Where do our HA fears come from?

[pd]

Warning - big long essay type post!

I've been doing a fair bit of introspection on this subject recently, mostly because I want to understand the way that I think, in the hope that I can change the way that I think. This is what I've come up with. I thought I'd share it to see what other people's thoughts were, and to see if anyone felt the same.

I fear having something seriously wrong with my health. I fear being unwell. It's not so much that I fear dying, it's that I fear dying RIGHT NOW. I'm going to die one day, which is a fact that I think I've accepted, but the thought of dying suddenly and leaving 'unfinished business' scares the crap out of me.

I don't want to die before I've really had a chance to live. I want to live my life to the fullest, and I want to see a lot more of the world before I have to leave it.

So far, I've spent my entire life in education. I'm in the final year of my undergraduate degree, and I have at least three and a half years of PhD research ahead of me before I reach where I want to be. I don't want to die before I get there. I don't want to have been working my whole life towards an academic career that I'll never actually get a chance to have.

I have a very negative outlook. I don't believe in luck, but I still say that I have very bad luck. It always seems with me that if something can go wrong, it will. That may well be self-fulfilling prophecy, since I am so negative about everything. I pick every achievement apart. I always could have done better. I am my own harshest critic.

I am now so close to my goals that it is easy to see them slipping out of my hands, just out of reach. I can see them, but there is still a long, hard, slog in the way before I get there. I will have to work very hard over the coming months and years. I believe that my health anxiety is a way of subconciously displacing the fear that I'm simply not good enough to do what I wish to do.

If I spend all of my time worrying instead of studying, and then fail my exams, then I can validate that failure to myself in a way that I would be unable to had I spent all my time studying. In some crazy way, I think my HA fears are trying to protect me.

Changing my outlook seems key to cracking this. I need to be positive. I need to believe that I'm good enough to do the job I want to do, health anxiety or no health anxiety. I need to analyse every negative thought, work out why I thought it, work out where it came from and give myself a reason not to believe it. I need to analyse every strange bodily sensation. Is that *really* pain in my chest? Is that *really* a numb, tingly feeling in my face? Usually, the answer is no, or there is a rational explanation for the sensation. I know, for example, that I suffer from costochondritis, which causes (completely harmless) chest pain. I know that I am incredibly tense and have poor posture, which cause back, neck and shoulder pain. I need to give myself a positive response to every negative thing that I think about myself and my situation.

I will change what I can, and learn to live with, and respond rationally to, what I can't.

I am going to get better this coming year.

[katiebean]

dear pd!
I too, get costoschondritis, and three weeks ago it was scaring the willies out of me. I too, analyse every little pain, ache, tingle, gurgle, you name it. I have now acceoted that most physical symptoms that i get are due to my anxiety and muscular tension.
I believe that underneath it all our health anxieties start when we are young. I was a small child, and my parents always worried about this, and I was sent for all kinds of allergy testing etc. During later childhood i lost a few relatives due to heart complaints. My mother is always talking about her health problems. I'm sure you can see that all these little things add up and wear off on us.
Perfectionism can also bite you in the bum.....nobody can acheive their best all the time. I dropped out of uni in the first week due to panic attacks. Now, 11 years later, I retrained to do what i do now from home, and now have my own business.
Confidence and trusting yourself is a big key.....what do you think?