I need help with some techniques (hopefully Cognitive Behavioral type strategies) to deal with obsessive thoughts I get over people. The most recent manifestation of this problem is a crush I have on a new friend. He’s literally the only thing I think of all day whenever I have time to idle. I tried keeping busy but with other things but I ended up exhausting myself.

This has been a problem my entire life. In the past it has hurt my relationships, but after many years of therapy, I have learned to manage it so that it doesn’t affect the way I relate to others. This time, I think I’ve handled the actual friendship quite well and he’s seen none of my obsessive thought patterns. We’ve set boundaries and I’ve been respectful about them and so has he. Our friendship is moving along nicely. The issue is the mental energy this friendship consumes. Every time he tells me he doesn’t want to hang out, I feel like shit (I don’t externalize this to him). Every time he says something that could be interpreted as him being frustrated at me I panic (I also don’t externalize this). Every time I’m not around him, I want to be around him (so I make sure to limit the amount of times I message him to something more normal). So the issue really lies with the fact that interacting with him means wrestling with intrusive catastrophic thinking, obsessive desires to not want to leave him alone, etc which leaves me completely exhausted by the end of the day.

I really like having this guy in my life. I have had plenty of crushes on straight people to know that I can handle temporarily having a crush on a straight friend. However, my obsessive thinking is deterring my quality of life and I really really want to “reprogram” my brain to stop doing that. Do you guys know how to intervene when this happens? Are there mental/meditative exercises I can do to lessen the emotional response of when I see him? (I’ve done repeated exposure type stuff for PTSD maybe something like that). I can’t just artificially create space because he’s a coworker so I see him and interact with him by default every day. Please help.