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Living with health anxiety.
Having always been an anxious child, it seems quite inevitable that at 20 years old, moving in with my partner, leaving college and starting full-time employment, my anxiety disorder introduced itself into my life.
After an attack of irritable bowel syndrome, which was misdiagnosed as a serious condition and ended up with me in a hospital bed, I subsequently developed illness phobia.
My phobia was so extreme that I went on to develop an anxiety condition known as ‘health anxiety’.
Each day I convinced myself that I was suffering from a variety of terminal illnesses and I spent my time checking my body for symptoms, desperately seeking reassurance from my relatives and partner in order to calm me down for 10 minutes, until a new illness would begin to obsess me.
This negative chain of thought patterns continued until it was decided by those around me that I needed professional help as I had become a prisoner to these thoughts and my life was a daily nightmare. I began accessing therapy and started taking medication in the vain hope that I would get better and resume a normal life.
What I have learnt in dealing with this condition is that it is possible to control your anxiety and your thoughts. This is achieved by learning as much as possible about yourself and about your anxiety.
Learning what triggers the anxiety is important and developing strategies to avoid the chain of events that follow this trigger can help to reduce the effects of the anxiety.
I found CBT useful and something that I could use each day but it wasn’t enough in itself. Combined with CBT, distraction techniques, keeping my mind occupied and my body active, all contribute to a quality of life that at 20 years old I thought could not exist.
There will be times in my life when I will be affected by stress and the health anxiety and accompanying
thoughts might well be hard to control. However, I do take comfort in knowing that everything I worked at and developed previously can be used again to overcome this debilitating disorder.
