catastrophizing

[westofengland]

has anyone else noticed, when we have symptoms, or fear an illness, it's always the really scary ones - cancer, hear disease, MS for instance

So if you get chest pain it's always, I dunno, imminent heart attack rather than angina... or a sore mouth is always mouth cancer rather than a gum problem. Why is it more rational to expect a really serious disease rather than a fairly straightforward one?

This is called catastrophizing, right? I do it in other areas of my life too, so i can see a pattern developing here. eg worry about money, career, family etc

I keep telling myself "I have a worry problem rather than an immediate health problem"

(but i WILL have a health problem one day, nobody is immortal! So it's learning to enjoy the current day and live with uncertainty)

[itoldyouiwasill]

Hi

As you have quite rightly stated living with health anxiety and then moving to recovery is all about learning to live with an element of uncertainty in our lives.

I think for many people, and as was the case for me, health anxiety seems to strike out of the blue and is often after we have had a health scare, seen a family member or friend with an illness or some other such stressor.

It is only really when we actually sit down and look back over our lives up to this point that we are somewhat shocked to discover that we have applied faulty thinking patterns to many aspects of our lives and the health worry is often an extension of this.

What really drags us down with health anxiety is our learned responses and habits that we may have adopted over the years. When health anxiety strikes we feel that it is something that we must defeat, it is a problem that is getting in the way of our lives and we need to eradicate it ASAP...it is at this point where we start to chuck at it all those problem solving 'skills' and techiniques that we believe have helped us out of our problems over the years and then we stand by shocked and paralysed as health anxiety refuses to budge and remain unmoved.

The trick really is to see the bigger picture and see health anxiety as a small part of our issues centered around issues such as uncertainty and control....this is a good example as to why we fear MS and MND/ALS so much as these are diseases that rob us off certainty and bodily control, the very things we crave for so much.

As you have indicated once we get into the habit of blowing problems out of proportion and over catastrophizing this swiftly becomes a long standing chronic problem and no amount of reassurance will help us...by definition reassurance appeals to our rational nature and guess what folks, we are not dealing in the rational once we get to this point!

[fightingmyself]

Excellant thread. I reality is that we are all going to meet our maker one day, maybe even before I finish this post.
Perhaps a good question to ask yourself in a morning is "If today is my last day, have I told everyone who I love what they mean to me? If this is my last day, should I spend it locked in the bathroom prodding myself, or being with my family?"

I think health anxiety is a form of cancer in itself, which eats away at your happiness. It grows when fed on checking, reassurance seeking, and googling, but can be treated by taking these food sources away and starving it. Or you can feed it and just like the real thing, it will grow and grow. Eventually, if you starve it, it will shrink away and you'll be in remission. Yes it can come back, but it is treatable. Instead of perhaps waiting around for a physical cancer to grab us, we should treat this virtual one?

[westofengland]

you guys have both got great insight. However hard you may be finding HA, you should congratulate yourself for being able to talk about this bloody thing in such articulate terms

I am tracing a lot of this stuff back to when I was a kid. I have always been very susceptible to triggers - i remember doing about the salivary glands in biology when I was about 14, next minute I couldn't stop thinking about mine, was I producing too much, would it damage me, etc.... Classic OCD. Back then there wasn't any internet so I couldn't obsessively research it.

My mother also had a thing about serving undercooked meat, and she'd panic she was going to give us all food poisoning - i remember her calling up a supermarket advice line about it

Still, understanding how you get into a hole won't necessarily get you out of it, but I have been reading the Claire Weeks book again, and maybe it all helps to get a new angle on your worries rather than convincing yourself YOUR WORRIES ARE PERFECTLY VALID AND YOU NEED TO GET ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THEM OR YOU WILL GO MAD

[joannap]

i was thinking this the other day - i have had stomach problems for 4 months and have immediately lept to CANCER! rather than considering it could be all sorts of other things and yes - i must admit - when i think about it - i immdiately leap the worst conclusion in other areas of my life too!

[fightingmyself]

Westofengland said:
"Still, understanding how you get into a hole won't necessarily get you out of it, but I have been reading the Claire Weeks book again, and maybe it all helps to get a new angle on your worries rather than convincing yourself YOUR WORRIES ARE PERFECTLY VALID AND YOU NEED TO GET ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THEM OR YOU WILL GO MAD"

You are right. And the best advice for getting out of a hole your find yourself in, is to stop digging

I don't think even 'normal' people don't worry about getting some terrible disease, it's just that they have a perspective and acceptance that S*** happens. And worrying about the chance that it might happen won't keep it away.
However, it's easy for me to say that at the moment because i'm feeling ok. The trick is to remember this when something crops. Which I cant do.

My HA seems to also trigger common sense amnesia

[westofengland]

well make sure you come back when you feeling bad again, we all care

[itoldyouiwasill]

you guys have both got great insight. However hard you may be finding HA, you should congratulate yourself for being able to talk about this bloody thing in such articulate terms

I am tracing a lot of this stuff back to when I was a kid. I have always been very susceptible to triggers - i remember doing about the salivary glands in biology when I was about 14, next minute I couldn't stop thinking about mine, was I producing too much, would it damage me, etc.... Classic OCD. Back then there wasn't any internet so I couldn't obsessively research it.

My mother also had a thing about serving undercooked meat, and she'd panic she was going to give us all food poisoning - i remember her calling up a supermarket advice line about it

Still, understanding how you get into a hole won't necessarily get you out of it, but I have been reading the Claire Weeks book again, and maybe it all helps to get a new angle on your worries rather than convincing yourself YOUR WORRIES ARE PERFECTLY VALID AND YOU NEED TO GET ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THEM OR YOU WILL GO MAD

You honestly would not believe how important things like that are!

If I had a penny for every HA sufferer who I have spoken to who had either one or both neurotic parents I would have , ooh, a lot of pennies

I have a 9 month old son and from day one me and my wife agreed that she would be the person responsible for monitoring his health as I would be running him off to the GP every 2 minutes, just like my mum did with me...see ther pattern.

Don't get me started about me wanting to run off to the hospital to feel safe and for a motherly matron to take me in her big bossomed chest and tell me that I'm all right and that the world isn't a dangerous place...all that neurosis is slowly brewed over years.

[westofengland]

yeah... i stammer too, and i control it well, but mum panicked about that too and made me feel ten times worse about it

I can't go round blaming her for ever though, i'm 47 and on paper, fairly successful. My current behaviour has much more to do with the continuation of my OCD than anything mum did in the 70s

thanks for the support though. As a parent now, it's tricky. I wigged out when my 15 year old got sunburnt at Glastonbury this summer. I did over-react, but in some ways i was right to, as skin cancer is no joke

Finding the right balance is bloody hard

[fightingmyself]

Yes, I really try to not over emphasize health matters to my son, but I still overreact and I think I keep my own HA away from him.
Mrsfightingback manages to keep things sensible
In my head he knows nothing about my HA, I wonder if he suspects?

BTW, just crumbled and done a couple of checks. Do as I say, not as I do