has your anxiety/OCD made you more gullible?

[acowsbarn]

'Cause I feel like it has for me.

Maybe it's not necessarily more gullible, but rather, more...
"Thinky"

This is not what I- lemme explain.

Before I developed such severe anxiety, I was able to watch horror movies and go to haunted houses, and supposedly legit haunted places just fine. I labeled them all as memories and moved on with my life.

Anxiety came into the picture, and I can't do those things anymore without thinking something bad is gonna happen.

So basically, I just can't do those things anymore. I've tried to explain to my family that my anxiety gets in the way of doing some of these things, and even some things that are just harmless, but they don't really respond too well too it.

They usually just get angry, it spikes my anxiety, makes me feel guilty, so I go anyway...'course this doesn't help my mental health :y. Like, we went to the Ohio Penitentiary, the one they filmed Shawshank Redemption at, and I felt light headed, my stomach hurt, my heart was racing, and don't even get me started on how bad it got when we saw the solitary confinement. I almost started crying since that was sort of how my anxiety got boosted. (I have social anxiety so friends weren't really my forte...not so say I didn't have them, I just...didn't like 'em...this entire post is making me seem really pretentious and mean. They were those friends that were more like..."friends.")

I think most of my anxiety comes from just the overall...general...idea of existence. It's such a vast topic that my brain couldn't comprehend it (even though it could before???) and then it just tried to find an answer. Eventually I just accepted the fact that no one truly knows, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm here, living, and just gonna die one day. I mean this was after 3 months of crippling anxiety but w/e.

However, recently that anxiety came back, and it's looking for answers again...anything that will just make me scared an anxious, really. There's this one creepypasta that actually screwed with my head pretty bad.

So basically- anyone ever really...sort of been affected by ideas that are just out right ridiculous but couldn't help it because of their disorders?

[Bearinmind]

I think the word you're searching for is self-conscious. Anxiety makes you too self-conscious (and vice-versa).

But, it's not like non-anxious people are perfect either. My word as an anxious person doesn't worth much but I believe that "normal people" can be too inconsequential as well. They're not "normal" because they've learn how to deal with anxiety, it's just that they don't care. Ignorance is a bliss.

There is a common phase in the development of every medical school student called Medical Student's Disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students'_disease), which is formal name for bouts of anxiety and hypochondria many medical students suffer when they're expanding their knowledge about diseases, making them more self-conscious of how dangerous the world can be. They quickly learn how to cope with such anxiety and move on (otherwise they couldn't get their degrees). But that goes to show that much of anxiety comes from a form of existential vacuum, where your incomplete knowledge and the recognition of the vastness of the unkown makes you more protective, obsessively protective, of your own mortality. As your knowledge and mind expands more and more, completing more and more of your knowledge, about the world and about yourself, this existential vacuum tends to disappear, and so does the anxiety.