A tip for HA sufferers...

[teacherspets]

As a fellow HA sufferer, with someone "wrong with me" every damn day, I've been given one simple piece of advice and want to pass it on.

Whenever you have the urge to google, which, if like me, you need to net-diagnose often, search "anxiety and your symptom".

So for me... anxiety and headaches, anxiety and numbness, anxiety and palpitations, anxiety and diarrhoea etc etc.

It's made me realise just how prevalent anxiety is with affecting us physically rather than someone intrinsically wrong.

• something

Great tip - can I add another? (I posted it on a previous thread so will just c&p)

I have health anxiety too and I realised I used to focus in on the one symptom I had - so for example (and apologies for the flippancy and over exaggeration) I'd google "death guaranteed disease" and the symptoms would be something like:

• Yellow horns growing from head
• Hands developing luminous glow in the dark spots *Coughing up small mammals *stomach ache

And I'd focus entirely on the stomach ache and ignore the other symptoms.

Now when I'm in a health anxiety moment and have succumbed to Dr Google, I force myself to read out each symptom aloud and say yes or no to it.

I find that this approach makes me more conscious that I may have half a symptom of a list of 10 rather than ignore 9 and half and focus on the one bit that is relevant to me.

Hope this is useful for some!

Fab tip.

Keep them coming! Let's beat this together. (Currently sat with a funny numbness sensation in my arm but I had it earlier at work and it went so I'm ignoring it).

Great tips - thanks so much! x