Contamination-flavoured OCD-health-anxiety: what works for me
Note: this isn’t health advice and I haven’t actually been officially diagnosed with OCD, I just assume I have it because the symptoms are kind of obvious. I don’t know how much of my different-ness when it comes to certain health issues is rational concern, how much is health anxiety, and how much is OCD. There’s some overlap between the three, for sure.
I had a worse episode than I’ve had for a while the other day. My sister was over from the States so my usual routine was disrupted. We all went over to our mother’s house and I was set to borrow my mother’s car to go home, a 25-mile trip. But when I got to the car, I noticed that it was full of dust. My mother has horses, and the yard they’re kept at has outbuildings with asbestos roofs, some of which are deteriorating.
(Explanation for anyone who might be confused at this point: I’ve heard that “even a single fibre” of asbestos can be dangerous, and deteriorating roofs means fibres of asbestos mixed into all the dust on the ground, some of which presumably makes it into the mixture of different types of dust that are now coating the inside of the car I’m supposed to be borrowing. If I sit in the car, the dust will get on my clothes. I could wash them, but does that really get all the dust out? How will I avoid bringing the dust into my caravan without getting naked outside? Etc etc.)
This was something I knew about already and had come to terms with, and could work around when I was occasionally working at the yard, at which time I was living in a house. I had horse clothes, which were kept in their own bag, and I could get a shower as soon as I got home, and there was space to sort everything out in a way that felt “clean enough” OCD-wise.
In the current situation, though, the dust was a blocker for me. Combined with a couple of other factors that made the whole situation more awkward than it should have been, there was no way I was going to get in the car. Long story short, all the other options had some kind of problem as well, so I spiralled for an hour or so and ended up staying over at my brother’s house.
In the morning, I did some reflection on the episode and decided to do some research into what I saw as the “legitimate health concern” part of the whole equation. I wanted to figure out what the actual rational approach was, given my level of risk tolerance (which may have changed since I originally found out about asbestos).
Resources on this kind of thing can be so vague and hedge-y as to be almost useless for this purpose. I already knew that asbestos was bad and could cause serious illness. Whether it was my own psychology that was different this time I don’t know, but for some reason a couple of the pages I found served the purpose perfectly. Here’s what I think the resources did that made the difference:
Mentioned elimination (asbestos fibres being removed by the body’s mechanisms for getting rid of this kind of thing). This reduces the regret-spiral-inducing sense of permanent damage.
Emphasised that short-term exposure is unlikely to put you at risk of illness.
Directly refuted the idea that “one fibre will kill” with a concrete observation: people who’ve lived to 60-79 and have not died from asbestos-related diseases have shown up to 1 million fibres per gram of dry lung tissue.
In the background, I’ve also been updating my mental models for things that can trigger contamination-style anxieties. Particular to asbestos is the fact that it is naturally occurring. There are asbestos fibres everywhere, so any fear that’s driven by the increased presence of asbestos must be calibrated according to exactly how much of an increase is at stake, compared to background levels. Doubling your background exposure for a day seems unlikely to have a significant effect.
This requires a good model, or pre-existing information, on what the level is likely to be, of course. In the case of asbestos roofs on outbuildings, my model is built out of rough estimates for the proportion of the gravel-dust mixture on the ground that’s likely to be excess asbestos, based on how many shards of broken sheeting are lying around. It also takes into account the fact that fibres will be generated at the point of a sheet actually breaking—some of which will be carried off by wind or rain—and the generation of new fibres will mostly be in other isolated incidents or the general grinding of tiny fragments among the gravel on the ground. If the rate of wind-and-rain carry-off is generally higher than the rate of fibre-generation-by-breakage-and-grinding, the place might even be deceptively asbestos-free!
Another element to my overall model of contamination is division. If you believe that particles of dust, pathogens, or whatever else are going to be transferred from one surface to another on contact, rendering both surfaces now contaminated, then it also follows that each surface now has less contaminant than the original surface did. Repeat this a few times and the level of contaminant likely to be present on a given surface after a chain of say, 5 contacts, may be completely negligible.
So I picked up the horse-dust car and drove it around for the month my sister was over, and it was fine.
To summarise, here are the points I find helpful that apply to any contamination-style anxiety:
Background levels. If a particular incident triggers a response, look up background levels and calibrate the excess against those to put it in perspective.
Division. Long chains of surface-to-surface contamination can greatly diminish the expected level of a contaminant, potentially rendering it negligible. Again, calibrate against background levels.
Elimination. The body can get rid of stuff. It’s doing it all the time.
Finding specific, contextualised information like the sources I linked for asbestos can actually be helpful. It’s probably best to do the research outside of a regret/anxiety spiral and be deliberate about what you want to find out, accepting that google can never give you a simple yes or no answer to the question of if working at a horse yard this time will give you the asbestos fibre that eventually kills you, and whether that would be worth it or not.
Hope you found it useful.