OCD and Catastrophizing

Hey yall, I’m posting here because I’d like to understand how those of you who may have experienced intense contamination OCD and Chronic catastrophizing have gotten out of it/improved. I need some help trying to figure out how people deal with these things, especially first hand accounts since it’s stolen my life away.

It’s been about 10 months now where I have woken up everyday in severe panic, am scared to touch things around the house, and am completely hopeless about the future… and honestly it breaks me inside to see how much life has 180d.

I used to be a very forward looking career focused and ambitious person. I had good relations with those around me and I had a really positive sense of self. Over time however, this personality has faded away into nothing, and now im just hopeless, struggling to get through every day, and just overall kinda run down.

I have developed this insane fear of dementia and Alzheimer’s and especially getting it early. That or really any neurodegenerative disease. Instead of living, I spend every waking hour trying to protect myself in trying to prevent that from ever happing. And that comes from not touching things around the house since im after of lead paint being on everything (it’s been painted over btw), I constantly wash hands to the point where they bleed profusely. I keep my phone on layers of tissues because im scared of it being contaminated and touching my desk, same with everything. Etc etc, the list could go on. This also is worse because work has some soldering involved so u can imagine how afraid I am of interacting with anything there.

Regardless one of the events that destroyed me recently is I ended up showering and in the process of cleaning my face off (was worried that there was solder dust on there), some of the water poured deep into my nose while I was trying to wash upside down. Now a normal person would be like “oh, that’s okay no problem im just gonna finish showering”. But I’ve spiraled to the point that I’ve convinced myself that the pipes in my apartment might have lead (its an old apartment like 1960s) and that this level of lead along with potential solder could’ve gotten through my nose, through my nerves in there, into my brain, and is secretly contributing to a chance of horrible diseases.

I don’t want reassurance. I know it’s probably really stupid. There’s been several instances of panic like this from random stuff like microplastics etc etc.

But how does something like this turn into such catastrophic thought that I just assume something horrible and plan my life around that. I don’t want to think that way, I want to live life like I used to, but it feels im so far gone and my thoughts of a future are dead.

How do yall deal with things like this? Is there a way out or is this permanently the way I’ll be from now on? There has to be a way out but I haven’t known it for months. Therapy wasn’t too successful but maybe that was because of a bad therapist idk. I don’t really want to take meds cuz a lot of people I know have struggled with them. But I want to know if there’s a natural way out. There has to be life can’t end here.

P.S. I feel like a huge mistake I made was trying to use ChatGPT for reassurance. Although sometimes it feels helpful, it usually turns into me getting more spirals and idk what to do. There’s been so many chats where I’ve spiraled to GPT about how worried I am and researched like thousands of papers and mice experiments etc etc. I know so much that it just breaks me inside knowing the potential consequences of literally everything. I need some peace.