Need advice on health anxiety recovery!

[liamliam]

As a part of sober October, I’m hoping to get my health and addictions in check in an aim to finally recover from my health anxiety. I’ve been in my current situation for almost 3 years now and I have tried countless times to get out of it with no avail. My anxiety largely revolves around my stomach and bowel habits. It has fixated on the idea of me having bowel C and no amount of reassurance seems to help. I am on a waiting list for CBT but have been for months now and I fear I'm going to get much worse if I don't take matters into my own hands before an appointment becomes available.

My current predicament is this - (TMI warning, sorry)

I tend to go to the toilet for a bowel movement once a day when I wake up. I have become obsessed with checking my stool for blood, to the point at which I’m ashamed to admit I have inspected it very close and in great detail. This provided me with some reassurance on a daily basis for a while, but as time went on, I became more and more sensitive to the smallest fluctuation, believing that even the slightest variation in colour, texture or contents (undigested food) was blood. This meant that no matter what I saw, unless it was what my mind considered unquestionable, it set me off in a panic and ruined the day/week. To get around this, I have stopped looking completely, which day to day has really helped. However, this has the side effect of allowing uncertainty to build up within me (what if I'm missing something bad) until I inevitably can’t help but check thoroughly and end up back at square one. It has now got to the point at which I cannot even look at the tissue as this is very likely to put me in a panic.

My question for you is, if I am aiming to completely recover from this state, is the act of not looking re-enforcing my anxiety? Do I need to get used to looking at the tissue like a normal person and just take whatever panic ensues? It’s so hard because without looking, my days are relatively normal compared to the chaos of a panic episode. 
To me, accepting whatever I see and moving on feels like the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. Almost as if I’m risking my life by doing so. I just want to be free of this and move on with my life.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[ankietyjoe]

Stop looking, stop checking, stop googling and stop posting about it.

That's all you need to do. There's no deep intellectualising over the reasons it works, it just does.

[axolotl]

Stop looking, stop checking, stop googling and stop posting about it.

That's all you need to do. There's no deep intellectualising over the reasons it works, it just does.

All exactly right, but sometimes you need professional help to get you out of bad thought patterns and allow you to do this. It's not easy. Plus I don't feel qualified to comment too much on the OPs post as this sounds a lot more down the OCD spectrum than my own GAD-based health anxiety.

Liam - those waiting lists are a pain, aren't they? But every day you're closer to getting help. Hang in there. Just a word of warning, don't go into CBT expecting to be cured, but you will be helped to accept, understand and cope with your anxiety, in ways that mean it's not debilitating your life to this degree. Good luck, hope you're not waiting much longer.