A Review of the NOCD App

I’ve been using NOCD for about a month now. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been very active on it lately. There’s been a lot going on in my life and I’ve neglected to do my OCD tracking and homework. Because of this, I wanted to do a review of the app if you haven’t used it. Right away when I found this app, I got excited. It is tailored for OCD and not general anxiety which makes it easy to use. There are a few different elements to it. There’s a discussion board, exercise, SOS, and progress tracking. You can also speak with a therapist through this app. Since I have an OCD therapist I haven’t utilized that feature.

I’m going to talk about the discussion board first. This is a really nice thing to have. Going to an OCD support group has been helpful for me. I know that it isn’t possible for a lot of people either financially or for availability. This gives a lot of that same support, it allows you to ask questions and respond to people. Giving you a real sense of community. Depending on the focus of your OCD it could be a bit triggering to read through the board. That’s a judgment you have to make for yourself.

Moving on to the exercise feature. I’ve never been super successful with tracking but this is super helpful. It gives you the opportunity to time your exposures. The downside is if you report a compulsion, you have to start over. In my ERP (Exposure and Response Therapy) we acknowledge and track compulsions but we don’t start over. So it’s difficult to get through the exercise and track properly but I understand why it works that way. I still think it’s helpful even though I don’t use it diligently.

I haven’t needed the SOS. I’m really grateful that I’m in a place where that’s not necessary for me. I tested it out for the purposes of this review. It gives you the option to report obsessions or compulsions. I chose compulsions because that’s usually what I fall into. It lets you write the compulsions and guides you through what compulsion you’re doing. It asks what obsession it’s tied to. Then asks what triggered it based on the hierarchy you made on the app and asks you to rate your anxiety. This is huge. It’s easy to use, allows you to detail what’s happening and how it happened. I can see using this to track spikes because it collects so much information.

So finally, you can track your progress. Moving forward, I’m going to try to be more diligent about using this. It’s a collection of exercises, stress levels, SOS episodes, etc. With a journey like OCD, it’s important to be able to see progress and that is what this allows you to do.

I would recommend NOCD. One feature I didn’t mention is that it lets you lock the app. This is so nice for us because who wants to feel exposed by writing out the darkest OCD intrusive thoughts. Overall, it’s easy to see that this was created by someone who has OCD. It’s built perfectly, in my opinion. I would encourage you to check it out, especially if you’re just starting to treat your OCD it makes the process less intimidating.