Grounded guidance and awareness for health anxiety patients and their friends and family
There’s still some debate among doctors about where health anxiety, or hypochondria, actually belongs. Is it part of OCD? Is it simply only a somatic symptom disorder? Is it “just” anxiety? Whatever the answer is, it’s more important that patients get diagnosed and treated. A big part of that is also having a sense of community and hearing the stories of other patients.
The Anxiety Guy not only shares his own personal story about how health anxiety has affected his life, but he breaks down how each attack arises in us. First is curiosity about a sensation in our body, the second is the What Ifs, the worst possible things you remember reading about on WebMD. The third is taking action, which traps us in a cycle of fear. He also talks about how we convince ourselves that this is a personal failure, that we just need to exercise more will power and we’ll “overcome” it. But our conscious mind is really only a small part of the equation. Awareness of the illness and how it affects us is key. He guides us through this process in a real and grounded way.
Health anxiety can be debilitating. It traps us in snowballs of catastrophic ruminations. Whoa, that pain in my leg was strange. I wonder what that is? Surely it’s a clot. I’ve been sitting for too long and I’ve formed a clot. I’m dying. Or once you get on the road, a small gurgle in the stomach can explode into a fear of having diarrhea while driving, which rolls up into ruminating on whether or not you have a cancer of the bowels. The next thing you know you’re panicking and pulling over at a gas station and actually experiencing the symptom you feared because of the overwhelming adrenaline. This happens over and over again like a program that won’t stop replaying, at home, at work, at school, on vacation, with family, with friends.
People have a hard time understanding it. They tell you to just relax, which is like telling a person with a broken leg to just walk. Struggling with this and constantly being in and out of the doctor and ER can leave us feeling depressed and asking, is this it? Is this my life? Are my dreams over now? But that isn’t true, those are just more ruminations. Once we cultivate awareness of our own mind’s process of snowballing like this, we can get a little better each day.
The Anxiety Guy is great not only for patients to learn more about themselves and steps they can take but for their family and friends to learn more about this illness.
Listen to Personal Health Anxiety Stories of Recovery and more self improvement audio programs on Audiojoy — download free on iOS or Android.
Content Review by Ronaldo Reese