LG18
22-03-21, 12:51
I’ve gone down someone of a rabbit hole recently. All of my OCD fears and compulsions surround worrying I have or will get cancer.
Yesterday I “came across” a load of studies that said that people with generalised anxiety disorder and chronic stress, are at increased rates of developing cancer. It went into how inflammation can cause it and how the immune system is dysfunctional in periods of high anxiety, which opens it up to cancer cells.
There was this one that found a link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584040/
And even worse was this one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32336-4/fulltext it found that men were 2.4 times more likely to get all types of cancer! Even when the researchers controlled for smoking, alcohol and other co-morbidities.
Now I’m in this endless loop of worry; I worry about my usual health concerns, and then worry about the worry causing me to actually get cancer, which makes me worry even more.
I’m 24 and I’ve had OCD and health anxiety for nearly a decade now, so I’m terrified at some point I will get cancer because of my intense chronic anxiety. How do I live with the constant fear that cancer has already started developing, say, four years ago because of my anxiety, and that soon it will rear its head? Or perhaps the various health worries I’m worrying about now are more likely to be true because having anxiety makes it more likely.
Has anyone else felt like this? Then of course, ERP and therapy necessitate the person feels MORE anxiety in order to get better, so how can you win? I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying really hard with my therapy thus far and have been doing well, and this has set me back big time.
Many thanks.
Yesterday I “came across” a load of studies that said that people with generalised anxiety disorder and chronic stress, are at increased rates of developing cancer. It went into how inflammation can cause it and how the immune system is dysfunctional in periods of high anxiety, which opens it up to cancer cells.
There was this one that found a link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584040/
And even worse was this one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32336-4/fulltext it found that men were 2.4 times more likely to get all types of cancer! Even when the researchers controlled for smoking, alcohol and other co-morbidities.
Now I’m in this endless loop of worry; I worry about my usual health concerns, and then worry about the worry causing me to actually get cancer, which makes me worry even more.
I’m 24 and I’ve had OCD and health anxiety for nearly a decade now, so I’m terrified at some point I will get cancer because of my intense chronic anxiety. How do I live with the constant fear that cancer has already started developing, say, four years ago because of my anxiety, and that soon it will rear its head? Or perhaps the various health worries I’m worrying about now are more likely to be true because having anxiety makes it more likely.
Has anyone else felt like this? Then of course, ERP and therapy necessitate the person feels MORE anxiety in order to get better, so how can you win? I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying really hard with my therapy thus far and have been doing well, and this has set me back big time.
Many thanks.