Experiencing a Bad Backdoor Spike

So for the past couple of weeks I’ve made a promise to myself that I would not look up the things that worry me and, for the most part, it’s been working with the exception of one or two days. However, about a day ago I’ve been getting these compulsive thoughts to look up the things that worry me again, mainly conflicting scientific studies about relationships that seem to contradict each other. My compulsions are now telling me that I need to look through some of these studies again because, for some reason, despite spending at least fifty to a hundred or so hours researching this stuff I managed to miss whether or not some of these studies were replicated, and now I’m telling myself to check if they were.

The problem is, in order to confirm or deny this, it would just require a quick google search and a browse, assuming that I haven’t forgotten the titles of some of these studies in the first place. A part of me is saying that, by not checking, I’m just being wilfully ignorant of things that challenge my worldview and looking for excuses to keep my beliefs intact, and that I’m just writing this in order to weasel out of going through with it. However, I know that if I do give into my compulsions, they‘re not going to stop and I’m just going to keep thinking of things that worry me and look them up again.

I also know that, if I go through with my compulsions and find something that confirms them, I’ll feel this sense of dread and anxiety and will be constantly trying to rationalise the things that I’ve found or get sidetracked with a bunch of other sources. If I don’t find anything that confirms them, I’ll just have wasted my time once again on things that never even mattered in the first place. Either way, however, regardless of what I find, I’ll probably feel terrible anyway if I go through with my compulsions as I’ll just be going back on a promise that I made to myself and I’ll just set myself back even further from trying to break my obsessive habits.

I know that I should listen to the voice telling me not to, and I’ve wasted hours of my life reading through things that worry me already, but the voice in my head telling me to just do it is seriously starting to weigh down on me, and I really just want some help to shut it out.