Please reassure me that I can't "think" my heart into stopping beating

[Ronan23]

Can someone rationalize this for me? Its an intrusive thought that my heart will stop beating for no reason. I'm 24 and as far as I know I'm in good health. I have this terryfying thought that the more I think about my heart stopping, the more likely it is to stop. I know it sounds ridiculous, but can you "think" yourself to death? Its scaring me so bad because the more I wanna not think about it, the more I do think about it. I keep thinking some people die suddenly, how do we know they didn't forcefully stop their heart by thinking about it so much? Please someone provide some rational or scientific thoughts on this before it destroys me

[MyNameIsTerry]

I think this is more of the OCD variety as there is a form called Magical Thinking, which I have. If you were thinking that something else could stop your heart and you worried about it, it would fit more to HA.

MT intrusive thoughts are of the variety whereby you think you can affect the physical world with your thoughts so you engage in compulsions to mitigate them. Do you have any compulsions that go with them?

You can't stop anxiety by trying not to be anxious, you have to allow that come on its own through your subconscious relearning that you don't need to be anxious. You can use the thought based methods in CBT because they address negative thought processes about anxiety but your subconscious has to learn.

With OCD, you don't suppress the thought, you learn not to react to it. Its well known science that a reaction is a validation (not saying its correct but the subconscious can't make that distinction) so the more you react, the more you reinforce it. Stronger emotional reaction is seen as even greater validation and it becomes even stronger.

It's known as neuroplasticity if you want the area of science and its accepted science which replaced the earlier concept that the brain has a ceiling learning limit where it cannot change further shape. This has been disproved and accepted a long time ago.

When you stop reacting, you are using the conscious mind to tell the subconscious that its irrelevent. Over time it causes the subconscious to learn that the process it is 'firing' isn't valid and then it starts to break down. You get less of the thoughts and their intensity decreases.

You also need to accept that intrusive thoughts are part of the human brain and studies have proven that all people get them but they don't tend to realise they do. Researchers had to show them how to spot & record them.

So, its unrealistic to think you can stop them all. However, I promise you that it is possible to no longer react, let them fly through in a moment or even smile/laugh at how riduculous they are. I have done all of this with my harm based OCD.

Bare in mind that if you could 'think' your heart to stop, there would be many of us who have suffered 'manual breathing' on here or Sensorimotor OCD connected to breathing that wouldn't be alive now.

These functions are subconsciouly controlled and you cannot alter them as the subconscious takes much of what it needs in the form of stimulus to continue with its functions. This stuff is born into us, we can't take it over and if we could it would require an incredible amount of training to do so. Just think how hard it is to retrain the way you breath and how that has to be trained eg Buteyko method.

I can choose to take a breath but if I hold my breath my subconscious will take back over by reacting to stimulus to keep things running. I can take a breath but I don't actually instruct my lungs to expand, my subconscious responds to the request and does all that for me.