that "trust your gut" is unreliable when you have anxiety?

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I have severe anxiety, mainly related to death, and have had it my whole life - have had various therapies, medications etc for it and it goes through stages where it's not too bad and stages where it's awful. I constantly see people being told to "trust their gut" when it comes to certain things (like health) - surely that is terrible advice when the person in question has anxiety? Like, when I'm in a bad anxiety phase my "gut" tells me every single symptom I have is cancer. When I'm in a bad anxiety phase and about to travel my "gut" tells me my car or plane will crash. If I trusted my "gut" about my health in particular I would be at the GP at least once a week and I'm not joking. Or like when you read a symptom of a heart attack/sepsis etc is a "feeling of impending doom/feeling like you are going to die". I feel like that every time I have an anxiety attack! Anyone else with anxiety get wound up by the phrase "trust your gut"? My gut has anxiety and is not trustworthy!

God yes. I view all my 'gut' instincts with extreme suspicion at best. I don't think they've got any better than a 50% success rate, and probably much lower than that.

Oh pregnancy was awful for it. The worst was overanalysing baby's movements, I ended up in the maternity unit for reduced movement about 5 times because I was always told "trust your instincts, better safe than sorry" and each of those times I'm not even sure that he actually was moving any less than usual, I was just totally overthinking it.

Take a look at AnxietyJosh on Instagram - he has a post addressing this, and yes, the challenge with living with anxiety is that you have to learn not to trust your gut (at least for the time being).

My gut’s a twat, too, OP.

CBT helped me learn to interrogate and ignore it.

Completely agree, my gut doesn't know it's elbow from its arsehole and has let me down many, many times before. Totally useless advice for me, personally. In fact I think life would be much easier if I had even a semi reliae gut to trust in the first place.

Anxiety sufferer here! It took me a while to understand that my gut is actually pretty crap and I can't trust my instincts, especially those never-ending thoughts that bother me at night!

I remember once dozing very fitfully in the car on a long, anxious journey (as a passenger obviously) and being jerked awake by a sudden image of a large lorry hurtling towards us. I made DH pull over and was completely hysterical. I told someone about this later and they told me maybe I had a psychic gift and had managed to avoid this by stopping when I did. Not helpful - I get horrible intrusive images in my head constantly, usually when I'm falling asleep. If even half of them had happened by now I'd be dead several times over and so would everyone else.

I could have wrote this post OP I fear death so much it's ruined my life since the age of 10. I won't now leave the house, won't travel in a car won't do anything that could cause death. Every time I get a twinge of pain I over analyse and end up in full panic attack.
I have cardiac appointments because my heart flutters all the time. I suffer with insomnia because my mind doesn't switch off because everything seems worse when I'm sat on my own at night.
I take propananol until I rattle.
I live on high panic mode all the time. It's so horrible to live with, and so hard to try and explain it to people who don't understand.
You're not alone

I used to think this about my gut as I was really anxious post divorce and my gut just stopped being accurate at all. Until one day I realised my gut wasn't such a twat as I saw the man I was dating spying on me. I then realised that my gut was probably my logical brain trying to put two and two together. Since then I've learnt to stop when I get that feeling and ask myself whether it's anxiety or if there's a reason for it. The most ridiculous feeling I had in the past year was that my current partner would try and scam me. Luckily his ex was really sweet and didn't tell him about the extent of my snooping into his background. Not my finest hour.