Recovering from excessive and long lasting health anxiety, is that possible?

[MrHarveysNewHat]

It sounds defeatist, I know but I genuinely can not see how I can ever recover from this and the older I am getting, the worse it is becoming.

As I write this I know it is pathetic, I see that it is and I know many people have little patience for health issues but it does hang over me like a black cloud. I do think my existing mental health issues and my chronic health problems are triggers though so it is a bit of a vicious cycle which I can not break.

I have always struggled with my mental health. From a very young age I would have a fear of dying and would spend a lot of time contemplating life and death. I also suffer with OCD which would often focus around contamination and illness a lot too.

I suppose it became a little better in my teen years and 20's but it was always there in the background. During my 30's I had my DC I managed to get through tummy bugs and viruses etc without having any major meltdowns although I would worry more than the average mum and would go into a panic if they came down with anything contagious, especially in the winter months and having emetophobia isn't much fun with young kids but I got through it.

None of my health anxiety problems are helped by the fact that I have struggled with some chronic health issues for decades. Since 1998 I have suffered from a bowels/guts problems (daily IBS and functional dyspepsia which are getting worse as I age), decades of excessively heavy periods resulted in years of anaemia which left my feeling very physically exhausted. I discovered 2 years ago that I have actually been suffering from endometriosis and adenomyosis. I seem to react very sensitively to hormones and also have aura migraines during my periods. My perimenopause journey has also been a bit rough over the last 7 years. I feel as though my body and mind are up against me every day (HRT makes my endo pain worse so can not take these and I have yet to find an antidepressant which doesn't exacerbate the gut issues).

I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD this year, I feel my mind has never functioned well and have limped along for decades.

But the covid pandemic shifted something in my brain, I feel it triggered the state that I am in now. I am not a conspiracy nut or anything like that but that timeline did something to me and I have not felt the same since. I am 52 so fully aware there have been and will always be pandemics and health disasters throughout history and most probably be more through my lifetime but the experience has triggered me and I am embarrassed to admit it although not helped by the fact my MIL died a horrible death in 2020 as a result of the pandemic (not from covid but because her cancer treatment was put on hold). My own mum had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2018 and was left quite isolated during the pandemic, she is sadly now in the advanced stages of the disease and I help care for her which has added another notch on my health anxiety journey.

I have now reached a point where I feel I am going crazy with constant worry over my health (and the health of those closest to me). I despise and dread winter to the point I will stay at home as much as possible and only go out when I need to. This current flu spike has me on edge. I have had the flu 4 times since my 20's (last time was this April) and I felt dreadful every time to the point that I now very much fear illnesses like flu.

I don't know what to do to ease this fear, the older I get and the more likelihood of disease or illness is triggering more fear but it's absolutely no way to live. I just want to be able to enjoy the rest of my life without this fear escalating over time. Watching my mum slowly dying from dementia has taught me how short life actually is but nothing I do helps. I have had endless CBT sessions, I even had advanced CBT sessions focusing on health anxiety but that didn't touch it. I have had endless counselling and am at the end of my current lot of therapy. I even did EMDR etc yet nothing eases the ingrained fear that I now have.

Has anyone overcome long standing health anxiety? We all face the same potential risk of disease as the next person but how are some (probably most) people able to live heir lives to the fullest and not allow this kind of anxiety to dominate their every day thoughts? Is this something that can be overcome at such a late age?

Oh goodness, we have the same mind! That’s exactly how I think and behave.

I hope the HRT works well for you. Keeping my fingers crossed.

@MrHarveysNewHat
The difficult thing is that I know that even if I were to have a full body scan today and be given a clean bill of health, it won't stop me developing cancer (my biggest fear) tomorrow. It's unrelenting. The fact that everyone else is in the same boat but don't all think that way doesn't seem to help 😔

I truly feel for you, you have literally written my story there too.

My grandparents were obsessed with poor health and dying and that’s probably where it started for me. I always recall my grandmother telling me that ‘It won’t be long before I’ll be greeting St.Peter at the pearly gates’. My sister and I were their only grandchildren and they really fussed over us, every sniffle and they were panicking and telling mum (their only child) how we must be kept warm and out of harms way etc.

I have always been someone who has been obsessed with finding out everything about a disease or condition. If I’m watching a programme and someone mentions a particular disease I’ll google the life out of it. The same with any condition or disease any family member may be diagnosed with. When my mum was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s I read and read and read everything I could to the point I know exactly what is coming to us and now wish I didn’t know so much. My sister on the other hand prefers to know nothing about it and is in ignorant bliss. I’m now terrified I’ll get it (peri and all this caring stress has sent me loopy).

I read everything I could get my hands on regarding Covid when it hit us and now live in fear of another pandemic. I completely acknowledge that it’s a ridiculous way to live, we all share the same threat to our lives and potential health, I just wish I could live out my life without every ache, pain, lump, bump, cough and sneeze being the start of my demise!

Same. I can’t tell you how many private tests and consultations I’ve spent a small fortune on, I feel relieved and elated for all of a week or so then another unexpected symptom or health worry will creep in and start worming its way into my thinking and the health anxiety cogs start churning again.

I just wanted to say that I totally relate to this.

It’s exhausting isn’t it? Also, just not quite knowing what’s a real, actual worrying symptom that should get checked out. Or what is just me over reacting to something that no one else would think twice about.

For me, I think of it as a noise. When I’m busy (I work full time in a school), the noise is like a faint hum. But the more time I have spare, often the louder the noise gets. It’s the school holidays now, so there are at least two things that I’m worried about, and it’s all quite noisy.

Exactly! When I had CBT I was fresh from getting the all clear from my all health worries at the time which made putting it into practice relatively easy. However, once I get symptoms that I'm genuinely worried might be a sign of something serious, (no matter how ridiculous they may seem) it's nigh on impossible to stop worrying in case this time it really is something!

Just chiming in here as another sufferer, HA is absolutely ruining my life at the moment and has ruined Christmas, after ruining my one holiday this year and also my birthday.

It's gotten to the point where I'll be approaching some time off and will actually stop myself from having baths, looking at myself in the mirror, touching certain parts of my body etc so that I can't spot something to worry about...and in spite of being on guard for potential triggers, every single holiday period I somehow mange to stumble across one or have something worrying happen to me and my time off will be ruined. I'm honestly so, so tired of it. This year I've had horrible breast pain and ovary pain investigated (the breast pain twice!) and had private meltdowns over moles, skin conditions, bowel movements etc. I try and be sensible and leave weird symptoms a couple of weeks before going to the docs, but I'm sick of going to the doctors. I'm sick of going to hospitals for ultrasounds and tests and feeling like I've wasted people's time. I feel like I'm constantly at war with my own brain, it feels like it's actively scheming against me to make my life miserable and I don't have any tools in my arsenal to fight it anymore.

Tldr OP, you have my sympathy. It's an exhausting horrible beast and you're not alone in having to fight it. Maybe in the new year we should both try some meds to see if that helps things

That's a really good way of putting it. I want the noise to stop!!

Yep exactly the same for me. It's ruined every holiday in recent years despite trying hard not to let it.

We do owe it to ourselves to try something in the new year.

I’ve been a wreck the last couple of days, I’ve had a bad tummy, I’ve suffered from ibs for decades and never have a well functioning digestive system but anything out of my ‘normal’ bowel habit throws me into a frenzy, dh says it’s because of Christmas and my stressing over my mum’s declining dementia but all I can think of is it’s something sinister. And I have a gastroscope on Friday which has ramped up my HA, so that’s not helping.

Good luck, I hope you manage to get it all to a more manageable level in the new year.

If it makes you feel at all better, I also suffer from stomach issues (pretty sure I've had IBS my whole life but never bothered to get it diagnosed, which is funny as a HA sufferer 😄). My bowel movements are absolutely shocking sometimes, I merrily seesaw between weeks of constipation and days of liquid shits and if I'm stressed or anxious the first thing that gets screwed about is my stomach! I'm the only person I've ever met who can get bad guts from drinking tap water! I would bet my entire house on your stomach issues being either IBS, stress or a change in eating habits rather than anything sinister. Of course, being worried about them is only going to make them worse, because HA is nothing but a vicious cycle ❤️

We do owe it to ourselves to try something in the new year.

We definitely do. This time last year I was determined to crack it and here I am again, after a year of counselling that felt positive in the moment but has had no long term effects at all.

The things I've noticed that make my health anxiety better are

• doing something creative, be that making, cooking/baking, writing, sewing, knitting. I tend to get absorbed and lose track of time, then emerge feeling calmer.
• getting outside and walking briskly.
• being somewhere with wide open views or vistas, or places where you're surrounded by history. These seem to remind me that I'm just a small human living out my very small human life, and we all only get a little bit of time to be here so we might as well take it all in marvel in the moment rather than spend that time worrying about our own finite bodies. (None of these things are easy in an ordinary working day though!)
• Trying to default to the 'theory b' philosophy, which means that every time I spiral into thinking something could be a sinister life-limiting symptom, I immediately and calmly apply 'theory b', which is that it is far more likely to be something mundane and completely insignificant. I also try to step outside of myself and ask 'how would someone who doesn't have HA/OCD react to this?'

The things that make it worse are
being on social media
reading or listening to stories or news items about illness
reading or listening to anything about 'how to live longer' - all those things about superfoods and cold water swimming and intermittent fasting etc.

If anyone else has any tricks that help, even just a little bit, I'd love to hear them. My heart goes out to everyone - I relate so much to all of the stories here.

This book started to help me and I might try it again. The author has an Instagram page which is a lot about health anxiety, which is also helpful.

My algorithms don’t help. I find I click on accounts where people are ill or talking about family members that are ill, so obviously that gets shown to me a lot which skews my perception of reality.

I agree re the algorithms, my feed is the same, full of sad cancer stories. And of course the more I read the more I get shown. DH says he doesn't get any on his, his feed is full of classic cars! I've tried clearing my cookies & clicking "not interested" which helps, but then I slip back.....

Thanks for the book recommendation Frankiecat. I've downloaded it, and the sample of another one that was recommended on the same Amazon page called Addicted to Anxiety, which I suspect may be relevant to me. I think I've been anxious for so long that I don't know how to be anything else. I noticed particularly over Christmas that in the evenings it felt like my brain was scanning around almost looking for something for anxiety to attach to.

On Instagram I've started clicking on the filter at the top so it only shows me accounts I'm following, not all the algorithm-generated 'suggested for you' stuff. That helps a lot, and means I only get the happy cooking/crafting/house content that I find soothing.

Ugh yes when your brain goes on the prowl for things to latch onto it's so horrible! Really does feel like my brain acts independently of what I want it to be doing. Like, I very actively don't want to be finding random bullshit to worry about, why is my brain hunting for stuff in spite of that? Has anyone done CBT or therapy and had any luck managing this?

I definitely focus on really bad cancer stories and they lodge in my brain. When I feel something unusual on my body my brain goes to these stories straight away and I just think "its my turn now"

Re CBT, I had it about 3 years ago and it helped a bit but at that time I was fresh from clear medical tests so didn't have any specific worries which made it easier. I've no idea how you're supposed to know the difference between anxiety symptoms & symptoms of an actual disease. How on earth do you know when it's safe to not worry and when to go to the GP?? I've tried working back through the material a few times since but always failed as I just can't switch off the worry like they tell you to when I have things niggling me. I only had 8 sessions allowed by the NHS though which is probably not enough.

I'm going back to the GP next week for advice and also to discuss HRT as my HA has definitely got worse due to menopause so hope that might help.

I'm determined to crack it this year (which I've said before I know!). However, I'm nearly 60 and realistically only have around 20-30 years left. Hopefully, I will die of old age after living a healthy life and it would be awful to look back with regret at all the wasted years worrying about something that never happened (I've wasted much of the last 4 already!). Even if I do get taken out earlier by something nasty, at least I would've led a happy life to that point.

I am the exact same @Ihatehealthanxiety

Just checking in to see how everyone's doing? I'm finding this week tough going. I'll read one of the books recommended above this weekend, but I wish it would just go away! I'd rather be thinking about nicer things rather than giving it my time and attention.

I struggle with HA too mine got worse after a difficult childbirth and then again after an emergency bowel surgery where they thought it was cancer but turned out to be a benign polyp. Following that had further emergency admissions and surgery for bowel obstruction due to scar tissue from the first surgery.

It's always at the back of my mind and I've been told to follow a low fibre diet as well.

I get intrusive thoughts about the pain, ambulances and the nasogastric tube.

I also had an episode of psychosis in the hospital possibly due to sepsis and or low electrolytes and started refusing treatment so I worry that might happen again.

I've been diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety and offered some intensive CBT but not done it yet. Bit apprehensive.

It's a horrible thing and always seems with me.

I got private medical insurance after some blunders with my diagnosis which in a way is helpful as part of my anxiety it being misdiagnosed.

But then as me up thread you can end up getting tested and one thing leading to another.

I have now found several oddities such as a benign liver hemangioma (googled that and found rarely they can cause internal bleeding)
and a duplex kidney which is like an extra kidney on one side which of course worries me and I saw a consultant which said it was ok but still not totally reassured.

I think it's been made worse because in the past with my bowel surgery I've been reassured and then suddenly whisked into surgery in the dead of night for an operation.

Then I had memory problems which is probably due to menopause but they referred me to the memory clinic and did brain scans which seemed to show some atrophy but then the consultant said they review the scans and it looks like I've got a funny shaped skull with more space at the top or something. Which was also strange and a bit unsettling.

I also had a PET scan which is normal but worried about the radiation and getting a brain tumour now!

I've recently been diagnosed with ME CFS and I do think all the stress from worrying has contributing to it. That's a worry too as told to do pacing etc not to make it worse.

Anyway it's all just horrible. I find the Calm app useful and listen to music on it and relaxing things like hot baths.

I feel for everyone with this. I've been on fluoxetine for years and recently had it increased and another med added which meant yearly ECGs and blood tests another thing to worry about!

I'm on escitalopram and that seems to be causing me endless stress as I think I want to come of it ..my teeth are all hurting.. bizarre side effects..
I need to make a decision

@Orangesandlemons77 gosh you have a lot to deal with..must be very stressful

Yes. It started after my first child was born.it was crippling and got worse and worse.

I eventually broke down in front of my GP and started sertraline in 2018. I am on a highish dose - 100mg daily. I have no health anxiety or crippling fear of flying. Both now resolved.

I am also autistic and have ADHD.

Edited to add: DS1 was born in 2001, so I suffered for 17 years

I struggle with health anxiety and what I have found to really help is accepting that this is part of how I think and is a stress reaction.
So its not something that will ever be cured or completely dissappear, as its just my personality type. I'm an anxious person and I can become alarmed by sensations in my body.
In a way its about acceptance.
I'm in quite a stable place now and it was from self acceptance. It's also been about managing stress, getting enough sleep and fresh air and having good boundaries with myself.
I find 'the anxiety guy' on YouTube really good. I listen to his positive affirmations for health anxiety at least once a day and it repeat it all out loud.
I also keep a diary where I can only write things I feel positive about and things im grateful for. I also write promises to myself every morning. One of which is that I wont Google any health symptoms today and if I start thinking about a sensation in my body I will immediately distract myself.