Hopeyet
04-10-16, 09:29
I thought I'd pass on a useful technique for dealing with health anxiety that I picked up in CBT therapy.
For me, as I suspect with most health anxiety sufferers, my worries are largely triggered by physical sensations. Whether it's a natural sensation like indigestion, heightened sensitivity to something I wouldn't normally even register or perhaps purely psychosomatic in some instances, I'll have an ache or pain and immediately fear the worst. This rapidly becomes behavioral - you can't separate the perception of a sensation from the fear that it means something terrible. Well, here's what my therapist recommended...
Try and describe - out loud if possible - the exact details of every sensation you notice in as much detail as you can. It might go something like: "I have a feeling of pressure across an area about two inches square below my lowest right rib."
The idea is to separate out the sensations from any fears they may set off. Like most CBT this sounds pointless obvious at first, but I've found it really helps. Firstly I realised that I only actually believed a sensation was something serious a small percentage of the time, the rest of the time I just sort of ... assumed it was. That's a very subtle distinction, but it helped to separate natural aches and twinges from the fears that they set off.
I've been doing it for a couple of weeks now and my health anxiety has almost disappeared. It tends to fluctuate, so I wouldn't for a second suggest I'm cured for good, but this is one of the best techniques I've found for dealing with it. It's worth noting that the pains I was experiencing have also gone. Not for the first it appears they were psychosomatic (so to anyone asking "can this really all be in my head?" ... it is entirely possible).
For me, as I suspect with most health anxiety sufferers, my worries are largely triggered by physical sensations. Whether it's a natural sensation like indigestion, heightened sensitivity to something I wouldn't normally even register or perhaps purely psychosomatic in some instances, I'll have an ache or pain and immediately fear the worst. This rapidly becomes behavioral - you can't separate the perception of a sensation from the fear that it means something terrible. Well, here's what my therapist recommended...
Try and describe - out loud if possible - the exact details of every sensation you notice in as much detail as you can. It might go something like: "I have a feeling of pressure across an area about two inches square below my lowest right rib."
The idea is to separate out the sensations from any fears they may set off. Like most CBT this sounds pointless obvious at first, but I've found it really helps. Firstly I realised that I only actually believed a sensation was something serious a small percentage of the time, the rest of the time I just sort of ... assumed it was. That's a very subtle distinction, but it helped to separate natural aches and twinges from the fears that they set off.
I've been doing it for a couple of weeks now and my health anxiety has almost disappeared. It tends to fluctuate, so I wouldn't for a second suggest I'm cured for good, but this is one of the best techniques I've found for dealing with it. It's worth noting that the pains I was experiencing have also gone. Not for the first it appears they were psychosomatic (so to anyone asking "can this really all be in my head?" ... it is entirely possible).