Anybody else have HA triggered by learning about a disease?

[HelloPanda23]

My health anxiety hasn't started once through feeling a specific symptom and searching up about it online to find myself thinking that this symptom means I have this specific disease. I first discover a scary disease through specific means, and then I start to obsess over it until I'm convinced I have it or I'm going to get it. Anybody deal with this type of HA? To some degree, this is good because I can't get onto the HA cycle through things I feel, but to another, it's super hard because getting over a specific fear for me is nearly impossible. Only reason my ALS fears ended after 2 months of nonstop worrying was a result of finding out about BEA/PAM, and that scared me much more. Now, it's been a month and I'm still going on with my PAM fear. Obviously, it's not as great as it initially was, but the way I feel right now is the exact same way I did when I feared ALS. What bothers me is the fact that I have to learn about a scarier disease than PAM to fully revert my attention elsewhere. Like right now, when I remember about ALS, I don't even care to the slightest. My anxiety is triggered through knowledge of a disease, not through symptoms I felt before discovering it. Either way, I'm doing pretty good with my anxiety recently, though it was provoked a bit these 3 days due to stress. No big deal though.

[Heather1234]

Yes, I catch myself doing this. Something will prompt me to "check" something on myself and it'll usually feel "off", then it all goes downhill. What helps me with this, is going through the list of things I thought I had....and realizing that this newest "thing" will end up like all the others. If that makes any sense.lol
I also have my norms though, I usually end up back on one of those :/ I'm doing pretty good tonight though :)

[elle95]

Hi there! I hope you're doing well. The same thing happens to me both searching symptoms thru google or learning about diseases. Specially when I watch TV. There was this show on discoverg channel I think about rare diseases, they were talking about mithochondrial diseases and mad cow disease etc and after I learned about them I was so scared I would get them, checking myself everytime looking if I had the symptoms... Also a couple of months ago I was watching a program about rabies, I didn't know other than it was a disease spread by dog bites, but in the program they showed how it is transmitted via bats and they ahowed a video of a man dying from rabies, it was awful! I have never seen a bat in my life but that night I inspected the entire house to see if there was any bat out there... Look how irrational this is. I really don't like jumping from disease to disease, because there are times where I think I have multiple diseases at the same time after I learned from them.

I hope you keep doing great and improving dear xx.