Health Anxiety

Bluenose1978
Bluenose1978 Online Community Member Posts: 4 Listener
in Mental health and wellbeing

Hi , So i suffer from health anxiety and I just feel so overwelmed so im just going to type to mabe release ,

can anyone else relate ?

its like a dark cloud that is over my entire world

its makes me feel very vonarable and scared

I question every feeling and thought

Im that scared of dying or getting a life threating disease . It means im not living in the moment which is now !

I hear a stories or know people that have cancer and it makes it so real that anyone can get it so makes me worry more !

I depend on loved ones and freinds to reasuure me all the time

I feel that i take life for granted when im feeling ok

even though death is garanteed in life it terrifies me 🙁

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Comments

  • Remina
    Remina Online Community Member Posts: 300 Empowering

    I get health anxiety too, it is indeed a horrible, debilitating thing.

    I get extra worried because when I was younger I struggled with a serious health condition and I had to have many CT scans during my treatment, so now as an adult I spend a lot of time worrying about cancer because of all the radiation from the CT scans I had.. I also frequently worry about getting bowel cancer from all the additives in food, emulsifiers/preservatives/processed foods, etc.

    Throughout my adult life I spent a lot of money going back-and-forth to private doctors, I'd pay for MRI scans, ultrasound scans, blood tests, etc. I was trapped in a horrible vicious cycle of constant dread that suddenly I'd get cancer, an aneurysm, a heart attack, all kinds of scenarios ran through my mind that something in my body was a ticking time bomb, I blew all my savings on tests and scans.

    The only thing that would calm me down is if I paid for a diagnostic test/scan and hearing the doctor tell me afterwards ''we didn't find anything..''. Other than that, nothing would calm me down or relax my mind. Nowadays I'm not as bad as I used to be, but if I get a new pain or health issue I still tend to get a little caught up in all the 'what ifs'.

    It's a difficult frame of mind to break free from.

  • hallac
    hallac Online Community Member Posts: 31 Contributor

    I to suffer from health anxiety and the difference in me from this time last year is night and day. What changed for me was cbt therapy it taught me that my thoughts weren’t real and how to manage them.

    I took a good few months but I finally started getting to grips with the thoughts. It taught me to recognise patterns in my thoughts and to break the cycle before it even began.

    I would highly recommend you to try it if you haven’t it really had changed my life.

    I wish you all the best.

  • Mary_Scope
    Mary_Scope Posts: 3,082 Scope Online Community Children and Family Specialists

    Hi @Bluenose1978 and a warm welcome to the community from me!

    I can relate to this a bit and I do think it stems from being quite young and spending a lot of time in and out of hospital for various reasons so now as an adult I do get quite a bit of anxiety if I feel like something isn't quite right in my body and need some reassurance.

    You've also got some support from members on your other post about health anxiety that I just to flag so you know that you are not alone in feeling like this,

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