. Many of my ideas were just games that I played for years with no end.

I must stop pretending now and accept that I do feel the same emotions as other people and I would like friends so I should work on that. But though I know what to do it is too hard though...

Starfoxx, I know it can be hard to do the things you know you ought to do. But I've seen you confront several hard things and I believe in you.

I'm actually trying to learn to do this myself, with little success...


I remember reading those in middle school, really interesting stuff. Are you me?


You know, it's funny, Starfoxx, I've had similar thoughts about NTs being weak and incomplete people, as much as said thoughts worry me a bit.

You could always start with making friends on the internet. My best friend right now lives across the country, I only met her in person once.

I may or may not be you from elsewhere in the string landscape multiverse

That's a very interesting observation. I find myself doing this a lot too, whenever I learn something new. It's not enough just to understand it myself, I have to feel that I could explain it to someone else, even if the opportunity to do so seems very unlikely - so I have imaginary conversations where I try out different ways to express myself.

I tend not to worry about what my obsessions are. As long as it doesn't involve regular fantasising about hurting people, then there's no reason to be embarrassed or worry about what I enjoy studying. More important is to be honest with myself when an obsession is taking up too much of my time, or is being used to avoid something more important about which I am anxious. If this starts to concern me, I will set time limits, and try to enforce them by setting an alarm clock so that I don't lose my sense of the passage of time.

A certain amount of disappearing into our special interests is healthy, in my opinion. Like stimming, I think it can be part of a necessary process of finding comfort within ourselves, and winding down from stressful events.

As for persistence. Some of my obsessions have been with me since I was four or five years old. Even though I abhor war and the suffering it causes, I retain my childhood fascination with war-planes and tanks, and will sometimes read the same Wikipedia pages over and over again - just as I used to read the same passages over and over in the aeroplane books I had as a kid.

It need not be any more harmful than the amount of time many people spend watching TV, or a sports fan's fanaticism for their favourite team. Just because the subject matter only interests a few people doesn't imply that an interest is dysfunctional per se.