How chess helped me manage my OCD

It’s a chilly winter’s night in central London in 2022. Below a canopy of trees, men move plastic pieces around plastic boards and tap clocks. People nod their heads to American rap music. They drink Kopparberg Dark Fruits cider and swear as if it’s naughty.

This is the Four Corners Chess Club, and I’m nervous. I haven’t been to a chess club before, and I’m worried about getting trounced. I sit opposite a friendly-looking Italian man called Andrea. He’s a drummer who’s just moved to London. My hands shake as I set up the pieces.

The previous three months had been difficult and I hadn’t left the house much. As relapses go, this was a bad one. The deleterious trinity of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression had conspired to make me basically monosyllabic and I turned up that evening looking absolutely deranged – unkempt and obscured, having not spoken to anyone for days.

I play white, Andrea plays black. We have 10 minutes each on the clock. Chess has become the one thing OCD doesn’t really affect, that I’m proud to be good at, and this is the real-life test.

I had been living with OCD for about five years, and I was doing terribly. The disorder tainted everything in my life. Other than some freelance copywriting work, I was effectively unemployed, and the only real contact I had was with a girlfriend, whom I was slowly and unfairly alienating, and a dreary support group. During the day, I would apply for jobs I didn’t want, research OCD, and play game upon game of online chess. I thought it was about time to actually see how good I was, and to re-enter the world, at least for one night.

Andrea has a good position, but I snatch a free pawn and make it count in the endgame. He resigns. I have won, but more importantly, for the first time in three months, for the space of 10 minutes, I was completely out of my own head. Instead of the ruminative closed loop of catastrophic what-ifs – What if this never goes away? What if I can’t manage it anymore? – and the paradoxical efforts to stay calm that always fail, I was entranced by the geometric patterns emerging from the tug and pull of attack and defence, of disparate pieces communicating with one another to reveal new positions brought about by the collision of two minds, with all their visions and fantasies. Suddenly I am feeling light. Perhaps this debilitating disorder isn’t the annihilating force I had imagined it to be. I could cry.

Every automated sense had been subsumed

My OCD manifested on the evening of December 22 2017, when I was 19, and a thought entered my brain that changed my life forever. Supine watching a film, I noticed how one of my legs was tapping against the other. I detected the constant hum of my body, how there was this rhythm happening below the surface of my awareness. I thought about how my body felt, how it sounded. I thought about how I could control things that were usually automatic. I wanted it to stop, but the harder I tried to make it, the stronger it became, right in the centre of my mind. Cold terror, like seeing the devil.

Over the next few days, this vigilance expanded over my body, until every automated sensory experience had been subsumed. In this new reality, I felt I had to control the mechanics of myself. On Christmas Day, I left a present half-opened and went upstairs to cry in my room (my father assumed I was having a breakdown because I hadn’t got what I wanted for Christmas, which was a fairly damning assessment of my emotional maturity). I started Googling whether brains can break.

It would take me a few months to learn that this one arbitrary thought would mark the start of a lifelong relationship with OCD. It is a relationship I am still working out, now aged 28. I have seen parts of myself I never thought I would. I have seen what deep, physiological, psychological pain can do to people. I have spent so much time in therapy; I have been pumped with medication, with self-help tips, with new-wave platitudes about awareness and inclusivity. I’ve lost many good years.

OCD is a complex, self-contradictory disorder. Conventional wisdom defines it as a preoccupation with order and cleanliness, but more often than not, OCD manifests as an internal monologue of intense uncertainty where the sufferer becomes obsessed that something bad might happen to them. Trying to think yourself better, to think yourself out of the mess of it, is like trying to pick a lock with your mind.

People talk about OCD coming from nowhere, like a shot in the dark. But any therapist worth their salt will tell you it comes from somewhere. Long before my OCD developed, I was a loaded gun of anxiety. This ratcheted up in my first year of university. After one particularly heavy night of drugs and alcohol, I woke up feeling like I wasn’t in my body anymore. I thought I had given myself brain damage. A long and ricocheting period of unabating anxiety ensued which discharged on that Christmas night, becoming something more ferocious.

I tried to resume normal life in the new year. I traded Scotland’s sleepy Central Belt for Bristol, for its late nights and its pace, and white-knuckled my way through the parties and lectures as though everything was fine. Inside, I was falling apart. I couldn’t communicate properly. I would stand there, catatonic, and zone out because I was obsessively trying to control my breathing, or my eye movements, or the position of my hands.

Carrying on as if nothing happened was like trying to ride the Grand National with an unbroken horse, and on one snowy morning in mid-February I snapped. I just wanted the obsessive thoughts to stop. I wanted to pull the plug on feeling so broken. So I made for the Suspension Bridge, skirted its edges and wondered about the physics of death. In retrospect, this episode was a kind of macabre catharsis rather than anything more serious, but I was coming to terms with the fact that my life had been irrevocably and catastrophically changed.

After university, life narrowed into a single question: how do I get rid of this? I spent most of my bad days seeking information on the internet. Searching the name of my OCD on repeat. I would email expert therapists who were either fully booked or unaffordable. And where there are desperate people, it never takes long to find someone willing to exploit them. Unverified social media accounts would pump out videos with titles such as “How to fix your OCD using this one simple trick”.

I went in the opposite direction and sought out the most credentialed expert money could buy. After months on a waiting list, and an extortionate fee, I found myself in a north London living room opposite a strange man with bulbous eyes. He was a world OCD expert, apparently. With total indifference, he informed me that my particular subtype of the condition was practically incurable.

It was like being knocked around the head.

A source of meaning and minor fulfilment

I had always imagined recovery as a eureka moment: one insight and the whole thing would fade into obscurity. Instead, one genuinely great therapist introduced me to acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. The simple idea is that pain is part of life, and trying to eliminate it makes things worse. Rather than fighting discomfort, you learn to carry it while committing yourself to things that matter.

When I consulted OCD specialist and ACT practitioner Paul Huntingford, he was careful not to present chess as a cure for OCD. There is no evidence that chess can treat the disorder. Anything, he pointed out, can become a compulsion if it’s used to suppress thoughts and feelings. But he affirmed that there are qualities in chess that lend themselves naturally to recovery.

“There are qualities of mastery in chess, and many other sports and intellectual pursuits, that certain stereotypical, but often accurate, OCD traits are very suited to,” he said. “The ability to think deeply on certain topics and analyse many different scenarios, or hypervigilance around danger…” If the sufferer can harness those traits and commit them to meaningful pursuits, he argues, “they will then end up feeling that they’re living a more fulfilling life”.

I realised that, throughout all the messiness of the disorder, chess had been my one constant source of meaning and minor fulfilment.

My father had taught me to play as a four-year-old on his giant Alice in Wonderland-themed board. At university I met a guy I wanted to be friends with who liked chess, and so I pretended to like smoking hash so we could sit in his hippie room and play. By the time I moved to London and everything felt transient, I had started playing online as I went from one spare sofa to another across the city. It followed me around. It was like an itch I needed to scratch.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that, amid the miasma of therapy appointments, didactic podcasts and annoying meditation sessions, chess was achieving something none of them could. For brief periods, sometimes only 10 or 15 minutes, I stopped thinking about myself.

It would take sitting opposite Andrea on that cold winter evening for me to realise quite how important it was. Over the next few months, I chased that feeling around London in chess meet-ups under railway arches, in the attics of Islington coffee shops, in the hallucinatory sprawl of food courts near Elephant and Castle, in medieval church courtyards. Despite the pain of the day, I would always turn up and push pieces around the board as if it were the most important thing in the world.

London’s chess community is a fascinating menagerie of international nerd-dom: very male and frequently foreign. One of its most common archetypes is the socially maladapted yet arrogant male who can’t look you in the eye but thinks you’re an idiot anyway. These are people who want to win and want you to lose. I saw one hurl his king into a busy road after losing a time scramble.

I played Daniel Fernandez, one of Britain’s strongest players, a grandmaster who made every move within half a second. I would find chess on holiday, and chess would find me. I played on the beaches of Sicily; in the Hanseatic grandeur of Gdansk, Poland; against ex-Red Army soldiers in Soviet-scarred Riga. I played on backstreets in the Georgian capital Tbilisi; in Berlin nightclubs; and above an illicit strip club in Latvia. After an unexpected redundancy, I took off across Northern Europe in the middle of winter and played chess wherever I could find it.

Perhaps the most understated, but significant, development in my chess life was finding a little club in an East London pub which I now run.

I first stumbled across the Lord Tredegar pub during a particularly bad period with OCD where I was struggling to talk. Life had narrowed around the disorder, and I had lost myself to it. But every Wednesday evening, I would walk into the pub and spend a few hours thinking about something else. Now I run the club, and drift in after work, order pints and play blitz (time-controlled, and usually only five minutes). Some of the players are strong, some are complete beginners. We talk about chess, football, work, relationships and whatever else is going on in our lives. It is, in its own small way, a community, that much sought-after thing.

Like OCD, chess begins with something arbitrary. Plastic pieces arranged in a specific position that you push around. Only when they come in contact with the transformative powers of our imagination do they transcend their constituent parts. The awful irony of OCD is how a single passing thought becomes a ruinous obsession when it touches the most existential and auto-aggressive parts of ourselves. In my life they echo each other. They are small things that become like galaxies.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]