This is all new to me, what is going on??

[tdn042090]

Hi everyone, I am a 24 year old male, and I have had agoraphobia (fear of leaving my"safe zone") since I was 18 but had gotten that well under control thanks to done medication. But times fell tough and about 6 months ago I stopped taking the meds since I couldn't afford them. I was fine for a few months but just recently and randomly, literally like a brick hitting you from the sky random, I got this sudden fear of death. Not that I was gonna die, but just that we are one day gonna die regardless, and that just scares me. This is turn turned into a more short term death anxiety like "what if I die early" which is now health anxiety also thinking I have cancer and lymphoma every lymph node I feel or I'm having a heart attack everytime my chest hurts (which happens often with my regular general anxiety attacks from the agoraphobia). This literally was so random. I used to live a fun full adventurous life without a care. What is happening to me. Its hard to live like this, staying up all night worrying about the littlest and sometimes weirdest things. Is this perhaps a crazy withdrawal from the discontinuation of my anxiety meds? Anyone else go through all this?

[Serenity1990]

Tbh I think the fear of the unknown of death occupies all minds at one point or another.

With respect to the health anxiety, that's something that's surprisingly common. Since suffering from it myself I have come across many people in my own life who have been through similar worries, people I wouldn't expect. The general pattern seems to be getting synptoms that are either normal, benign, of anxiety or of some minor ailment, googling them, then diagnosing yourself with something horrible. For some, this process is repeated for various ailments or some become somatic, developing the symptoms of whatever ailment they're scared of which feeds into the fear. This all heightens anxiety symptlms, which themselves can mimick other nasty illnesses, and the cycle continues.

The way to break the cycle, in my experience, is accepting these weird aensations as anxiety, it ignoring them and moving on. I find when I truly accept them as anxiety they quickly go away, sometimes to be replaced by other symptoms. This is the first step of getting better.

[tdn042090]

I always try to tell myself it's just the anxiety, but then when I'm not thinking about it and am going about my business and ill feel a new symptom. Right now my fear is lymphoma. I have no idea why. It makes it worse because my aunt on my fathers side was diagnosed with lymphoma, she us currently in remission thank god. But now I found myself googling the symptoms every night trying to match mine with them. It's taking over my life. I was thinking about going back to the doctor and asking to be put back on my anxiety meds because this started after I stopped taking them.