Let's start at the beginning. Maybe you inherited a tendency towards high anxiety. Maybe not, maybe your nerves have just been over-sensitised by too much stress. Too much over work, disappointment, loss, grief, toxic relationships, worry about friends or family.
Finally, your nervous system decides it's had enough and it becomes over sensitive. In this state small worries and problems become exaggerated ten fold. This can take many forms but a common one is health anxiety. A headache must be a brain tumour. Muscular tension in the chest must mean your heart is failing. A stomach ache must be cancer. Even the reassurance of medical tests and doctors leaves us thinking "what if they've missed something?"
We've all been there but we're all still here to tell the tale. Because health anxiety cannot kill you, cannot disable you and cannot send you crazy.
Without help you can easily get into a vicious circle of symptoms causing fear causing more anxiety causing more symptoms causing more fear and so on. Anxiety feeds on fear. The second fear that we add to the flash of first fear, that is.
You can recover from anxiety disorder (formerly called hypochondria) no matter how long or how deeply you have suffered. That's right, you can recover - health anxiety doesn't have to be a life sentence.
I'm not a medical practitioner so I can't instruct you what to do. But I can tell you what helped me to recover and what has helped many others. Many years ago a doctor called Claire Weekes experienced anxiety disorder. She gradually devised a method which allowed her to recover. Doctor Weekes then wrote a book describing her method titled "Hope and help for your nerves".
She said that first of all we should stop fighting the symptoms of anxiety. Fighting creates stress and strain: the last thing sensitised nervous systems need more of! Instead, she advocated "accepting" all the symptoms of health anxiety for the time being knowing full well they are imposters and can't truly harm us. Accept them without adding second fear to the flash of first fear. Accept them completely by agreeing to co-exist with them for the moment.
She summed up her method as: Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass.
It has been said* that over the past 50 years tens of millions of people have recovered using her protocols. She was even nominated for a Nobel Prize.
Her book is still in print and available new or pre-owned from Amazon or Ebay. It's quite simply life changing.
*David Barlow, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Boston University. Source: "Claire Weekes- the woman who cracked the anxiety code", Judith Hoare, 2019.
xx
