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How can I stop catastrophizing

NAS89636

Hi everyone, this is my first post here, and it’s about something I’ve been struggling with for a while. right now I’m a bit lost on what to do and would like some help with my problem.

For the last couple of years I have delved into some unsavoury things regarding politics, generally terrible things regarding different groups of people, such as women, people of colour, people of different sexual orientations, etc. While most people would typically just ignore this stuff and move on with their lives, but for some reason I just can’t do that, and seem to obsess over certain claims being made about different groups of people, especially since some of them use science to prove their points, so I force myself to analyse as much as I can no matter how much I hate it.

But I just can’t take it any more. I feel like I’m living in this constant state of fear and anxiety that I’m wrong about everything and that something will come along that will force me to view the world in a negative light. I’ve tried so long to combat the things I’ve read with my own research, but I can only do so much. And half of the time some of it doesn’t even make any sense or is just so confusing.

For example, some people have made the claim that the majority of black people have committed crimes, causing me to force myself to look into crime statistics regarding unreported crime, arrest rates, and so on, and do calculations on a percentage calculator even though I suck at math. At best, the numbers are alarmingly high, which worry me but I keep telling myself that I have to be unbiased and try to accept it, but at worst, the numbers literally make no sense whatsoever, no matter which way I slice it. And there’s so many unaccountable variables and contradictory studies that I don’t know what to believe most of the time, yet my mind constantly goes to the worst case scenario.

I’m just so tired of all of this. I get no joy out of doing any of this, and it feels like some massive weight is being pushed down on top of me, but I force myself to do it because I worry that if I don’t them I’m just remaining wilfully ignorant, or that I’m just disrespecting the suffering of others for the sake of my own beliefs. On numerous occasions, I just replay things that I already obsessed over months ago, worrying that I missed something the last time I did this, but sometimes I’ll go back and find nothing, and if I decide to be stubborn and say no to myself the guilt will eat away at me. Even on days when I don’t do any of this, the constant nagging and catastrophizing still hums away in the back of my mind like some kind of terrible song that’s stuck in my head and I just want it all to end.

Every time I try to stop I always get a few weeks of peace, before the guilt becomes too overwhelming and the cycle just begins again with some new or old. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong and I just really need some help.

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  • It sounds like a trigger is news or social media posts so detaching from them is probably a good idea.

    You have this deep need to go in depth into a topic, that's probably an autistic thing I definitely get that. But the direction of these deep dives is distressing, so it sounds like maybe you need to find some alternative avenues of putting this focus?

    I have the capability to do these deep dives on depressing topics (for me generally natural world related) and something that really helped me was learning about things detached from me, but still learning about them.

    So when I was having a lot of problems with getting sucked into atmospheric statistics, I instead went and did a course on exoplanetary atmospheres. Still got the deep dive, but not connected enough to my life to make me unhappy. 

    So maybe rather than trying to quit cold turkey, try a different input? I don't know what interests you have, maybe the industrialisation of lacemaking is something that is of interest, or maybe trying to find the most agreed upon temperature of caramelisation for honeycomb across a range of online recipes (yes I have spent hours on both of these topics). 

    I know it can be hard to avoid the doom ness, and it sounds like guilt is a real issue for you, but you really don't need to know the intimate ins and outs of how *** the world is. Even the people that do this as a career focus on one very small specific bit of rubishness to avoid becoming overwhelmed. You don't need to have an in depth knowledge of all of it.

  • in reply to Fibonacci Squid
    Fibonacci Squid said:
    So maybe rather than trying to quit cold turkey, try a different input? I don't know what interests you have, maybe the industrialisation of lacemaking is something that is of interest, or maybe trying to find the most agreed upon temperature of caramelisation for honeycomb across a range of online recipes (yes I have spent hours on both of these topics). 

    Thanks for the advice. Me personally, I really like dinosaurs and other prehistoric and modern animals, and I’ve always wanted to get better at drawing them. 

  • in reply to NAS89636

    That sounds amazing! Maybe when you are getting these really strong impulses, you could try finding a youtube dinosaur drawing tutorial, or just a picture of a prehistoric animal  and try drawing them.

    In more of an information gathering theme, the interpretation of what different dinosaur species looked like has changed vastly over the years. You could try finding different interpretations for the same species and make a collection of options, and then make up your mind on what you think is most likely

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  • in reply to NAS89636

    That sounds amazing! Maybe when you are getting these really strong impulses, you could try finding a youtube dinosaur drawing tutorial, or just a picture of a prehistoric animal  and try drawing them.

    In more of an information gathering theme, the interpretation of what different dinosaur species looked like has changed vastly over the years. You could try finding different interpretations for the same species and make a collection of options, and then make up your mind on what you think is most likely

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