So I started my CBT/Acceptance therapy today and I can honestly say I've never felt so positive coming away from a therapy session.
My therapist really made me feel hopeful that there are ways to control my HA and I just wanted to share some things she said today.
Firstly, she pointed out that almost everyone has some anxiety around illness/dying but the difference is most people don't think about it very often and therefore don't have much anxiety around it. She said HA exists for the very reason that we are constantly thinking about the "what if I get sick" scenarios and therefore it becomes ever present in our minds and ends up consuming virtually every waking second. As a result we don't think about nice things because we are so preoccupied with the negative thoughts.
She also pointed out that the key to this therapy and an end goal should be that whilst I can't control when I die or if I get ill what I can control is how much anxiety I have around that that is very much dependent on how much I allow it to control me rather than the other way round.
So her first tip was to book myself an appointment on my phone or somewhere that it could send an alert to me for a 10 minute period at the same time every day. This has to be a time when I am not busy doing other things and can literally spare the 10 minutes. I then needed to set an alarm at the end of the 10 minutes as a reminder the appointment was ending. During this 10 minute period I can do what I need to reassure myself (but not googling), she said I can choose to go over thoughts around my health or if there is something I have an urge to check on my body, I can check it but I cannot spend any longer than 10 minutes doing this. If I do become anxious at any other point during the day (unless of course it's a medical emergency) then I have to tell myself firmly that "I am too busy for this now and it will just have to wait until the appointment later on". She said I have to be really strict with this because this will be when the anxiety is peaking and it's very easy to give in and just check or start going down the negative thought pattern. However, she said by not giving in I have the safety behaviour of being able to check later and what should hopefully happen by the time the appointment comes around, is the anxiety peak will have passed and I should hopefully be feeling more rational about things and might not even need to check. This apparently is a good way of being able to start to control the anxiety rather than having it controlling me.
I've also got to find distractions and she said to really pay attention to this as it's very easy to think we are distracting ourselves by reading a book or going for a walk but is it really distracting or is it just a case of being on auto-pilot and doing these things whilst still having anxious thoughts whizzing around in our heads so I have to really think about what completely takes up my attention and doesn't allow me to focus other things at the same time.
So just a couple of things but I'm going to give them a go and thought I'd share in case anyone else felt they could use either of them.
I will continue to update on my sessions in case there are any tools that other people might find useful.
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