How do I beat health anxiety?

[HarryPotterFan436]

I am struggling massively with health anxiety at the moment. I am on the waiting list for talking therapy (CBT I belive) but I have 3-6 months to wait. I’m about a month into that wait now.
I can’t breathe for anxiety. Over the last few days I have spiralled between having leukaemia, bone cancer, skin cancer. Leukaemia is my biggest fear at the moment. I am so frightened I have it and any symptom I get I can make fit leukaemia or some other kind of cancer. I had a perfectly normal blood test about 5 months ago after my child was born.
I can’t watch or read anything about cancer because it triggers my anxieties. I feel sick all the time. What can I do? Has anyone beaten this? How do I beat it?
I don’t know how to cope with it much longer. It’s taking over my life.

Can you afford to pay for therapy? That's probably your best bet if you can - even one or two CBT sessions can be enough to get you onto the right path and reset your anxieties.

You may be able to get going yourself - it's not really the same as an adaptive therapist but it's better than consuming yourself with fear. I found this book very useful: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1848319509/?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Two words of advice:

1. Never google a symptom, only ever google for an illness/syndrome that a medical professional has informed you that you may have. As you've found out, cancer has all the symptoms, so if you google up anything you'll find it leads to cancer. This is worse than useless for you.

2. Only ever search for symptoms of a syndrome/illness in order to find ones that you DON'T suffer from, to eliminate that illness as a possibility. Twist your anxiety around to build a positive result.

I could have written your original post. At the moment I'm terrified I might have ovarian cancer because I'm getting intermittent bad pain on my lower left hand side. I know that could be down to any number of things, but I'm petrified. I've booked myself in for a private scan as I'm so worried the GP is going to think I'm a total hypochondriac as I've been in to see them so often lately. They've always been lovely, but I can't bring myself to book yet another appointment so I'm just paying for a scan as if it's nothing at least it's just my own money I've wasted and if not I'll know sooner. I'm normally a rational, level-headed type of person but I feel a bit like I'm spiralling atm.

I did CBT sessions through IAPT for a while. They did help and I felt like I had a bit more control of it, but I've only stopped going for a couple of months, which I agreed with the counsellor, and now it's out of control again and I can't help but feel like a failure if I have to go back so soon.

I have a 3 month old and my health anxiety got significantly worse when I found out I was pregnant. For me it's the fear that I might not see my baby grow up or might "leave" him. I resent it hugely as I feel I can't enjoy his babyhood as I'm constantly scared I won't be around much longer, for no real reason. Have you always felt like this or has yours become worse recently? From speaking to people I think it is quite often the case that this kind of anxiety gets worse after having a baby as so much more is "at stake" then, if that makes sense? I can recommend IAPT. You self-refer to them and they have a variety of different types of sessions, depending what would work best for you, and it's free. I did individual sessions and found them to be very helpful. I think they do an antenatal mindfulness group session in some areas. I'm considering going in the hope it might help.

Good luck, I hope you manage to get on top of it soon. In the meantime, solidarity, it really, really sucks.

In the past little while I have diagnosed myself with a condition that will make me go blind, bowel cancer, several heart attacks, heart failure and breast cancer.

Getting your overall anxiety levels down will help the thoughts not get out of control.

Try and talk yourself through it without panicking. For example my palpitations I managed to rationalise it and realise it wasn't a heart attack. I know I have had palpitation before and was fine and had likely just drunk too much caffeine.

Work out what is triggering your anxiety. A friend recently was diagnosed with cancer and died within a month. Before I never had cancer anxiety but now I do. It is easy to see where those thoughts come from.

I luckily have a lovely GP who asks me what I think I might have, she then reassures me I don't have it and doesn't treat me like I'm being an idiot.

I would love to know more about the specific behavioural techniques people have used.

www.amazon.co.uk/Overcoming-Health-Anxiety-David-Veale/dp/1845298241?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

I have been there, but am in a much better place now. It was a combination of antidepressants and CBT that helped me. Exercise helped a lot too because it focused my mind on something and left no room for anything else.

When I was in my darkest place with health anxiety I really struggled to function at all. I would actually just sit for hours trembling with fear. You have my sympathy.

And I hope I can offer some hope that it's possible to overcome it. I spent several years living in terror. And now I barely think about my health at all.

Hello, thank you for these replies. It’s lovely to sit and read them. I can’t afford to pay for therapy at the moment so I think I will have to wait it out on the nhs unfortunately. I looked it up a while back but it’s definitely a no go. Thank you for the book recommendation. I have popped it in my Amazon basket to have a look at later.
I have always had a lot of anxiety and health anxiety has always been present on some level but since I got pregnant it has taken off and been terribly bad. I think it’s possibly partly because I had severe hyperemesis in my pregnancy. I was very unwell and in and out of hospital.
I am convinced at the moment I have leukaemia and I will die. I don’t know if I should go for a blood test but then I’m not sure if it will help if it’s just the anxiety talking.

CBT should really help. In the meantime the book 'overcoming health anxiety' is brilliant, totally ban googling anything health based and practice refocusing your attention on something else as soon as you notice yourself scanning your body for symptoms.

@HarryPotterFan436 IAPT is free and you can self-refer. They are significantly quicker than NHS waiting times as far as my experience goes, if you have one in your area.

Fellow sufferer here who is often in 'remission'.

Cbt really helped. I did group sessions and they helped
Sympathetic gp who would ask me what I was worried about
Cutting down on google. I used to use it to prove to myself I was ok so the reverse from a lot of people but damaging all the same

There is a website called no more panic which has a health anxiety forum. I found it very useful as a, full of people with brains like me and b, advice on how to deal/rationalise.

Another book for you to check out - Mind Over Mood - a CBT workbook. Really good book, very helpful.

I have been crippled by health anxiety. I was convinced I had heart problems and would have a heart attack or stroke any second. It is horrendous. I empathise.
I however am now much more like the old 'me' and I credit CBT and finding Paul David's 'At Last A Life' with giving me my life back. It's taken at least 3years but I can honestly say I am no longer in a constant state of fear and once I found Paul David's book and blog my recovery became much smoother and quicker.

The only thing that helps me is medication.

Postnatally I was a wreck. Sertraline really helped me.

The thing is I am scared I will miss something important if I don’t google my symptoms. But I am terrified. A slight pain in my leg (when I regularly get pains all over my body anyway) along with a handful of bruises and I am convinced I have leukaemia. I think I should go to the doctors for a blood test but I am scared to go.
Thank you for all these replies. I am going to look into IAPT and all these other recommendations. Certainly I need to find something that helps me. I can never breathe properly for anxiety and panic.

When I was in the middle of severe health anxiety, half the problem was that no amount of reassurance would actually reassure me. Because you just start convincing yourself that the doctor has missed something etc. Catastrophising is the nature of the illness. Cold turkey is the only way to go. Even now I sometimes reassure myself with 'well, I've had that funny feeling in my side on and off for years now. If it was something serious I'd be really sick by now'.

Another exercise that really helped was this. Concentrate on eg your little finger. Keep thinking about it and you'll find it starts to feel funny and might even feel painful. It really proved to me that when I got a worry into my head and kept concentrating on the pain I was actually causing the pain. It was a real eye opener.

@isabellerossignol I am going to try that trick tonight with the little finger when the kids are in bed. It wouldn’t surprise me if I am somehow causing the pain as it doesn’t hurt until I am sitting down with nothing else to really focus on. Also a few months ago I thought I had skin cancer due to a pain I was getting near a mole on my back. Now I am worried about something else that pain has completely gone. My goodness I sound ridiculous I think.

I have secondary cancer, breast cancer in the bone. Currently it’s under control, but I obviously have a lot of worries about niggles etc. My rule, and one my oncologist is very on board with, is my 2 week rule.

If I have a pain, or a symptom, instead of obsessing over it, and assuming the worst, I note it, and then dismiss it. I can almost guarantee that in 2 weeks it will have gone and I move on. If I was ever to get to the 2 weeks and still have that Issue, I would then act.

I don’t know if that’s of any help to anyone, but it’s got me through the last year since my diagnosis and it keeps me from going mad!!!

The pp has it right, you can cause yourself actual pain, I regularly do, and once I’ve moved on, it goes!

I can now look back at how I felt at my worst and have a little laugh at it, all the illnesses I thought I had.

But it was far from funny at the time. I thought I was losing my mind, and in a way I was.

When I was younger I suffered badly from depression. When anxiety hit me I actually yearned to swap it for the depression because it was so much harder to live with than depression had been. Health anxiety meant living in a state of utter terror every waking hour.

I am thankfully existing quite nicely these days with no symptoms of either anxiety or depression although I suppose they might be lurking in the background waiting to pounce again. I am on long term medication and frankly I don't care if I have to take it forever. I'd rather take a tablet every day than ever face health anxiety again.

But I'm telling you this to let you know there can be light at the end of the tunnel.

Yes. That is exactly how it feels. Complete terror the whole time I’m awake and sometimes even in my dreams.

I’m sorry to hear about your cancer rodent01. That two week rule seems like a good one for me to attempt to adopt. I’m not sure if I’d be able to dismiss my symptom completely though but maybe it is worth a try.

Just an update that I have tried focusing on my little finger. It didn’t take very long at all before it started to feel sort of stiff and heavy and not too much longer before I was getting a sort of niggly pain in it. That’s so strange that that should happen.

Isn't it mind blowing? I remember being when I realised just how much my mind could influence my body.

I don’t have health anxiety but do have something related to it. I agree with the book recommendation of fitemanking, really worth a read, but for it to make any difference you have to work hard on completing the exercises, it isn’t a magic cure. For me anxiety medication takes the edge off to help me cope better too (although have had to come off medication due to being pg)