Can you recover from health anxiety? Any positive stories?

[Windywel]

Hi all I’m having a major blip of health anxiety with concurrent depression. I’ve been on medication and having therapy for nearly 3 months but this weekend I have just completely crashed - a combination of stress, upping dose of medication and getting sausage stuck on the way down my oesphagus on Saturday morning. Now am completely freaking about all sorts of throat issues and feeling really down on myself for having this bloody illness. Anyone got any positive stories about overcoming health anxiety and how they got there? I really need some inspiration right now. Thanks heaps and merry Christmas to you all. X
PS have not googled since 4.30am (it’s now 3pm) and I have vowed not to except to look up self help for health anxiety.

[Kitkat99]

It definitely can get better. My health anxiety got better for a couple years. It’s worse again now but it was almost gone for a while.

Of course I still worried about stuff but it wasn’t as frequent or intense. More like I’d get a pain and be like “what if it’s X” but be able to stay calm and think more rationally about it. It wouldn’t get to the point of constantly obsessing, and with in a day I’d moved on normally.

[ankietyjoe]

Massive well done for not Googling. That's the main thing to keep doing as that's the main fuel for health anxiety.

And yes, you can recover 100%. It's not something you catch, it's something you do. It's 100% within your power to recover simply by changing bad mental habits. Takes a long time though, so keep NOT Googling as the first step to full recovery.

[Windywel]

Thanks so much for replying. I don’t think the meds are going to work as well this time so I’m going to have to do most of the work. What else can I do? How do I change the mental habits? How do I deal with the hypervigilabce? I know not to avoid so managed to stay watching tv last night when I felt really anxious while eating as I was panicking about getting food stuck after my scare on Saturday but it’s constant worry that’s so hard to stop. And now I’m feeling anxious about being so bad again and worrying that I’m never going to get better or be happy again so it’s a double whammy. The depression is really bad- lots of tears again. Any advice much appreciated x

[ankietyjoe]

It sounds like you already know what to do, so this may be an exercise in patience. So not googling, not checking every symptom, accepting that being ill is part of the human condition and attaching a fear reaction to minor issues. All the things you know you have to do are the opposite of what you have been doing, and it takes a very long time to change habits, months at least.

And yes it's hard, but worrying about dying for years on end is much harder, right?

Changing mental habits takes repeated practice, thousands of times.

[Windywel]

Thanks aj - what mental strategies do you use when you start thinking the worst ie catastrophising?

[ankietyjoe]

I don't suffer with any kind of anxiety any more other than normal day to day stuff that everybody experiences from time to time. When my anxiety was at it's absolute worst I learned that if I was catastrophising, it was because it was ME that was doing it, and I made myself stop. Distract yourself, go and do something else, tell yourself out loud everything will be fine, tell yourself out loud that thinking the worst will solve nothing, go out for a walk.

It's really anything that you can do that will break that mental habit. There's no secret to it other than repeatedly NOT doing it.

It's like anything. If you want to learn a new language you don't just read a book with the words in it and know it. It takes repeated practice to learn not only the words, but the vocabulary too. What you are trying to do here is learn a new mental language and it takes time.

In the short term, you might find it useful to remind yourself that people do recover from this is they accept that the problem is them. If you accept this is your own 'fault' (and this isn't a bad thing), that also means you have it within you to fix. Remind yourself that the way you are feeling now is temporary, and that you want to recover and WILL do the mental practices it takes to recover.

[Mrsmitchell1984]

I don't suffer with any kind of anxiety any more other than normal day to day stuff that everybody experiences from time to time. When my anxiety was at it's absolute worst I learned that if I was catastrophising, it was because it was ME that was doing it, and I made myself stop. Distract yourself, go and do something else, tell yourself out loud everything will be fine, tell yourself out loud that thinking the worst will solve nothing, go out for a walk.

It's really anything that you can do that will break that mental habit. There's no secret to it other than repeatedly NOT doing it.

It's like anything. If you want to learn a new language you don't just read a book with the words in it and know it. It takes repeated practice to learn not only the words, but the vocabulary too. What you are trying to do here is learn a new mental language and it takes time.

In the short term, you might find it useful to remind yourself that people do recover from this is they accept that the problem is them. If you accept this is your own 'fault' (and this isn't a bad thing), that also means you have it within you to fix. Remind yourself that the way you are feeling now is temporary, and that you want to recover and WILL do the mental practices it takes to recover.

what a great post- thanks Ankiety Joe. Windywel- this is good advice that we can practise together - each day we should see the bad thoughts diminish- maybe a million one day, 99,999 the next - every day a step closer to breaking bad mental habits x

[Mrsmitchell1984]

Sorry 999,999 that should say

[tommy1982]

look back at my old forums i started from about 10 years back, i had all types of symptoms from health anxiety, effexor made them go away for about 10 years,

was dizzy for months on end, sensitive eyes, obsessed about eatting, obsessed about my chest, about my breathing, i bet it all for 10 years, anxiety is back at the moment but I had a long run from the days my whole day was based around anxiety.