My Obsessions Are Ruining Me Mentally

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Hey everyone, this is my first post here. I could really use some advice with what I can do to make this stop.

I’ve been an anxious person for pretty much my whole life. From childhood to now I’ve had a variety of bizarre, almost crippling fears and anxieties, mainly about the end of the world, religious guilt, etc. For the last few years, however, these anxieties have just gotten worse and worse, constantly stirring around in my mind in a seemingly endless cycle.

I was originally just obsessed with stuff like creationism, I would constantly obsess over the things creationists would say to disprove evolution and take it upon myself to thoroughly read through it and try to debunk everything. Pretty soon, however, that shifted over to conspiracy theories, namely things like dinosaurs never existed of flat earth and the like. Looking back on it now, these theories were always completely stupid, but because I’ve always loved dinosaurs I took it personally and tried to obsessively debunk every single conspiracy blog, video, podcast, etc, dedicated to this conspiracy, and that was my main obsession between 2017 and 2021.

At the start of 2020, however, I also began to delve into some unsavoury things regarding politics, generally websites and videos that spouted off terrible, hateful things directed towards women, people of colour, LGBT, and quite a few others. While most people would typically just ignore this stuff and move on with their lives, for some reason I just couldn’t do that, especially since some of the people spouting these things tried to use science or statistics to prove their points, so I forced myself to analyse as much as I can no matter how much I hated every minute of it. I don’t want to get into the “science” these people used, but it was generally highly biased, cherry picked sources which at best didn’t fully support their beliefs or were built on sketchy foundations and at worst didn’t make any sense at all regardless of how much I tried to understand it. And so much of this contradicted with other sources that I just didn’t know what to believe at times.

But I just do take this any more. I’m living in a constant state of fear and anxiety that every single thought or opinion I have is wrong, with this little voice in my head constantly nagging me to look into these things or else I’m being wilfully ignorant. And it’s not just a few times a week, it’s pretty much every day. These thoughts just keep ruminating in my head, with a worrying thought appearing in my mind and me trying to use my own logic and research to combat it which just devolves into me repeating the same things over and over in my head for what’s sometimes hours. And when one thought eventually fades another just takes its place.

Sometimes I don’t cave into my obsessive need to research these topics, and I’m left feeling this gnawing sense of guilt over choosing not to engage my obsessions, but whenever I do cave I just feel so drained and tired with this pit in my chest, like I’m forcing myself to stay awake for hours on end. In fact, I’ve actually stayed up well into the early morning doing this, as well as take time away from things I could be doing, like studying or my hobbies. Sometimes my obsessions even cause me to research the same things over and over again just in case I missed something potentially world shattering.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. My obsessive tendencies and anxieties feel like some kind of hideous parasite that burrowed into the bask of my skull and started pumping chemicals into my brain to control me. Every time I promise myself that I’m not gonna look these things up or stop obsessing altogether, I eventually just break again and start the cycle again. I just don’t know what to do anymore.