Have I finally found a real reason to be anxious?

Hello all,

I've been dealing with with anxiety episodes over the summer mainly focused on fear of infectious deceases but I also gave up driving because of fears of having been in an accident.

I started to feel better over the past week, however last night something awful popped into my head and I've been feeling so bad as I have absolutely no idea what to do.

In short, I remembered something that happened 3 years ago - I was drunk at a house party and went to the bathroom and masturbated over the toilet (I am a male). I do not remember whether I cleaned up or even put the seat up, it's just something that happened and I didn't give it much thought until yesterday. With horror, I also recalled doing the same thing couple of months later at another party. And then that awful intrusive thought appeared that one of the girls could have gotten pregnant from sitting on that seat.

I was sure you can't get pregnant that way but I couldn't resist looking it up on the internet just to be absolutely sure. And of course like I had done so many times over the past weeks with infectious deceases I ended up reading the unlikely-but-possible yahoo answers which got me into one of my worst anxieties yet.

This is so not the kind of thing I do in general. I am not even sexually active and I have now given up drinking alcohol as it's not good for my anxiety, but 3 years ago I was just a stupid teenager thinking about girls and not getting them, I didn't have the anxiety I do now.

I am really confused whether that's not a genuine reason to be worried. Unlike with getting infectious deceases I can't just tell myself "if everyone does that and they are fine, than so should be you".
I know that to beat the anxiety I have to think that 'maybe it happened, maybe it didn't' and stop trying to argue with the thought, but would that be right in this case? I mean, as I think about it from perspective what sort of person does this sort of thing? Running away from the girls to the bathroom and doing this like a total creep... I don't think that happens much and maybe there really is a chance I got somebody pregnant? I am tempted at trying to look up every single person on that party on facebook and check whether they have given birth, but I didn't know most people there and I have no way of finding them out. What's more how can I be sure it only happened these two times. Obviously, it wasn't a big deal for me at the time and I never though of the consequences so I might have done it many times whilst drunk and not remember? If so, and this is really a very irresponsible thing to do then how can I possible get on with my life without doing anything? How can I possibly think 'maybe it happened maybe it did' if I have children I don't know before even having sex for the first time?

Please, I just need an outside perspective. Is the risk real or is it just anxiety?

The odds of that are so microscopically small that no other person on Earth will or should worry about it. This is NOT a real reason to be anxious. This is OCD-induced fear. You must have it bad.
The thing to remember about OCD is that pretty much every OCD theme ever, and I mean ever, was unjustified, and that whether or not you have justification, allowing OCD to try and solve it is DESTRUCTIVE. it makes you do things that you cannot tell are terrible ideas, it hides the truth and simply tries to convince you that your fears are true regardless of what they are, etc. It really only makes things worse and no problem can or will ever be solved by OCDing over it.

Go buy a bunch of raw sunflower seeds and snack on those all day. They seemed to help me a lot when I was bad off. You have to eat a lot of them though, but not a ridiculous amount because that will just give you a stomach ache and it doesn't help anymore after a point. They do a LOT of good for me though.

This is also very good:
obsessive-compulsive/topic103176.html
obsessive-compulsive/topic144944.html

And alas, find the book called Brain Lock by Jeffrey M. Schwartz.

bendib wrote:The odds of that are so microscopically small that no other person on Earth will or should worry about it. This is NOT a real reason to be anxious. This is OCD-induced fear. You must have it bad.
The thing to remember about OCD is that pretty much every OCD theme ever, and I mean ever, was unjustified, and that whether or not you have justification, allowing OCD to try and solve it is DESTRUCTIVE. it makes you do things that you cannot tell are terrible ideas, it hides the truth and simply tries to convince you that your fears are true regardless of what they are, etc. It really only makes things worse and no problem can or will ever be solved by OCDing over it.

Go buy a bunch of raw sunflower seeds and snack on those all day. They seemed to help me a lot when I was bad off. You have to eat a lot of them though, but not a ridiculous amount because that will just give you a stomach ache and it doesn't help anymore after a point. They do a LOT of good for me though.

This is also very good:
obsessive-compulsive/topic103176.html
obsessive-compulsive/topic144944.html

And alas, find the book called Brain Lock by Jeffrey M. Schwartz.

bendib,

Thank you so much for this answer. Thanks to your comment I've probably moved a week forward in this episode and am now more comfortable with the uncertainty. When I worry about things it helps that I usually know some sort of point in time in the future when I will know for certain whether the bad thing has actually happened e.g. end of incubation period, even though by that time I have moved on to something else. This time I don't see anyway I can ever know for certain what I fear has not happened. I walk around with the feeling of being a horrible person. And even if I deal with this one I fear it might keep coming back in future. What line of thinking would you suggest will get me out of this one?

I will definitely try the sunflower seeds thing, thanks very much for that. I will also find that book and read through the topics.

Really, thank you so much!