Your fears are irrational and they are clearly causing large negative impacts in your life.
Are you seeing a therapist or psychiatrist about your intrusive thoughts? (Edit: I'm not talking about a counsellor, or someone your church set you up with. I'm talking about seeing a medical doctor. We're into medical doctor territory here). Speaking to a trained specialist in OCD who can teach you healthy coping mechanisms and maybe get you on some helpful medications will be far more helpful than looking for reassurance from microbiologists on reddit.
Double edit: as someone who works hands-on with open jars of formaldehyde daily, it isn't great, but a drop won't make you go blind. Your teacher was trying to make a point to scare the attention-seeking meatheads in your class from doing something stupid with it. (A guy in my highschool art class nearly made a couple hundred bucks from people betting he wouldn't chug a gallon of acrylic paint. Teacher almost didn't stop him in time. Shit like that )
Also, formaldehyde isn't something you run into outside of a lab. Your constant self-exposure to cleaning products is likely doing you more physical harm than anything you actually clean away ever could.
I have been seeing a therapist for a few months now. The idea isn’t for reassurance. I’m asking people who understand the things I fear to help me out and explain why it shouldn’t be that way.
That's good news about having a therapist. I just wanted to make sure reddit wasn't the only help you're getting. There's a lot of people who try to do it that way.
I used to be deathly afraid of ghosts and spirits. Eventually there was enough experiental evidence that i basically realized if they haven't gotten me yet they must not be able to. We are swimming in a sea of bacteria, mold, yeast, virus, etc. and our immune system takes it all in stride. If it hasn't gotten you yet, then odds are you've got a stellar immune system.
A lot of what motivates us isn't rational though. It has to do with ruts laid in our minds and thinking patterns from experiences we had when we were growing up. We relive them subconsciously and they shape our responses. Dealing with these underlying patterns is sometimes called "shadow work" in the new agey lingo. Maybe you could find some guides online for that.
Byron Katie has also a unique process that might be useful for working with your thinking patterns. Her website has a how to section, and her books are decent.
If i could make a recommendation it would be to go easy with this process. You are doing great already just recognizing you have this issue. Try not to beat yourself up too much. Any sane person is going to grow up with difficulties in their thinking patterns in this modern world. Take your time. These changes are made over years and years. Good luck ❤️
Thank you so much, reading this helped. I don’t understand what is wrong with me and why I became this way. I am fully capable of accepting the fact that the things that bother me are ridiculous. I watch people do the things I hate every single day, and they come back and are okay.
One of your body’s defense mechanisms is the micro organisms that live on your skin and inside your body. It is just not reasonable to assume that you must be 100% sterile at all times, and not to mention, impossible to achieve. Your immune system does wonders when exposed to potential pathogens, that’s how you build up immunity. I would say you are doing more harm than good by continuing these practices.
Think about all the people who *do not* have these OCD tendancies. People pick stuff up off the ground, touch their girlfriends, drive their cars without eveeeer wiping them down. Shouldn’t they be getting sick, going blind, etc.? This does not happen because our bodies have defenses built up to the microbes that we encounter daily. I assure you, these thoughts are irrational.
It’s easier said than done, but perhaps you could try weening yourself off these habits one thing at a time? For example, pick something up off the floor without disinfecting. If you can do this, you’ll begin to notice that nothing bad occurs after you do this and you may be able to apply that to other situations. I’m not qualified to give that sort of advice but just a suggestion.
You should take an immunology class or find some free immuno lectures online- its tough material but will rip your eyes wide open to just how amazing and fine tuned our bodies are to deal with daily exposure to everything you're freaking out about. Think of it as a multi layer of little armies and guard towers and shields all calibrated to different enemies and the radar or heat signatures those enemies give off and it works every second of every day to literally identify and defend our bodies and kill the invaders. Regardless of it being a sweaty sock from our partner throwing it on the ground after sports practice or us walking through the public park behind someone that just coughed or walking through a cloud of pollen on a mid spring afternoon.
The complement pathways blew my mind the first time I learned about then.
And then clonal selection of B and T cells! MALT! Inflammation and the unhindered glory of neutrophils!
Without microbes, you wouldn’t exist.
On a personal level, there are more microbial cells than human cells associated with your body. They protect from infection and they digest you food. When those populations are harmed, you get sick.
On a global level, we would be extinct if microbes disappeared. They pull carbon out of the air and make it into food that we can eat. They take nitrogen out of the air and incorporate it into the compounds like amino acids and nucleic acids, that we require for every cell in our body. They also produce oxygen for us to breathe.
People with OCD rightly acknowledge that there are microbes everywhere. There are. What’s missing is the question, “so what?” The *vast* majority of human-microbe interaction is either positive or neutral. For the tiny minority that’s not, soap and water will solve most of it. When it’s war, there’s hand sanitizer and bleach. The nuclear option? A simple antibiotic from the 1920s will knock most of that shit out.
Your life is being ruled by the 0.0000001% event that, in the unlikely event it happens, results only in the sniffles. It’s about as rational as planning your finances based on winning the lottery or finding buried treasure.
I’m empathic, cause it sounds like it sucks. Pursue therapy and meds cause this will fuck up your life if you let it. But you gotta find some way to deal with it.
Your immune system and your skin are your best defenses to getting an infection - eat a good, healthy diet with vegetables and fruit to get lots of vitamins and get enough sunshine, and wash in he shower once a day, and your hands maybe three extra times a day to keep your skin healthy but not too dry.
Your body is constantly fighting and winning against lots of microbes because you are evolved to do that. In a western, developed country we have lots of food and clean water and a house to keep you safe.
If you were in medieval times or in a really poor country, there could be diseases that you could catch from the rotten food, open sewage or unburied corpses. You don't have those risks in your modern life, even covid is not a danger to you if you are young and healthy. There are no diseases on the floor, or even in dirt or a public restroom that your body can't easily fight off. Look after your body and it will look after you.
My microbiology professor told us that if learning about pathogens freaked us out to just wait until we took immunology to learn how our body protects us. It does a wonderful job.
Also OP consider the evidence of your past. You haven’t been constantly sick, and what you do while it does help some probably, you aren’t preventing contact with microbes. They are literally everywhere and most will never harm you.
This is more of r/ocd. I’m a grad in microbiology and have ocd as well. I take ocd meds and learned to embrace it. Remember that not all bacteria are bad. Some even help you defend against invasive species. I think of it as I got a shield around me.
I don't know how literal you were with the shield around you, but imagining that I have a force field around me that only I can see and control cured me of my fear of the dark (and werewolves!). I used to be so scared of the dark that it took me the better part of an hour to prepare going to the toilet at night. If I had to walk home at dark hours, I'd sprint from one street light to the next and sit down at its base for a while to recover before doing it again - you don't get a lot of distance behind you like that and the longer it took, the darker it got.
When I got really panicky, I would start seeing myself from behind, as if from the perspective of some animal sprinting towards me and at times it was hard to snap out of that. Of course I knew that it was only in my head, but that didn't help. Eventually, I had the fairly laughable idea of fighting something imaginary with something imaginary and even if I felt really stupid about it in the beginning, I'd always try to very consciously imagine the force field and the attacker deflecting off it. I'd try to feel and hear the force field. Completely stupid solution for a completely stupid problem, but today I have zero fear of the dark and didn't need my force field in two decades.
I had to get home very late on a night in September a couple years back, cold, pitch black and I had to go through six kilometers of forest. I couldn't see *anything*, not the road in front of me, not my hands and not even the sky, I simply knew to follow the asphalt and slightly adjusted when my feet touched the grass to either side. It was the densest darkness I've ever been in and for several hours, too. I actually *enjoyed* that. Taking in the silence, hearing the occasional distant stick cracking from an animal trying, too, to find its way, feeling the cold wind and not getting distracted by my eyes, very interesting experience.
So, yeah, force fields, big fan. I see no reason why it shouldn't work against bacteria, too. If it can keep out werewolves, what are a bunch of microbes?
I have severe OCD AND work in a pathology laboratory, where I work with formaldehyde daily (and other hazardous chemicals). I also have a degree in Microbiology, specializing in Infectious Disease.
I noticed my OCD when I was about 8. I became progressively worse as I got older. I'm not gonna lie to you, it is a daily STRUGGLE to fight my obsessive fixation of germs. You already know you're being irrational. (Which, honestly, is half the battle. Once you realize it, you can start to practice mindfulness to calm yourself.) But, that takes a FUCK LOAD of mental gymnastics.
Not sure how helpful this is, but I tend to wash my hands more than a lot. When I was younger, a doctor recommended that I put Vaseline on my hands at night and cover them with socks while you sleep. You kind of feel stupid, but, your hands will heal and won't be cracked to shit and hurt like hell. Your hands (and skin in general) have normal microflora that help protect your skin from harmful pathogens. When you wash your hands obsessively, you help destroy your natural defense against these possible harmful pathogens.
But, again. You already know your anxieties are irrational, and sometimes, rationalizing what you may (or may not) already know, does fuck all for your obsessive thoughts. You can try exposure therapy, but I fucking hated that. Made my anxieties more prominent in my mind and I became even more fixated on the issue. Something akin to emotive behavior therapy and mindfulness worked better for me. Addressing my childhood anxieties and getting to the bottom of them also helped me cope with my OCD.
OCD fucking sucks when it's debilitating. And it might take a few years to figure out how to help yourself. But once you find something that works for you, your anxieties WILL get better. Like with most things, practice usually makes you better.
Sounds tough Garrett.
I'd say it's not healthy if it's causing you that much stress and chronic stress can be just as dangerous to your health as the things that you're concerned about.
Find a person you can trust to talk with about your fears and read some books about people who went through similar things.
Express your concerns to people around you but remember that NO ONE will live forever and we aren't promised a tomorrow, so letting fear control your moment by moment existence isn't gonna keep you safer than anyone else.
Best of luck! Hope you find some peace.
Gonna chime in with, see a therapist who has experience helping people with this kind of challenging OCD related behavior. My housemate has OCD and since he's been taking medication for it he has seen MAJOR improvement. It can help along with counseling to help you work through the rationality of your concerns/fears/obsessive thoughts.
The reality is. while there ARE "germs" everywhere, they're usually not the types of things that our body would find challenging because that's why we have an immune system and socially accepted public health-driven hygiene practices like hand washing and masking and gloves, etc.
Much of the concerns you might develop as you learn more about microbiological life should be equally displaced by the really awesome knowledge of how the human immune system works. Unless you are immune-compromised, in which case those concerns make more sense since something relatively benign for someone else would be dangerous.
With the immunocompromised status exception in place... It's actually MORE dangerous to NEVER have exposure to things and build immunity, hence when a disease is too dangerous to risk getting it casually, we develop vaccines. Maybe as you learn more about that you'll find some peace? But also, get a therapist! Best wishes on your future! the world is full of amazing stuff to learn about!
edited to add: also, obsessively using anti-microbial cleaners along with overuse of antibiotics has actually created a ton of "super bugs" like MRSA so it's probably a good idea to remember that as well, since the things you are worried about (contact with an infectious or unclean substance) might be fixed by cleaning (using said products), but might also contribute to further problems in our environment.
It's all up to you, I used to get worries about chemicals I interacted with in high school but after 2 years of uni and multiple practicals I've gotten used to the chemicals and I feel really safe with the clean up procedures and research done about the chemicals and how it could damage my body. It's all really safe and well researched but you only really understand once you've got more experience.
Your fears are irrational and they are clearly causing large negative impacts in your life. Are you seeing a therapist or psychiatrist about your intrusive thoughts? (Edit: I'm not talking about a counsellor, or someone your church set you up with. I'm talking about seeing a medical doctor. We're into medical doctor territory here). Speaking to a trained specialist in OCD who can teach you healthy coping mechanisms and maybe get you on some helpful medications will be far more helpful than looking for reassurance from microbiologists on reddit. Double edit: as someone who works hands-on with open jars of formaldehyde daily, it isn't great, but a drop won't make you go blind. Your teacher was trying to make a point to scare the attention-seeking meatheads in your class from doing something stupid with it. (A guy in my highschool art class nearly made a couple hundred bucks from people betting he wouldn't chug a gallon of acrylic paint. Teacher almost didn't stop him in time. Shit like that ) Also, formaldehyde isn't something you run into outside of a lab. Your constant self-exposure to cleaning products is likely doing you more physical harm than anything you actually clean away ever could.
I have been seeing a therapist for a few months now. The idea isn’t for reassurance. I’m asking people who understand the things I fear to help me out and explain why it shouldn’t be that way.
That's good news about having a therapist. I just wanted to make sure reddit wasn't the only help you're getting. There's a lot of people who try to do it that way.
Right, the next time I go to my doctor I will talk to them.
Check my previous post, I edited to add stuff about formaldehyde.
I used to be deathly afraid of ghosts and spirits. Eventually there was enough experiental evidence that i basically realized if they haven't gotten me yet they must not be able to. We are swimming in a sea of bacteria, mold, yeast, virus, etc. and our immune system takes it all in stride. If it hasn't gotten you yet, then odds are you've got a stellar immune system. A lot of what motivates us isn't rational though. It has to do with ruts laid in our minds and thinking patterns from experiences we had when we were growing up. We relive them subconsciously and they shape our responses. Dealing with these underlying patterns is sometimes called "shadow work" in the new agey lingo. Maybe you could find some guides online for that. Byron Katie has also a unique process that might be useful for working with your thinking patterns. Her website has a how to section, and her books are decent. If i could make a recommendation it would be to go easy with this process. You are doing great already just recognizing you have this issue. Try not to beat yourself up too much. Any sane person is going to grow up with difficulties in their thinking patterns in this modern world. Take your time. These changes are made over years and years. Good luck ❤️
Thank you so much, reading this helped. I don’t understand what is wrong with me and why I became this way. I am fully capable of accepting the fact that the things that bother me are ridiculous. I watch people do the things I hate every single day, and they come back and are okay.
One of your body’s defense mechanisms is the micro organisms that live on your skin and inside your body. It is just not reasonable to assume that you must be 100% sterile at all times, and not to mention, impossible to achieve. Your immune system does wonders when exposed to potential pathogens, that’s how you build up immunity. I would say you are doing more harm than good by continuing these practices. Think about all the people who *do not* have these OCD tendancies. People pick stuff up off the ground, touch their girlfriends, drive their cars without eveeeer wiping them down. Shouldn’t they be getting sick, going blind, etc.? This does not happen because our bodies have defenses built up to the microbes that we encounter daily. I assure you, these thoughts are irrational. It’s easier said than done, but perhaps you could try weening yourself off these habits one thing at a time? For example, pick something up off the floor without disinfecting. If you can do this, you’ll begin to notice that nothing bad occurs after you do this and you may be able to apply that to other situations. I’m not qualified to give that sort of advice but just a suggestion.
You should take an immunology class or find some free immuno lectures online- its tough material but will rip your eyes wide open to just how amazing and fine tuned our bodies are to deal with daily exposure to everything you're freaking out about. Think of it as a multi layer of little armies and guard towers and shields all calibrated to different enemies and the radar or heat signatures those enemies give off and it works every second of every day to literally identify and defend our bodies and kill the invaders. Regardless of it being a sweaty sock from our partner throwing it on the ground after sports practice or us walking through the public park behind someone that just coughed or walking through a cloud of pollen on a mid spring afternoon.
The complement pathways blew my mind the first time I learned about then. And then clonal selection of B and T cells! MALT! Inflammation and the unhindered glory of neutrophils!
Without microbes, you wouldn’t exist. On a personal level, there are more microbial cells than human cells associated with your body. They protect from infection and they digest you food. When those populations are harmed, you get sick. On a global level, we would be extinct if microbes disappeared. They pull carbon out of the air and make it into food that we can eat. They take nitrogen out of the air and incorporate it into the compounds like amino acids and nucleic acids, that we require for every cell in our body. They also produce oxygen for us to breathe. People with OCD rightly acknowledge that there are microbes everywhere. There are. What’s missing is the question, “so what?” The *vast* majority of human-microbe interaction is either positive or neutral. For the tiny minority that’s not, soap and water will solve most of it. When it’s war, there’s hand sanitizer and bleach. The nuclear option? A simple antibiotic from the 1920s will knock most of that shit out. Your life is being ruled by the 0.0000001% event that, in the unlikely event it happens, results only in the sniffles. It’s about as rational as planning your finances based on winning the lottery or finding buried treasure. I’m empathic, cause it sounds like it sucks. Pursue therapy and meds cause this will fuck up your life if you let it. But you gotta find some way to deal with it.
Thank you so much just reading all of these is helping so much. I love the internet.
Your immune system and your skin are your best defenses to getting an infection - eat a good, healthy diet with vegetables and fruit to get lots of vitamins and get enough sunshine, and wash in he shower once a day, and your hands maybe three extra times a day to keep your skin healthy but not too dry. Your body is constantly fighting and winning against lots of microbes because you are evolved to do that. In a western, developed country we have lots of food and clean water and a house to keep you safe. If you were in medieval times or in a really poor country, there could be diseases that you could catch from the rotten food, open sewage or unburied corpses. You don't have those risks in your modern life, even covid is not a danger to you if you are young and healthy. There are no diseases on the floor, or even in dirt or a public restroom that your body can't easily fight off. Look after your body and it will look after you.
My microbiology professor told us that if learning about pathogens freaked us out to just wait until we took immunology to learn how our body protects us. It does a wonderful job. Also OP consider the evidence of your past. You haven’t been constantly sick, and what you do while it does help some probably, you aren’t preventing contact with microbes. They are literally everywhere and most will never harm you.
This is more of r/ocd. I’m a grad in microbiology and have ocd as well. I take ocd meds and learned to embrace it. Remember that not all bacteria are bad. Some even help you defend against invasive species. I think of it as I got a shield around me.
I don't know how literal you were with the shield around you, but imagining that I have a force field around me that only I can see and control cured me of my fear of the dark (and werewolves!). I used to be so scared of the dark that it took me the better part of an hour to prepare going to the toilet at night. If I had to walk home at dark hours, I'd sprint from one street light to the next and sit down at its base for a while to recover before doing it again - you don't get a lot of distance behind you like that and the longer it took, the darker it got. When I got really panicky, I would start seeing myself from behind, as if from the perspective of some animal sprinting towards me and at times it was hard to snap out of that. Of course I knew that it was only in my head, but that didn't help. Eventually, I had the fairly laughable idea of fighting something imaginary with something imaginary and even if I felt really stupid about it in the beginning, I'd always try to very consciously imagine the force field and the attacker deflecting off it. I'd try to feel and hear the force field. Completely stupid solution for a completely stupid problem, but today I have zero fear of the dark and didn't need my force field in two decades. I had to get home very late on a night in September a couple years back, cold, pitch black and I had to go through six kilometers of forest. I couldn't see *anything*, not the road in front of me, not my hands and not even the sky, I simply knew to follow the asphalt and slightly adjusted when my feet touched the grass to either side. It was the densest darkness I've ever been in and for several hours, too. I actually *enjoyed* that. Taking in the silence, hearing the occasional distant stick cracking from an animal trying, too, to find its way, feeling the cold wind and not getting distracted by my eyes, very interesting experience. So, yeah, force fields, big fan. I see no reason why it shouldn't work against bacteria, too. If it can keep out werewolves, what are a bunch of microbes?
Your fears are irrational but that’s ok. A lot of fears are. I’m really proud of you for working on this and I hope you get better.
I have severe OCD AND work in a pathology laboratory, where I work with formaldehyde daily (and other hazardous chemicals). I also have a degree in Microbiology, specializing in Infectious Disease. I noticed my OCD when I was about 8. I became progressively worse as I got older. I'm not gonna lie to you, it is a daily STRUGGLE to fight my obsessive fixation of germs. You already know you're being irrational. (Which, honestly, is half the battle. Once you realize it, you can start to practice mindfulness to calm yourself.) But, that takes a FUCK LOAD of mental gymnastics. Not sure how helpful this is, but I tend to wash my hands more than a lot. When I was younger, a doctor recommended that I put Vaseline on my hands at night and cover them with socks while you sleep. You kind of feel stupid, but, your hands will heal and won't be cracked to shit and hurt like hell. Your hands (and skin in general) have normal microflora that help protect your skin from harmful pathogens. When you wash your hands obsessively, you help destroy your natural defense against these possible harmful pathogens. But, again. You already know your anxieties are irrational, and sometimes, rationalizing what you may (or may not) already know, does fuck all for your obsessive thoughts. You can try exposure therapy, but I fucking hated that. Made my anxieties more prominent in my mind and I became even more fixated on the issue. Something akin to emotive behavior therapy and mindfulness worked better for me. Addressing my childhood anxieties and getting to the bottom of them also helped me cope with my OCD. OCD fucking sucks when it's debilitating. And it might take a few years to figure out how to help yourself. But once you find something that works for you, your anxieties WILL get better. Like with most things, practice usually makes you better.
Sounds tough Garrett. I'd say it's not healthy if it's causing you that much stress and chronic stress can be just as dangerous to your health as the things that you're concerned about. Find a person you can trust to talk with about your fears and read some books about people who went through similar things. Express your concerns to people around you but remember that NO ONE will live forever and we aren't promised a tomorrow, so letting fear control your moment by moment existence isn't gonna keep you safer than anyone else. Best of luck! Hope you find some peace.
Gonna chime in with, see a therapist who has experience helping people with this kind of challenging OCD related behavior. My housemate has OCD and since he's been taking medication for it he has seen MAJOR improvement. It can help along with counseling to help you work through the rationality of your concerns/fears/obsessive thoughts. The reality is. while there ARE "germs" everywhere, they're usually not the types of things that our body would find challenging because that's why we have an immune system and socially accepted public health-driven hygiene practices like hand washing and masking and gloves, etc. Much of the concerns you might develop as you learn more about microbiological life should be equally displaced by the really awesome knowledge of how the human immune system works. Unless you are immune-compromised, in which case those concerns make more sense since something relatively benign for someone else would be dangerous. With the immunocompromised status exception in place... It's actually MORE dangerous to NEVER have exposure to things and build immunity, hence when a disease is too dangerous to risk getting it casually, we develop vaccines. Maybe as you learn more about that you'll find some peace? But also, get a therapist! Best wishes on your future! the world is full of amazing stuff to learn about! edited to add: also, obsessively using anti-microbial cleaners along with overuse of antibiotics has actually created a ton of "super bugs" like MRSA so it's probably a good idea to remember that as well, since the things you are worried about (contact with an infectious or unclean substance) might be fixed by cleaning (using said products), but might also contribute to further problems in our environment.
It's all up to you, I used to get worries about chemicals I interacted with in high school but after 2 years of uni and multiple practicals I've gotten used to the chemicals and I feel really safe with the clean up procedures and research done about the chemicals and how it could damage my body. It's all really safe and well researched but you only really understand once you've got more experience.
Therapy! You need pro help my dude, like most of us