I just wondered if there were any other MNers who currently feel they get this. A search for historic MN threads did show up some fellow travellers but I was hoping to talk to people who are struggling with this at present.
I'm a worrier and suffer from more or less chronic anxiety. This hooks onto fairly predictable issues - my health, the threat of nuclear war, my parents, my children, money - and when I'm more stressed about life in general, my anxieties will ramp up. Objectively, I know that my anxieties are a disorder - that I catastrophise, obsess and overthink. I've had this my whole life, after all. Health anxiety is almost always with me - I'm one of those tedious people who assumes that every odd twinge is cancer or a brain tumour or a heart condition. I know this and feel terrible that people who actually HAVE these conditions, are a lot more level-headed than I am!
In the last couple of years though, I've noticed my anxieties have found a new 'hook' - our house. Now, objectively, we really do have a few problems. Damp is always an issue (20's ex-council house, sturdy but with single-skin brick walls, so exterior walls always cold and grow mildew given a chance). But in the last few years cracks at the tops of interior walls have appeared. They're not massive and we did have a surveyor in who said, this is almost certainly just very slight minor movement, the plaster has got damp and detached a tiny bit at the tops of the walls. But they are everywhere. Damp patches are all over the place and for lots of different reasons. The roof really needs redoing in entirety but I have no idea how we'd pay for that (we're about to have about 5 grand's worth of minor roofing and guttering jobs done and that's going to have to be a small loan). The stucco plaster on the outside is blowing in some areas and that's also a prohibitively costly job.
There is too much crap IN the house (I'm not a hoarder but not far off, in all honesty, and decluttering is compounded by my anxiety and depression which make it very hard to get my head into the right state of mind to let go of things). That doesn't help airflow.
There is now a pervading smell of damp and sometimes mould in certain areas and I'm finding it oppressive. I find myself going into headspins of terror about it all - is this damp, mildewy house making us all ill? Would we ever be able to sell it? Where do we find the money to put it all right and where do we start and how do I find someone who isn't a cowboy to do it??
I find myself eyeing cracks in the walls apprehensively, particularly at night. Every creak or tap (often from the house settling down as the heating goes off in the late evenings) seems as if it goes right through me - I genuinely feel it in my body, like a tiny shock. I now can't tell if, when there's a sudden creak, it's the tiny shot of adrenalin that it sets off in my body because it makes me anxious that's what I feel, or if there was actually a tiny 'movement' in the house that my body felt. I wake in the middle of the night and smell mould (I have a horribly oversensitive sense of smell and retain smells in my nose for ages, so I'm not sure I can trust it). I try to stop myself, but imagine dry rot mycelium spreading its tendrils behind the plaster, along the bricks, unseen. I lie awake convinced the house is about to collapse, that with every heavy rainstorm the material of the house is getting more and more saturated and one day will just ... subside. I imagine the foundations becoming eaten away from beneath.
I know all of this is utterly crazy! I'm intelligent, educated and I know health anxiety when I see it. This is EXACTLY like my horrible health anxiety, only it's about the house. I see some minor (I hope!) issues and then everything I observe becomes a 'symptom' of some far greater malaise, like dry rot, rising damp, rotten joists, subsidence. Like going to see a GP with something I'm obsessing about, the reassurance of that surveyor's visit had a very short half-life. (To be fair, he was a friend of a friend and came in briefly as a favour, so it wasn't exhaustive.) Essentially, whatever he said to reassure us, I now don't really believe.
Having bitten the bullet and got a roofer to come and do some remedial work, I had hoped to feel better. But I'm already panicking about it - what if he lifts the felt on the flat roof he's recovering and finds it already rotten? What if, by December, it's raining so much they can't do any repairs and we'll have to wait until spring and the roof will deteriorate over winter? What if it all costs twice as much as they said it would?
Does anyone else suffer from this particular sort of anxiety? It's so very like health anxiety. What do you do to help it? I did try CBT years back for health anxiety but don't think I found it very helpful - probably wasn't doing the 'homework' properly. I just don't know where to start on trying to calm my thoughts and think (or not think!) rationally about this. At times I just wish I could die overnight to stop worrying about it.