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View Full Version : Does putting your worries in writing help you see them in perspective?



Kayla1992
12-05-16, 12:06
I have been a severe health worrier my entire life! (I'm 23)

I have tried every thing possible to try to help:
Medication
CBT
EMDR
Hypnotherapy
Counselling
just to name a few. I have begun to feel like health anxiety is a part of who I am and that it has become so ingrained into my personality that I will never be free from it :( Its almost like I feel that I don't know what else to do or think if i'm not worrying.

I do have good periods without worry which can lust up to a couple of weeks, but some new symptom will pop up again and I will go back down the spiral.

Lately however I have decided to go from reading other people's posts to posting one myself!

Often when I read someone else's worries and concerns I can see it objectively and often I think "oh why are they worrying about that?" or "if only they were my symptoms then I wouldn't worry because I can clearly see that that is nothing serious"

However for that person I know they are super scary! I know all my family and friends think those things about me when I complain about my latest deadly fear, however when it is happening to you, you cant see the objectiveness. All you can see is the dark scary place that your mind is taking you.

I have attempted to post on here many times before and got to the point where I have written out my worry only to read it back to myself and think "Oh, I can see this now as if someone else has written it, and how silly it sounds to be worrying about it" and then I never post it.

By putting the worry into words on a page rather than words in my mind helps me to take a step back and see the issue from afar.

This has helped me see the issue as others would see it in me and it helps to put it in perspective.

This doesn't always work though as some fears just dig their claws in so deep that it feels like nothing will help.

I have some quite bad fears a the moment, but I will save them for another post.

Sorry this is quite long, but it is a technique that I find can help in some situations and I hope it helps others too.

So logically write out what it is you are concerned with, take a step back and then read it again from an objective point of view as if you were reading something someone else has written and then see what you think of it.

I find little things like this help to make life a little easier

MyNameIsTerry
12-05-16, 12:23
If you can write it and then come to that conclusion and move on some of the time, that's great as many can't so definitely practice it. There are worksheets for this such as Thought Records, Theory A/Theory B, etc which encourage the person to do this in a structured manner. They would be worth looking at.

Picking out Cognitive Distortions is useful too and can be combined with that.

emmamoose
12-05-16, 15:33
Yes.
I keep a diary on my laptop too.
I sometimes find it helpful if I am feeling really anxious to look back through my entries to the last time I felt so bad. Then I can see that those feelings eventually subsided and it gives me hope that my current fear will subside too.

Kayla1992
13-05-16, 12:45
That is a good idea!

I used to do a similar thing when I was a child. Whenever I got a "worry" as I called it, I would try to think 'I have had this before and was ok'. Or I would ask my mum if she had felt like this before.

It is good to be able to look back at past health concerns to see what you have felt before and to know that it didn't kill me then, so it wont kill me now.

One of my psychologists said that is a good way of trying to learn from past experience, to try to re train your brain to not jump to the worst case scenario, because it has never turned out to be that in the past