Been health anxiety free for months now & can feel it creeping back up on me - help!

[GirlAfraid23]

I have been free for a while now and now I can feel my anxieties getting worse again.

Been having digestive and bladder problems lately and coupled with some pain, I've started panicking of what it all means.

I don't want to go down the health anxiety/general bad anxiety again - how do i stop it before it consumes me again?!

[southey]

Hi,

Well the first thing you should not be doing is researching anything at all to do with health. Research to us anxiety sufferers is like Kryptonite to superman!

Think that you are OK now even though you were maybe convinced in the past that there was something wrong.

Also try distracting yourself from those creeping thoughts. Keep busy, don't isolate yourself from others. Plan fun things to do and do them. Replace any negative thinking with positive things or just plain distract yourself with nice things around you like sights, smells or sounds.

It's hard to distract yourself from negative thinking at first but with practice it gets easier. Each time you distract a thought it breaks the negative pathways trying to form in the brain and trying to get a hold of you.

It's good to talk about how we feel so if there is someone you can go to who understands thats great, it's like sharing a burden and also having an objective viewpoint to counter our negative bias one.

ATB,

Steve.