I want to stop worrying, but I feel trapped by my obsessions and anxieties

I’m just gonna get right into this because I really need to get this off my chest. I just can’t take this anymore. I have genuinely tried to stop worrying, stop obsessing over things, but for some reason I just can’t do it. Nothing seems to stick with me no matter how hard I try, and I just feel awful about it.

Over the past few years I have read some… let’s just say unsavoury things about people online, terrible things regarding different groups of people, such as women, people of colour, people of different sexual orientations, etc. Any other person 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.

For example, recently I’ve been worrying about this one claim I’ve read about women and how apparently they only live men who make more money than them. This is apparently supported by the fact that husbands on average tend to make more than their wives, and that apparently a large number of single men are poor, whereas a large number of single women are wealthy. At the same time, however, I’ve also read that the number of married women who outearn their husbands has increased significantly in numerous countries across the world, to as many as 30-50 percent of women in some countries earning more than their husbands. Granted, apparently most of these husbands aren’t in the lowest income group, but that still counts for something right? I even read as well that some the trend of husbands out earning wives may not even be intentional based on certain statistics.

I’ve also read that apparently, these types of marriages where wives earn more are more likely to divorce, but the reasons are sketchy, since some say both men and women become uncomfortable when the wives earn more, and some indicate that them being unhappier is due to the, doing more housework on top of earning more, and others still say that it differs by country, and that these divorce rates are t that high in some countries. I have also read some studies which suggest that these wives try to compensate with husbands if higher social status, but I’m still sceptical that so many of these women are all able to find men of higher social status, especially in countries where a caste system doesn’t exist.

I just don’t know what to think anymore, I know there a lot of studies that apparently provide evidence for this behaviour, but I also know there are some that call it into question. I did think for a while that I should be skeptical of all of these studies if I didn’t know that much about the topic, since I really was just using the information of other people to form my opinions. Unfortunately, I told myself that that was just a cop out, and that I was just scared of the truth or of reading studies that go against my worldview, but at the same time I never just blindly accepted the studies that found little support for these things, and I literally copy and pasted the titles, links, and even authors of these studies all over twitter, advanced search engines, and numerous other websites in order to determine whether they were heavily flawed. Honestly, I think I should have reason to be skeptical of these studies, at the end of the day I don’t know much about social sciences, some of the papers I’ve read involve maths that I don’t understand whatsoever, and I feel like learning about these topics would take more time than I have available to me or that I’m even honestly willing to spend.

Part of me thinks that I’m just copping out by doing this, that I’m just seeking affirmation to stop reading into this and am just being wilfully ignorant, or that I’m pathetic for even doing this, but I just can’t take it anymore. I’m sick of worrying about things I hardly understand, I’m sick of constantly having a nagging voice in the back of my head all day that urges me to go back and look, I’m sick of wasting hours of my life reading this stuff just so I can have a modicum of a better understanding towards it, I’m sick of having the thoughts interrupt the things I actually enjoy doing and causing me to stop, and I’m sick of staying up late into the night just to satiate the parasitic thoughts that dwell in the back of my mind.

But honestly the worst part is the promise that I made. A year ago, I lost someone close to me, and I promised myself that I would properly grieve and move on and that I would give up my habit of doing this. It’s been over a year now, and I haven’t been able to do it, I’ve failed at keeping my promise. Sometimes the voice in my head tells me to just get over it, that it’s a cop out reason to stop, or that it’s disrespectful to them to have made that promise in the first place, especially when they didn’t know what I was going through, but I just don’t know at this point.

I’m just so tired all the time, I feel like my brain is on fire, and some of the things I used to enjoy just don’t have that spark that they used to anymore. I just feel so trapped, bored and stressed, and I just want everything in my head to just go away. I apologise if this isn’t the right place to post this, but I just don’t know where else to go.