A personal look at fear and the spiritual life from someone suffering from OCD.

I think in my life I've usually come down on the side of one poster who responds:

I myself encountered this a number of years ago. Sadat had been
assasinated. The Russians were about to invade Poland. The Chicago
School teachers were about to go on strike. My stomache was in knots,
my mind in turmoil. Fortunately, they were the same headlines for
week after week- so that I was able to see finally how ludicrous the
situation was. Finally, I woke up and said to myself, This is
completely nuts.

So I called into the radio show and pointed out what I had discovered
in myself, that for NONE of the things this lady was was worried
about did she have any responsibility whatever.

"So what should she do?," asked the radio host.

Well," I said from my own experience, "It just seems to me to be
Mental Health 101 that when you get in that kind of turmoil over "the
world situation," you turn off the news. You don't watch TV. You
don't read the paper. Instead, you take a chlorophyll bath by taking
a walk in the woods....." You spend some time in front of the
Blessed sacrament. You take a hymn book home from church (with
Fathers permission) and you sing hymns of thanks and praise to God
for His goodness. source

We do have a disturbing amount of control over what we think about, though it may be hard to exercise it if we havn't in a while. More important of course is trusting in God, but we have to put in the effort as well.