First off, allow me to apologize in advance for what I already know is going to be a rather verbose response to your post, but you touched on a few issues that I think need to be addressed here.
1.) What you are feeling is very natural in situations like this.
2.) I highly doubt that you have an anxiety disorder.
Let's address the first point that deals with your feelings of discomfort. Think back as far as you can to your earliest memories. I am sure that if you focus hard enough, you will realize that you knew the difference between right and wrong instinctively your whole life. However, (leading in to point #2), like any normal child, you lacked the intellectual capacity. the language skills, and the emotional experience that comes with age to communicate why something you instinctively knew to be wrong was wrong as it was contradicted with the spoken words of media, advertising, the political class, elders, etc.
That psychological assault has been happening to us all our entire lives which is why so many people are affected by anxiety and depression, and the licensed drug dealers in white coats are making big money on our suffering because of it. It is not a physical problem like they say. I strongly recommend you pick yourself up a copy of The Hypnotic States of America by Roy Masters.
Those mixed messages in popular culture are designed to make you doubt yourself. This may sound simplistic, and even a bit cliche, but what you really need to do is learn to how to doubt doubt.
How this ties in to the whole 2012 hysteria? Your conscience coupled with your own ability to analyze information tell you that it is all BS. However, what you hear in the form of the spoken word though media, friends, neighbors, family, co-workers, etc., contradicts what you know to be true. When enough people around you buy in to hysteria, it can be very upsetting. Especially, if like me, you are a very visual person and can actually see words, and therefore see how catastrophic something like that would really be, that it is not as glorious as it is portrayed in movies.
Now, I could get really esoteric here, and make a series of arguments based on sociology on why so many people have been obsessed about the end of the world since the beginning of time tying in to this death cult called popular culture. But, if I were ever going to do that, I would just open up my word processor and start writing a book on the subject if I were to type out that many words. And maybe one day I will. I have considered it a few times. I just need a good title.
But what I will do for you for now, is tell you a little story as I did go through something similar to what you are going through now, last year. Remember the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year? I remember shortly thereafter, less than a week after the earthquake, I got a call from my mother and we ended up getting in to a stupid argument over some BS that was posted on Yahoo news of all places. There was this mini doomsday theory that had went viral over the web that the 'super moon' was going to cause a 100 foot tsunami to hit the west coast of the US, and I live in San Francisco which would be ground zero in such a scenario.
The first I heard about this theory was the phone call from my mother which should tell you how much time I really spend online. She was trying to convince me to drive out to her house in the Central Valley so that we could all drive up to Tahoe to ride it out. Of course I refused. A.) I had work that weekend, B.) I had to go to the lab at school to do my homework since it was getting near midterms, and C.) I sure as hell wasn't going to let some fear monger disrupt my life. Needless to say, the conversation didn't go very well. I immediately did some of my own research and found so many contradictions to the claims. I wrote her an email including a few links to Universities, NASA, and two independent news sources, which were Fox News, and ABC. One of the links I sent her, (the one from NASA) proved that a "Super Moon" happens roughly every 30 years, and does not cause 100 tsunamis or major earthquakes, and in fact, has minimal impact on the earth if any at all. And that the most recent 'super moon' happened back in the mid 1970s with no effects on the tides, or caused any major earthquakes.
And just for grins, (just to be an ass, actually), one of those links I included was from a scientific study of what would really happen if a 100 foot tsunami where ever to hit the west coast like that, and it showed that they would not have been any safer up in Tahoe than I would be in SF.
Do you want to know what happened? Not only did the supposed day of catastrophe go by without a single hitch, but I got no response from my email, and I didn't even get so much as an apology from her when she was proven wrong either. No "thank you for the information", or "this really helps." Not even a "Thank God I was wrong, and that it was all nonsense."
You know what? Maybe I should write that book after all.
