Just realized I have health anxiety

[kukidog]

Hi everybody,
I just realized that for the past two years I'm having pretty bad health anxiety. I had no idea that such a thing even existed.
It was brought up by one of the health forum members where I was asking my 100s question.
I'm constantly worrying about myself and my family members. It got to the point where I'm driving everybody mad, including myself.
Can anybody please point me on how to deal with it?

 

[Cuchculan]

Accepting that you have it is a good start. Now look at the things you worry about. Ask yourself how many of them have actually come true? Chance are the answer will be ' Zero '. I always tell people to make out lists over a period of time. All the things they assume they have. All the things they assume their family have. Then it is a game of ' Yes ' or ' No '. From that list how many were real? I like to keep the list going. Some day something might pop up on the list again. You will see it written there and see you didn't really have it before. It was just the mind playing tricks on you. So you might look at it a different way second time around.

It is never easy. Hard to tell if you are really sick or not. You might get a build up of anxiety. Just from how you are feeling. The worry that you might be sick. This is were our list comes in handy. If I asked you to write out a list of everything you thought you had over the past few months. That would be a start with your list. Then how many you really had on one side of the page. How many were just your anxiety on the other side of the page. It more or less shows you the working of the health anxiety mind. To thing you can go through symptoms for something you don't even have. That is how powerful it can be. So try and play the game of logic with your mind using your list. Plus add in reasons why you should have something you assume you have. 5 good reasons.

All just takes time. So be patient.