An idea

[Leah88]

I've been a long time health anxiety sufferer but this month I've tried harder than ever before at breaking the cycle. If I'm being honest, I think we hide behind our fear of aging, dying and ceasing to exsist so health anxiety offers a little escape from the dread that comes with awareness of mortality. Until you find a way past this fear I believe you will have health anxiety until the day you die. Sure, you'll have little breaks from it every so often but it'll always be your shadow. If you are an atheist like most of the modern world are, then you will probably always have a small fear of death but it does not need to take over your life. What works for one may not work for everybody but my suggestions are medication, relationships and excecise/diet. It's what science has always suggested to help with anxiety but unless you do it continually it won't help you. Also caring about something bigger than yourself will help you find peace with the fact that one day you will stop existing. I believe people with heightened anxiety will always have to workhard to rewire our brains because for some reason we haven't evolved like the rest of humanity to be ok with dying and able to just accept that you can't fight it, even with all the medical science the word has to offer in your lifetime. Just accept that you have a heightened survival mechanism in your brain left over from your ancestors. It's not that non anxiety sufferers aren't aware they are mortal, it's just that they don't feed the pathway that focuses on it. One day you might indeed get diagnosed with a terminal illness or you might not. But if you're dead you won't know you're dead so who cares? Most of you probably already know all of this but sometimes you need to hear someone else say it.

[NervUs]

Definitely, the coming to terms with mortality is part of my hypochondria. My bouts of HA have all stemmed from finding lumps or masses that very well could have been the big C.

For me, having my kids is a HUGE obstacle to accepting mortality. Right now, that is. I am an atheist and don't particularly fear being dead.

What I do fear is making my kids live through one of the most traumatizing experiences there is- losing a parent.

I have a three year old and I am going through a lung cancer thing at the moment. I have so many symptoms of it, it is ridiculous, doctors think adult onset asthma, I think they are missing it, of course. I lay down with her at night as she falls asleep, and she is snuggled up to me, and that is when my mortality matters, because she doesn't deserve to lose a parent.

It is so hard to get past that!!!!

I have two older (i.e. 13 and 10) kids and they don't deserve it either, although they have started to separate from me in a way that my youngest has not. BUt, they still need a mom.

Of course, I don't have the counterfactual, but I think I could handle the fact that I will die IF my kids were grown. I mean, I still have things I want to do in my life, but more than any of that, I want them to get to adulthood without having to deal with anything heavy. I never thought this way until I found a lump about 5 years ago that doctors wanted to biopsy. That reality check brought anxiety into my life.