Scar tissue

[Lindsey14]

I have a bump on my head that is scar tissue from when i was attacked by a dog. Ive been checked out and its nothing but scar tissue, but when i get foggy i get scared and over think. Get the thoughts im dying or something...its scary

[Miniwheats]

Hi Lindsey14. I can understand how you feel. Health anxiety is the pits 🙄 When you were attacked by this dog (yikes!) did you fall and hit your head? Are you worried that it might have caused a "silent" type of injury that is rearing its ugly head now? If so, did you have a CT scan or MRI done at the time? If you didn't hit your head and you are focusing only on the bumpy scar tissue, I know it can feel really creepy.. like "what the heck is in there and why is it so damn hard?" I have a hideous scar on my chest from skin cancer surgery a few years ago and I swear each year it gets harder and harder and feels deeper, and just feels "wrong" but I know it's only scar tissue. My personal opinion is that you are looking for any kind of link to your brain fog and your first thought is on the scar because it is after all, on your head. I think that you are scaring yourself and making yourself anxious by thinking these thoughts which is driving your sympathetic tone up and exacerbating your symptoms. Did you perhaps have some random moment of fogginess, thought about your scar, and then started to feel fogginess more frequently? You may not even recall having that first thought. This is how physical symptoms around anxiety start - a brief, benign symptom that we overanalyze and attach meaning to, and then monitor as if our lives depended on it and then freak out when they happen again which only fuels the visious cycle. You need to break out of this cycle of gloom and doom. You can start by challenging your fearful thoughts of dying. Ask yourself what the likelihood is that brain fog or death could be attributed to scar tissue which lies above the skull. I know that in your heightened state of anxiety right now it seems to you that anything is possible and you are right, anything is possible. But "possible" does not equal "likely" - there is a big difference, and this is a classic thinking trap for us anxious people. Ask if it's more likely that the doctors are correct and it's only scar tissue. Ask yourself if it's more likely that your anxiety has spun your symptoms out of control because you know this does happens to alot of other people (just read this forum) and that there are physiological, evidence based explanations for this. You can also try an experiment where you give yourself 3-4 days where you ignore the symptoms and chalk it up to anxiety, then see what the result is. There is a 50% chance that you will still feel your symptoms and a 50% chance that they will subside as your anxiety subsides. You've got nothing to lose by trying this except, hopefully, your nagging worry which you are fed up with I'm sure. Honestly, the thought challenging exercise and a 2 week experiment, suggested by my therapist, were the only things that finally broke the cycle for me. It was like a load was lifted off my shoulders when I was given permission to forget about my symptoms for two weeks - and it only actually took two days before I noticed my symptoms had subsided, and a week for most of them to completely disappear 😊 I was so pleasantly surprised!! Give yourself that chance too! I strongly believe that the physical symptoms caused by anxiety are produced by the same mechanism that is responsible for the placebo effect. This belief gives me comfort whenever I feel wonky symptoms creep up 😊

[Lindsey14 in reply to Miniwheats]

Thank you for taking the time to write all this. Really, i feel like this helps