"Coming back down to earth" from a period of INTENSE health anxiety?

[oceanscape]

Hi everyone

Over the past week I have been living in intense 24/7 anxiety; I have a Monkeypox scare (before people tell me how low the risk is, I am a male and had a potential exposure 3 weeks ago).

Sufficient time is slowly passing for me to hopefully be able to reassure myself that what I have been experiencing is not Monkeypox and to move on. However, in the back of my mind I think the risk is still there - and will be for the next week or so, although I am *slowly* coming back to normal as days go by.

Over the past week I've been living in a non-stop of hell of checking myself, Googling symptoms and trawling message boards .... to the extent I have had no appetite (this has NEVER happened to me before!) and have been in a constant state of high tension, high stress, unable to sleep or think properly. Random outbursts of crying. I live on my own and it has been immensely lonely as I cancelled all social commitments/seeing family for fear of passing it on. I did try to keep up exercising for a few days (socially distanced running) and that normally works wonders at making me feel happier afterwards but not this time, still felt anxious after and no better.

My question for now is -- if you've also been in a position of having intense HA for a prolonged period where it has literally absorbed you 24/7 -- how long do you normally take until you feel yourself again once you start to calm down? I'm still on edge and have no appetite and I am constantly shallow breathing and still feeling anxious.

[NoraB]

My question for now is -- if you've also been in a position of having intense HA for a prolonged period where it has literally absorbed you 24/7 -- how long do you normally take until you feel yourself again once you start to calm down? I'm still on edge and have no appetite and I am constantly shallow breathing and still feeling anxious.

Months.. (at least) and that's if you go all in on helping yourself..

The system becomes highly sensitised and it takes quite a while for things to settle back down..

You cannot hope to feel 'more like yourself' while your irrational thinking and triggering behaviour (such as Googling, checking etc) is creating (and sustaining) this level of anxiety..

Have you seen your GP about this?

[BlueIris]

Agreeing with Nora. You need to work on reducing (and hopefully cutting out) behaviours that only feed your anxiety.