You might assume Sam Temple has led an easy life. At 22 she was a young artist who’d just arrived in Los Angeles from her native Georgia. Now, four years later, she’s a YouTube star, loved by millions for her sweet and funny personality. But people who’ve enjoyed her props and conversation don’t see the struggles behind her success.
Since she was a girl, Sam Temple has lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)—intrusive thoughts that hijacked her mind and drove her to strange behaviors that would give her a little relief from her fears. She had a perfectionist’s fear of disappointing people. She was terrified of guns and other weapons, which would trigger images of harm coming to herself or others.
And those were only a few of the thoughts that possessed her. It took more than a decade for Temple to find the treatment that makes life with OCD manageable. She has been speaking out now about the disorder and her treatment to let others with OCD know they aren’t alone, and that they can get help.
Living with multiple forms of OCD
From the age of 10, Sam had all kinds of frightening thoughts taking over her mind. Tell her about a disease, and she’d be on WebMD and Discord, researching symptoms because she was afraid she had it. Go out on dates with her, and she’d be plagued with the worry that she was bad for you and would ruin your life, ultimately breaking up because the anxiety was too much to handle. For a while she walked around with a heart rate monitor, a pulse oximeter, and other equipment, because she was terrified that her heart might beat too fast—and maybe give out.
“I would tell people, ‘I feel like I’m possessed,'” she says. “Like there’s someone else in the driver’s seat of my brain.” It was a lonely life, because “I didn’t know anyone else who was struggling with these things the way I was.”
Now, at 26, Sam knows her problem wasn’t simple anxiety. She has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), though she didn’t get the right diagnosis for many years—after all, her experiences didn’t match the symptoms most people associate with the condition. But that diagnosis is what changed everything. It’s what allowed her to find the treatment she needed to thrive with OCD. “Something I used to hear a lot when I shared my fears was that I was really creative,” she says. She’d tell her family about her thoughts “and they would say, ‘Oh, you have such a big imagination.’ I have to say: man, that was not it. I had a disorder.”
OCD isn’t “being creative”
The thing is, Sam is creative—but that’s not because of OCD. Trained as a graphic artist, she began designing props and sets for a massively popular podcast in 2021, later becoming an associate producer before joining another popular podcast as a producer. Sam also founded her own company where she sells her art. Her creative skills have given her a busy, fulfilling life.
But OCD was a different part of her life entirely. It was a part of her that no one really understood—not her family, not her friends, and not even herself.
My worries were not about tangible things. They were all situations that I created in my head.
“I had friends who would say that they struggled with anxiety,” Sam says. “They’d mean the feeling before we had a test. But I’d have thoughts about finding out that I’m allergic to food in the cafeteria, and dying at lunch. It wasn’t the same. My worries were not about tangible things. They were all situations that I created in my head.”
As OCD took over her mind, it made her feel like she had to get control of the situation. Scary movies and caffeine were off the table—what if she pushed her heart too hard? She’d only travel in vehicles she was driving—never a passenger in a car, bus, or plane. Any time she didn’t feel in control, it seemed unbearable.
“If the next car I see is white, I’m going to die.”
Sam bargained with the universe to reassure herself that she had a grip.
“I used to be extremely superstitious when I was young,” she says. “I would say to myself, ‘if my mom tells me to have a good day at school, I’m gonna have a bad day at school. If the next car I see is white, I’m going to die. It could be any little thing that my mind landed on to make sense of uncertainty that I was terrified of.”
Her family tried to support her, taking her to the doctor when her thoughts first began to go wild, and getting her into therapy. But the message at home felt mixed. That was because, as Sam realized as an adult, her mother and her grandmother also had OCD. “My mom would always tell me, ‘stop worrying!’ But I was seeing my mom do the exact same thing.”
The doctor Sam saw at age 10 diagnosed her with generalized anxiety and prescribed Prozac. But she was just too scared to take meds, so her family didn’t use the prescription. Sam says she doesn’t think they would have made a difference anyway, because while SSRIs like Prozac can be used for OCD, the proper treatment is much different than it is for anxiety. That’s what her talk therapists didn’t understand either, as she now knows.
“I have been in and out of talk therapy since I was very young. And my talk therapist was just always telling me ‘Yeah, it’s just anxiety,’” she says. “That made me feel even more isolated, because I was thinking, ‘This must be the worst case of anxiety on earth.’ Here I am in talk therapy for years, and I’m not getting better at all.”
I was thinking, ‘This must be the worst case of anxiety on earth.’ Here I am in talk therapy for years, and I’m not getting better at all.
“If it’s in my head, it must be me”
Thoughts of choking on a meal, shooting a loved one, ruining a boyfriend’s life, or dying of an exotic malady were scary enough on their own. But Sam was also frightened by what her fears seemed to reveal about her. If she could have these thoughts, she figured, that must be the kind of person she was: vulnerable, dangerous, endangered. That didn’t align with her values or the life she was trying to have. “I would think that if it’s in my head, then I must actually feel it. That must be me.”
If Sam couldn’t feel a sense of control about something, she’d avoid it. And she’d try different ideas for a cure. “I was trying a bunch of different therapists. I was doing crazy supplement regimens.” But nothing helped.
When she did manage to gain some ground against OCD in one aspect of her life, it wasn’t a person or a miracle supplement that did the trick. It was through learning to accept uncertainty and discomfort.
Sam’s relationship OCD had been driving her to break up with anyone she dated. “I would tell myself, ‘You’re going to break their heart, you’re going to ruin their life, and you’re going to be the reason they become depressed. So I would say I’m sorry, but I have to break up with you. Because my brain tells me all day that I’m going to ruin your life, and I can’t deal with it.”
But, she says, “As I matured, I just was able to kind of isolate that. I would tell myself, if I’m not happy, it’s okay. I don’t need to interpret all my negative feelings as ‘I’m going to ruin someone’s life.’ I may or may not break this person’s heart, but I can handle it either way.”
How things got worse, then better
Looking back, Sam realizes now that she was able to live with untreated OCD because she had a support network of friends and family, and familiar routines in the place where she had grown up. While her life remained pretty stable, OCD lurked underneath.
When she was 22, though, everything changed. She dropped out of her senior year in college for a job 3,000 miles away, in Los Angeles. But after a few months, she was laid off. Far from most friends and family, in an unfamiliar city, and without a job, her OCD symptoms exploded. She stopped exercising (“What if it gave me a heart attack?” said her intrusive thoughts). She stopped going to concerts. She even stopped creating art.
Sam found another therapist, and notes from her sessions helped her find a way to make art again. But, as always with general talk therapy, her OCD didn’t get any better. Plus, the pandemic had just begun, making everything worse.
Convinced she needed to do something new, she found a psychiatrist. She thought it might be time to get a prescription for one of the medications she’d always been afraid to try. Instead, the psychiatrist told her she might have OCD, and would need treatment from a specialist trained in the condition (which most therapists aren’t).
The treatment that worked
Sam connected with NOCD, and life started to get better. Her NOCD Therapist explained to her that these weird thoughts and superstitions weren’t her—they were symptoms of OCD, and they didn’t mean anything about who she was.
That was a revelation.
“I spent a really long time not understanding what intrusive thoughts were,” Sam says. “I didn’t even know the term ‘intrusive thoughts.’ But at NOCD I was learning that I’m not in control of every thought that I have. This was so pivotal to my recovery, learning that you can’t control everything that enters your mind—you can only change your reaction.”
This was so pivotal to my recovery, learning that you can’t control everything that enters your mind—you can only change your reaction.
Of course it was a relief to learn that her terrible thoughts arose from a disorder—that they weren’t the real Sam. But it was a double-edged sword, because it also meant she had to give up the lie OCD had always told her: that someday she could feel total control over her mind.
Still, Sam didn’t give up. For the first time in her life, focusing on her reaction to her thoughts, rather than the thoughts themselves, gave her a real way forward. And within a couple of months, she was experiencing life-changing results.
NOCD uses a research-backed and effective treatment called exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. It’s a method for teaching people that they can tolerate the thoughts and distress OCD throws at them. Step by step, they learn that they don’t have to respond to those thoughts with compulsions—in Sam’s case, googling symptoms, avoiding planes, breaking up with partners, and so many more.
Sam recognized this strategy: it mirrored what she’d done to get a handle on her relationship fears. She’d told herself she didn’t need to react to her relationship worries, and that it was okay to be uncertain whether it was going to work out with someone. It was okay to be distressed. “In that small way, I’d been doing ERP on myself,” she says.
Sam’s work with her NOCD Therapist was an expert-guided version of the same principle, applied to all her symptoms. Crucially, this included ones that she never would have identified on her own. The journey began with drawing up a list of her OCD “themes,” and identifying the ways she responded to each one. This alone was a lot of work, she says. Her list contained 36 different themes.
Sam and her therapist then organized all her fears into a hierarchy, with the less scary ones at the bottom and the most frightening ones at the top. Bit by bit, they worked collaboratively to face those worries and feelings and resist the urge to respond with compulsions, climbing the ladder one rung at a time. She learned to lean into those feelings of uncertainty—those moments when she felt control slipping away—rather than running from them.
“It’s very difficult,” she says. “You have to get uncomfortable and learn to just sit with it.”
That’s where the shooting range came in. Knowing she feared any and all weapons, one of Sam’s assignments was to go to a place with hundreds of them.
“I was panicking the whole entire time, telling myself, ‘I can’t do this.'” Sam says. But she persisted, and she came out the other side stronger than before.
The key: Learning to live with discomfort
As Sam’s ERP therapy continued, she found herself able to live with different kinds of intrusive thoughts. With each step, OCD’s power over her diminished. Today, after several years working with her NOCD therapist, that list of 36 OCD themes is down to just four.
“Doing ERP more and more, I just know that those intrusive thoughts don’t align with my values,” she says. “They’re not from me, and I don’t have to let them control me.”
Doing ERP more and more, I just know that those intrusive thoughts don’t align with my values.
Even Sam’s existential OCD—the distress she felt about not having the answers to life’s deepest questions—turned out to be treatable. Instead of avoiding thoughts about the meaning of life, she leaned into them, getting used to the idea that some of life’s profound questions have no certain answer.
“You have to be comfortable with uncertainty,” she says. “You have to condition yourself to be okay with things that you have no control over. It is hard, because OCD loves control. The meaning of life, my purpose, my value—it used to freak me out that there’s no perfect answer. I’d feel like ‘I need to know.'”
Now, Sam says, she has found a path beyond OCD by accepting the key lesson of ERP: It’s not the end of the world to experience distress. Discomfort is a part of life, and you can get through it.
“There may or may not be ultimate answers, and these thoughts may or may not scare me every now and then, but either way, it’s fine.”
