Sometimes I ask my brother or my husband how they manage not to worry when they start to experience strange symptoms, or even about existing health conditions. I think, besides being able to compartmentalize better, they also implicitly trust their doctors, and they haven't had a traumatic event in their past that triggered anxiety or the habit of catastrophizing. The latter can be improved with counseling. But the former is more difficult to manage. It's repeated often in the forum's that we need to trust our doctor's judgment. But if we've had a genuine breakdown of trust with our doctor, sometimes the best solution is to find a new doctor. I was talking about this with my internist, because my GP is the type that becomes annoyed by complex chronic health problems. And the internist mentioned how important it is to find a doctor one can trust, saying that I may need to look for a new one. Depending on the situation, this is sometimes the best solution. In the process of fighting anxiety, we need to learn how to recognize and manage our anxious thought patterns, how to trust our gut when it's warning us about a real problem with a doctor, and how to tell the difference between the two. For example, my family's previous GP was convinced that our symptoms were due to anxiety and stress, and as a result my brother ended up in therapy for a year before his symptoms were recognized as a chronic illness, and that recognition only came about because of my extensive research into my own chronic illness. When my brother asked for a referral to the appropriate specialist, our GP gave it grudgingly and with disdain, yet that specialist ended up giving my brother the diagnosis I suspected, and was able to give him important guidelines for managing his chronic illness. That's partly why I link to RateMDs in my signature, because our fight against anxiety will be more successful if we know our doctors are worthy of our trust.