Jake Shane Shares How His ‘Hyperfixation’ on Pop Stars Helped Him Find ‘Comfort’ amid His OCD Diagnosis

• Jake Shane appeared on The Squeeze podcast on Oct. 16 and opened up about his love for pop stars like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga
• Shane revealed that he was officially diagnosed with OCD when he was 21 years old
• He shared that his hyperfixation on pop stars helped him find “comfort”

Jake Shane is opening up about his OCD diagnosis and how his “hyperfixation” on pop stars helped him find comfort.

During an interview on The Squeeze podcast on Oct. 16, the 24-year-old TikTok creator shared that he was officially diagnosed with OCD at 21 years old but struggled with it throughout his life.

“When you have OCD, you hyper-fixate on things,” he explained. “For example, when I was in 6th grade, I hyper-fixated on shampoos. I was clinically addicted to shampoo and I would try out all the different shampoos and line them up like it was like a whole to do.”

During the podcast, Shane also referenced an article he wrote for Highsnobiety back in May, where he talked about hyper-fixating on pop stars like Lady Gaga, Lorde, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and becoming “entranced in their world.”

“Something about female pop stars made the world go quiet. (Hyperfixation, a symptom of OCD itself, was in fact my only comfort),” he wrote at the time. “My OCD wasn’t fixed, and the intrusive thoughts remained the same, but falling into the world of pop stars gave me the confidence to address these issues head-on.”  

During the podcast, Shane explained that when he does hyper-fixate on a pop star, he becomes “their advocate.” His love for pop stars came full circle in 2023 when he famously collaborated with Olivia Rodrigo to promote her single “Vampire” from her album GUTS.

“Honestly, I was in a rough place at that time, where I was like, ‘I feel like I can’t think of anything funny,'” Shane told PEOPLE at the time. “I was like, ‘Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ is out, let me just react to it.’ Female singer-songwriters are my jam. That’s my favorite thing to listen to.”

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Later in the podcast, Shane opened up about the struggles he faced growing up with untreated OCD, noting how people around him simply said he would “grow out of it.”

“My parents were very against medication, so I was like, ‘Okay there’s nothing I could do,’ ” he recalled. “[It] started when I was seven or eight [years old], and I started touching things evenly. Then it was [tied to] good luck [and] bad luck. Like, ‘If don’t do this, I’ll get bad luck.’ ”

He shared that those tendencies did go away for about two years, however, they returned when he discovered social media for the first time, noting “Once it gets in your head, it just festers.”

“I used to not be able to get out of bed if I wasn’t able to do this one thing [and] I would have a hard time showering,” he recalled. “I was lazy, but I was lazy because everything took so much work in my head for it to happen. Everything took 10 times longer.”  

Once he got on medication and tried exposure therapy, he said he felt like the symptoms were “more controllable” and that he could “silence it a lot easier” and “move past the compulsion.”

“I’m able to just do something and forget about it,” he added. “Whereas [in the past], I would do it, and, like, I wouldn’t stop thinking about it.”