Who would’ve thunk it! The very thing, coffee, that makes a person hyper and antsy is the very thing that may be the key to helping a person who has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) resist the need to compulsively clean.

Hadar Naftalovich, Noa Tauber, and Eyal Kalanthroff are the researchers in the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who conducted a study in order to determine whether caffeine can curb folks’, who have OCD, urge to go on a cleaning spree.

“The current study examines whether manipulating arousal can facilitate inhibition and the resistance of compulsive cleansing,” is what the three researchers wrote in their abstract.

They got 47 people who just love to clean and separated them into two groups, caffeine and no caffeine, and then the researchers tempted both groups with filthy things like dirty diapers.

The folks who received the caffeine didn’t have as much of an urge to jump up and wash their hands several times like the folks who didn’t receive the caffeine. A person in the caffeine group was like, “I’ll finish this cup of joe, first.”

Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I do know that I would’ve been like the non-caffeine folks in that I would’ve “Carl Lewis” to the bathroom to wash my hands. I would’ve been washing my hands, arms, and elbows because caffeine or no-caffeine, me and doo-doo don’t get along. No sir, unh-unh!

Come to think of it, I wonder if the researchers added an extra ingredient in the cup of joe that would result in the caffeine having the effect of reducing a person’s urge to clean. Because a cup of joe by itself, I just don’t see how that’ll work.

Having said all of that, the researchers did find that although the caffeine folks’ urge to clean was lower than the non-caffeine folks, the caffeine folks did spend the same amount of time washing their hands as the non-caffeine folks. “Time spent washing, subjective distress levels, and urge-to-wash levels after participants washed their hands were similar between groups,” is what the researchers wrote in their abstract.

Therefore, based on what the three researchers are saying, caffeine lowers a person’s urge to clean but not a person’s need to be clean.