I’m not sure what I’m suffering from at the moment is really health anxiety, but it’s related. Last year I had a really bad period of anxiety stemming from a botched ear cleaning procedure that left me feeling like I was underwater for around five days. With it, I got these very unusual intrusive thoughts stemming around not understanding people (literally not understanding the words that come out of their mouth) to not being able to speak or move my body. They probably sound pretty weird but they really, really bothered me to the point where I would avoid seeing people in case I couldn’t understand them.

So recently I’ve had a few ear problems (it now looks like it’s nothing too bad) which has really made my anxiety peak again. And as a result the intrusive thoughts have come back, but in a different way. Now I’m scared of going deaf. Not like I might go deaf in the future, but that it might happen any second. Any moment of the day I might just stop being able to hear. That might sound really irrational but it feels real to me and it’s causing me a lot of distress. I am trying to keep busy, to think about other stuff, to keep my mood up and anxiety down, eat well, do stuff I enjoy etc. But still… it’s there.

One of my biggest issues is that these aren’t future-based thoughts. They are “what if this happens now” thoughts. And there is no way of escaping it. Plus I think about what I would do if it happened and I just did go deaf.

I know the idea is to become ok with this thought but how can I do that when I’m obviously not going to be ok with going deaf? It would be lying to myself.

Ironically, I’d swap this thought for one of my other previous ones.