Chad LeJeune's Pure O OCD and the Anxiety Facet (N1)

A clock face dissolving into open sky

Chad LeJeune is a clinical psychologist, and Pure O OCD is his guide to the version of obsessive-compulsive disorder that runs almost entirely in the mind, all intrusive thoughts and no visible rituals. His account of the underlying mechanism is worth carrying around. In an interview with At Health he explains, "Worry is a verbal process, unique to humans, where we use our minds as a time machine, traveling into the future to encounter problems and threats that are not here yet." How much your mind runs ahead into worry like that is, in the Big Five, one facet.

A mind that runs ahead into worry is the Anxiety facet

That facet is Anxiety (N1), under Neuroticism, how readily your mind anticipates threat and how hard the resulting worry is to shake. A high scorer feels the pull to chase every what-if; a low scorer lets most of them pass. Pure O sits at the far end, where the worry latches onto a distressing intrusive thought and the person answers it with hidden mental rituals, reassurance and checking that all happen inside the head. It is worth naming the usual confusion, since the word compulsive suggests Orderliness (C2), the tidy side of Conscientiousness, when this is anxiety running in the cognitive channel. This post is about the trait rather than a diagnosis, and it does not replace treatment.

What makes LeJeune's approach useful is that it targets the relationship with the thought rather than the thought's content. Because worry is that time-machine reflex, arguing with a specific fear only feeds it, so his acceptance-based method teaches you to let the thought be there without treating it as a command. That is closer to a learned skill than a feat of willpower (C5), since the aim is to stop chasing certainty rather than to force the thought away. Letting the future stay uncertain is the move that drains the worry of its fuel.

For a reader placing themselves, your N1 is a fair read on how far ahead your mind runs and how much authority your worried thoughts carry. High on it and Pure O OCD offers a way to loosen the grip of intrusive thinking without arguing with it. Low on it and the book explains why a single stray thought can capture someone else for hours. Where you sit on Anxiety tells you how readily your mind runs ahead into worry, and we take the facet apart in Anxiety (N1).

Read the book: Pure O OCD: Letting Go of Obsessive Thoughts with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Chad LeJeune.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations

LeJeune, C. (2023). Pure O OCD: Letting go of obsessive thoughts with acceptance and commitment therapy. New Harbinger Publications.

Twohig, M. P., Hayes, S. C., Plumb, J. C., Pruitt, L. D., Collins, A. B., Hazlett-Stevens, H., & Woidneck, M. R. (2010). A randomized clinical trial of acceptance and commitment therapy versus progressive relaxation training for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 78(5), 705-716.

Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.

Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.