when will it stop?

[love87]

hi everyone.

I am 110% that I am suffering with health anxiety even though I have never been diagnosed. at the moment I am suffering with heart palps a lot and of course I have heart disease even though doctors think im fine. I also have a lump on my throat which doctors have said is a mucus something or other but im convinced its something more sinister. once I get to the bottom of these things I will be great for a few days and them something else will crop up and im thrown into a world of worry again. of course "DR GOOGLE" does not help one bit but I cant seem to stop googling symptoms! my question is when does it all stop? how do you overcome it? it is getting me down as I have a 3 year old daughter with the world at her feet and I'm her scared mummy who is afraid to do anything other than google her symptoms. any advice is welcome as I feel so alone. :blush:

[Light_Bringer777]

Well I'm only a few months into it myself and not "cured" but definitely better. The first rule for me is don't feed it. What gets fed gets bigger. Giving into worry, googling, making grim scenarios... you've got to stop your mind from going there.

For me so far the simple fact of not giving into worries and keeping myself occupied and distracted keeps my health anxiety at a manageable level. It's not perfect, and there are bad days, but at least I'm living my life pretty much normally most of the time.

Someone else here once said something along the lines of "Your recovery from HA starts when you start to fear not living now more than you do dying", and that's been true for me so far. Everything carries a risk in life, but we do things anyway. There is always a risk of our health falling apart, but unless there are short-term life-threatening signs (and there never was any in my case!) I just look the other way and live as a normal person would. I try my best to act as someone "stupid" would really (because my head is telling me that the intelligent thing to do is worry my ass of, I'm not saying people without HA are stupid here!). "Fake it til you make it" if you will.

As I said, that's taken away 95% of the panics (and I've also used a few coping tools for when panics do happen) and taken the anxiety from a 100 to 10-30 for me. Still there, but I'm living my life at least.

Others could probably give more advice than this since I'm only just learning to deal with all of this myself!