Originally Posted by
MJunderway
Sorry to hear you are struggling at the moment. I saw your other posts as I was combing through the IBS threads last night. I'm on the forum because my IBS kicked up again. I get panicked when symptoms either increase, show up at seemingly random times, etc. I don't know if this would be helpful to you but I do the following to help manage my HA.
I try hard to avoid catastrophic thinking (always ultimate worst case scenario) or magical thinking (this random pain is connected to another random symptom) when I get in a panicked frame of mind. I reserve my visits to the forum only for the times when a new symptom kicks, an old one comes back, or I'm waiting for test results. And I allow myself to look for a certain amount of time and then I leave the site. As long as I stick to those parameters, I can keep my HA fears in check. I used to be obsessed with looking up symptoms and in the past often spent hours at a stretch constantly looking up things online to reassure me.
Finding this forum helped greatly with breaking away from the obsessive googling of symptoms. I can see that there are others who also jump to worst case scenario thinking and it makes me feel less like an ocd weirdo. I also have gotten to a point where I allow myself to accept test results and doctor's opinions (this was not the case for most of my life).
When actual physical symptoms do show up, I keep track of them to see if they are related to stress (physical, mental, or for me, as a woman, hormonal). I do deep breathing everyday as part of a pain derived from stress management technique. I've used deep breathing to help with pain management for about 7 years now and while it's not a miracle cure, it helps me in in so many other ways. I also let my husband and son know when I am not feeling great and they are both pretty supportive.
Do you have strategies in place to keep you from falling too low? Do you recognize when you are headed downwards? Who is the best person in your life that can offer you peace of mind when you aren't doing well? Part of me thinks that people with HA or have somatic forms of anxiety are generally very sensitive people who don't have consistent or solid self-care strategies in place. Even with all that I listed above, I still fall into bad spots at least once a month. But they are way less frequent than they have been in the past and definitely do not last as long.
I hope you are already in a better frame of mind and I hope what I shared above was helpful in some way.