A Day in the Mind of Health Anxiety
Tags: This Happened To Me, Mental Health, Anxiety, Mental Health Awareness, Self

I have come to realize, over many years of struggling with Health Anxiety, that all the weight, ache, and pain I feel at the end of the day is magnetized by a belief system that I am not a healthy person. I cannot let go of the sensations of sickness because my brain has honed in on them and agreed to give them life — unconditional faith.

Becoming a Devout Health-Worrier

The journey is different for everyone, but this is an outline of the path I took:

Be born into a family whose members all have diagnosable anxiety.

Be raised primarily by an ill caretaker — mine was my grandmother. She used an oxygen tank, took many prescriptions, and complained daily of her ailments.

Watch ill caretaker deteriorate and eventually die of a heart attack. Have little context for the habits/circumstances that made her ill — your family believes you are too young to benefit from such information.

Grow up without health insurance, or with a parent who tries to put off taking you to the doctor. Fracture both bones in your arm at the age of 10, and wait to go to the doctor for several days because your parents think you are exaggerating your pain.

Overhear your adult brother scolding your parents for not taking you to the hospital sooner. Adopt the notion that all ailments must be immediately addressed by a doctor.

Step on a scale at the age of 22, in the wake of leaving your abusive husband — you have neglected yourself for far too long. Hear the term “morbidly obese” describe you. Be told that everyone in your family suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes and if you don’t get your diet under control, you’ll end up just like them. Decide this means you can have complete control over your health if you do the right things.

Have no idea how to break the habits you’ve had your whole life. Feel ashamed, powerless, guilty, foolish, scared.

Leave a career that made you constantly sick (stomach issues, bronchitis, influenza, colds) and notice that illness becomes just an occasional thing. Forget how to be sick. Forget that you have survived sickness dozens of times. Lose patience with any illness that lasts longer than a few days.

Stop trusting your body to take care of itself.

Watch your blood pressure begin to climb. See blood sugar rise. Hear your doctors telling you over and over again that you have to take better care of yourself. Obsess over diet, exercise, and most importantly, signs that you’ve missed your chance to get better.

Make health such a focus that without even realizing it, you develop rituals that allow you to check for illness before it even begins. Assume the worst, always. Ritualize.

The Daily Ritual of Health Anxiety

Wake up and immediately assess how you feel. Is your throat still sore? Are you dizzy? How about those chest pains?

Journal all symptoms, even normal bodily functions that look like symptoms every day. Take this journal with you to the doctor so that they can try to connect dots from constipation to a pimple behind the ear to dry mouth that went away after you drank more fluids for a day.

Read about illness. Study it in school.

Google symptoms and try to self-diagnose to save money and the shame of visiting the doctor again, who by this point has written you off as “wackadoo”.

Hear the symptoms of others. Ask about their illness. Look into rare illnesses. Ignore statistics. Assume the worst, always.

Become so familiar and in-tune with bodily sensations that self-diagnosis of terminal illnesses happens before you even have a chance to “think”. These are automatic thoughts. They control you.

Seek reassurance that doesn’t last. Talk about nothing but health and health anxiety with everyone you know. Become nothing but your illness and the impending illnesses that will surely end your life. Lose friends. Alienate yourself.

Cry yourself to sleep at night certain you won’t wake in the morning.

Pray to gods you’re not sure you believe in. Beg to get better from sickness that has yet to take you. Be greedy for life but miss out on it every single day. And be angry with yourself for that, too.

Your church becomes a prison.

Losing Religion

It is easy to draw conclusions from behavior to outcome if the outcome continues to land in your favor.

If the fear is death and the outcome is continuing to live, then the key must be the ritual! Even though it hurts, even though it is all you think of, you train yourself to believe it is worthy, necessary, required.

While I was busy avoiding death, I realized that I was living for the fear, not the hope. The focus of my actions was to negate something, not create something. It left me feeling empty and I began to forget what I was fighting for — this life didn’t feel worth all that trouble.

It was time to leave that church.

Identifying —

Before I could do anything else successfully I had to give the fear a clear definition. I wrote out the beliefs that lead to the fear.

Here are just a few:

_ all illness is terrible illness

_ terrible illnesses lead to death

_ death is painful

_ death is endless

Countering Beliefs —

I had to provide counter-statements to each belief that had led to prisonous fear. Many illnesses are minor. The body knows how to fight off illness-it has done it so many times before. You don’t know what death is like-it seems peaceful for many. You don’t know what happens afterward, it’s arrogant to think you do.

Rebuilding in the Emptiness —

Children respond best to instructions that tell them what to do, rather than what NOT to do. So does an anxious, ruminating brain. You can’t say “stop worrying, Brain” and expect it to enter stillness. Instead, we have to find other things to think about = Distraction. And then give it other things to enjoy = Living.

I honestly believe that writing was a huge part of my recovery. The more I tap these keys, the more I write about anxiety or any other negative thing, the less power it has over me. And the less time I have to think about it in a way that brings it back to life.

I also had to watch shows and read more, not just as a distraction, but to give myself something to talk about with other people rather than always talking about sickness or the anxiety itself.

One of the best tactics I found was exercise. Exercise wipes my brain clean. The more focus my brain gives to keeping me cool, keeping me from falling down, etc, the less time it can give to anxiety. And it’s a two-for-one deal — exercising is good for both the brain (mental health) and the body (physical health). Exercise pushes out the thoughts in the moment, and improves my health to reduce those fears in the future. All your doctors keep telling you to do it — they aren’t wrong about this.