How I Overcame Health Anxiety

Today's episode is an overview of my experience with health anxiety. I went from being agoraphobic and stuck in my house to traveling the world, and you can do it, too! I'll talk about what my experience with severe health anxiety was like, and the specific steps I took to make my way out of it. Enjoy! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is confusing, isolating, and scary about fear and anxiety, and we turn it into something you can actually work with. And honestly, one of the best ways I know to take the scary, confusing, isolating parts of anxiety and turn them into something you can work with is to do that with people who know what you're going through, which is a perfect moment to let you know that the signups for my next Reclaim cohort are open right now. The first session of the next cohort kicks off on August 12th. Reclaim is my small group coaching program where we do this work together of moving from fear to freedom with real support and accountability. If you're hearing this episode the day it comes out, it's not too late to grab your spot. The first session starts next Wednesday. Sign-ups will be open through Monday, so head to amandacley.com to save your spot. Today's episode is kind of a personal one. I get a lot of questions about how to overcome health anxiety. It seems to be a really common, maybe the most common issue that my listeners deal with. And I want to be really clear about my intentions with this one. I am not a clinician of any kind, and I don't think I have any business telling you exactly what you should or shouldn't do to overcome your health anxiety. What I can do is share my story. So if any part of what I went through sounds familiar, my hope is that you'll feel a little less alone. And maybe you'll find some bits and pieces in my story that you could bring to your therapist, your medical professionals to try for your own health anxiety. So, with that, my usual reminder that I am not a therapist or a medical professional. Everything I share on this show is based on my own personal experience with fear and anxiety, my journey through overcoming those things, and the research I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy or medical care. So please take only what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and talk to your medical and mental health professionals first. This reminder matters on every episode, but especially today as we're talking about health and health-related anxiety. So make sure that anything you want to try, anything new you haven't tried before, you consult your doctor before trying. Okay, let me tell you my story. I want to start by showing you where I actually was mentally. Um, because I think that you might see yourself in my story, and I want you to know that I'm not talking about this from a detached um, I read about this once kind of place. I really lived this. At my worst, I was severely agoraphobic. I was scared of my own body and my own mind. I had moments actually where I really believed that I was having a psychotic break. I was having multiple panic attacks a day, and underneath all of that was this constant certainty that I could die at any moment. It was very, very intense health anxiety, and it was completely debilitating. Here's what that actually looked like day to day. Almost anything I did that wasn't laying in bed, I would have to muster up energy for, and sometimes days or weeks beforehand, depending on what I had to do. And then afterward, I would have to essentially veg for days to recover from how much it took out of me to grit my teeth and white knuckle through that experience. My whole life had shrunken down to this experience of dreading something, trying to grit my teeth through it, recovering, and then dreading the next thing. Because we're on the topic of health and health anxiety, I want to mention that through all of this, I always went to my annual physical exams. I would bring up my concerns with my doctor, I told him about all the symptoms I was having, and that I was an anxious person. And if my doctor thought that a test was warranted, I always had the test done. Thankfully, everything always came back normal. Um, but it's really important that you continue to be checked by a doctor if you have any kind of concern. Health anxiety and a real medical condition or medical issue can feel very similar, and you deserve to have a professional help you sort that out. And here's a part of my journey that anyone who's experienced health anxiety knows in their bones after a doctor appointment, after good test results, I would feel better for days, sometimes even weeks. And then at some point, I would have the same symptom that I went to the doctor for in the first place. Within minutes, I would be convinced that the test had missed something. That something was actually wrong in my body, and the doctor who called the test, the person who administered it, the doctor who read the results didn't catch it. And just like that, I would be back to the same spiral that I was in before, but feeling more defeated because I had had a hope that I was gonna be okay that didn't last. My specific fears were around my heart and lungs. When I was really afraid and anxious, I would have a lot of heart palpitations and my heart rate would go up. And it scared me every single time it happened. If for some reason my heart was behaving in a way that I deemed normal and safe, I was probably having uh feelings of breathlessness. I call this symptom cycling, that's the term I made up for it, and it's something that I'll get into more on a future episode. I also went through stretches of intense air hunger where I was feeling like I could not get a satisfying or deep enough breath. And I had that almost every single day. And I remember asking myself, which of these things is easier to deal with? Like which would I rather have the heart thing or the breathing thing? Um, and it was always whichever one I wasn't experiencing in that moment, of course. And then there were the cancer scares. Any symptom that was new that I hadn't experienced before, that wasn't related to my heart and lungs, um, that I couldn't immediately explain, I thought was cancer or ALS or MS or Parkinson's. And not like uh this might be worth mentioning to my doctor the next time I go in, but um, I would be convinced that I had an incurable disease that needed immediate medical intervention. Worst case every time. If you're listening to this and relating, and maybe you've never heard someone describe your experience back to you, I want you to hear this. You are not crazy and you're not alone. This is a pattern that a lot of people get into and that a lot of people get out of, and you can do it too. So let me tell you what actually started to change things for me. And I've said this a hundred times, but this was not quick and easy. I went through a lot of trial and error, and I do try to help you avoid some of that by sharing my experiences and tips with you. But there were a few things that made real differences for me, and every one of them comes down to a version of the same thing, which is teaching myself that I can tolerate uncomfortable things without treating them like emergencies. The first part was learning to be okay with my body doing things that I didn't like. The way I worked on that was maybe counterintuitive if you haven't um listened to my other podcast episodes and understood this idea, but I started by purposely doing things that made my heart race. At my worst, I started with things so small that it might sound silly to you. At first, I would literally just think of something that I was scared of, and I would let my heart race while I had that thought or imagined that experience. And that was the whole exercise. And then um, next, maybe it was walking around my yard for a minute and then going up the stairs in my house a couple times, and eventually over time, that became like more intense exercise. But I built up to that gradually one tiny uncomfortable experience at a time. And the part that I believe made it work was that while my heart was racing, I practiced allowing myself to feel it. Because my old pattern, where I did anything I could to get that feeling to stop, did not work at all. And in fact, it made my fear of that thing a lot more intense over time. At one point, I actually stopped eating bread and carbs because I noticed that if I did, my heart would feel like it was pounding. And by the way, that is a real and completely harmless thing that happens. Our heart um rhythms and rates can change when we eat because our bodies are working to digest food. So um it's not dangerous. But at that time, I didn't know that that was that's what was happening. I didn't know that it wasn't dangerous, so I just started avoiding it, and every time I avoided it, the fear of doing it got stronger because I was teaching my brain that eating carbs was dangerous, and then every single time I ate a big meal, like felt full, I would notice that my heart was pounding. So that's a little bit of a digression, but I did the opposite of that, practicing allowing myself to feel those feelings without avoiding the situations that caused them. The second thing I wanted to learn was how to accept the feelings of discomfort. And I mean really accept it. There was a point where my practice included literally telling myself, I am willing to feel like I can't breathe right now. And I'm not going to pretend like that was easy. It was so hard, but that was the whole point. And caveat, I knew and the people around me knew that I was in fact breathing just fine. I just was tense and felt like I couldn't breathe. So I knew it was safe to practice that willingness. And I was training myself to tolerate difficult, challenging things instead of running away from them. I was letting myself have a full experience of whatever was happening, the air hunger, the racing heart, all of it without rushing to fix it or get the feelings to stop happening. And here's something that surprised me. Letting myself have a really scary experience without treating it actually started to lift my fear of that thing really quickly, faster than anything else I had tried. This is the work of acceptance and willingness that I talk about all the time on this show. I have an episode called How to Practice Acceptance, if you want to go deeper on that. The third piece I started to change that I think was really important was giving myself time. So when I'd have one of those scares, a cancer scare or a fear about some rare disease, instead of just immediately grabbing my phone and researching the symptoms and the prognosis, the whole thing, I would give myself time to sit with the fear. And that was huge because researching can be a safety behavior. It can be a way of getting the uncertainty to go away right now. Giving myself space to process, to think for myself, to be willing to feel some fear without doing anything about it. That's what taught me that I could get freaked out and not spiral out of control. I could feel the fear, allow it to be there and come out on the other side totally fine. Every time I did that, it got a little bit easier. Alongside all that practice, there were a few shifts in how I actually saw things that I think were just as important. So these are the mindset changes that took me from white knuckling and gritting my teeth through the symptoms to actually living a free life. The first one was learning to make peace with the uncertainty of health. For a long time, what I wanted was a guarantee. I wanted that I was fine, that nothing was wrong, and that nothing ever would be wrong with me. And at some point, I had to come to terms with the hard truth that at some point in my life, I will have a health issue. That's not me being pessimistic, that's just having a body that ages. Everyone does have a health issue eventually. And weirdly, accepting that was scary, but also freeing. Because instead of chasing a guarantee that I literally could never get, I started to build a new belief that whatever happened, I would handle. And that is a much more grounded place to be than please don't ever let anything bad happen to me. The second mindset shift that was important for me was learning that our bodies change and they often do things that don't make sense to us. A flutter, a twinge, a weird sensation out of nowhere. Bodies are strange, and a strange sensation is not automatically a sign of immediate danger. I learned that a lot of times it's just my body being normal and regular, and I don't have to know what's going on at all times. And actually, I feel a lot better knowing that I can trust my body to tell me if something is actually wrong and that I don't have to pay attention constantly. And that was a confidence I built over time through these practices. The third mindset shift was realizing that even if I did have a symptom that indicated some kind of medical issue, didn't even mean worst case scenario. This one was very eye-opening for me as I got more confident in trusting my body. I had spent years acting like every and any symptom meant the scariest outcome possible. But I started to ask, okay, what if you do have a heart condition one day? And what if it's something that could be treated with a medication or could be treated with a lifestyle change or even something that goes away on its own? The number of possible outcomes is huge, and fear had narrowed all of them down to one, the scariest one. The limits I put on possible outcomes of any given situation when I was really scared and anxious was wild, and I bet you can relate. The last shift I want to share with you is something that is really important to me, and that was deciding that living my life was more important to me than never risking my health or safety ever again. And there was a specific moment for me that I remember really clearly. I was on an airplane. It was one of the first flights I ever took, and I was feeling anxious. I was really nervous to be on this flight. And I remember saying to myself, I would rather die being brave and exploring the world than staying in my house for the next 50 years. And I know that sounds intense, but my brain needed the intensity of the truth in that at that time in my life. I had spent so long letting the fear of dying keep me from actually living. And I needed to name in the strongest terms possible that a small, shrunken life was not what I wanted for myself. I wanted to live in freedom, and even if having it meant accepting that I'm a mortal person and that I cannot control everything. So if you take anything away from my story today, let it be this. I was about as deep in health anxiety as a person can be. And I got better. Not by finally getting the perfect test results that made me never feel afraid of anything again, but by learning that I could feel the scary sensations, feel the uncertainty, and handle it. Proving to myself that I could handle discomfort and fear changed my life. I'm sharing all this for two reasons. One, so that if you're going through it right now, you know that you're not alone. Because I promise you you're not the only one. And two, because maybe you've heard a couple things that you think are worth bringing to your therapist for you to explore. Because if I could come out of this, I really do believe that you can do it too. And that's all for today's episode. I hope that hearing my story was helpful to you. I know that hearing your stories and your experiences is always super helpful to me. We are not alone in this, and there is a way out. And thank you for listening to my version of this fear thing cohort. Quick reminder that the next Reclaim cohort kicks off next Wednesday, and you can head to amandaclay.com to save your spot. If you want to learn how to change your life and move from fear to freedom, that is exactly what Reclaim Coaching are for. I would love for you to join us. If you have a question about today's episode, or you have a topic that you want me to dive into on the show, please reach out. I would love to contact me on my website, or you can send me an email at Amanda at AK.com, or send me a DM on TikTok or Instagram at A. If today's episode was helpful to you, please hit subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you haven't done yet, please leave a reading or review so that other anxious people can find this show. Thank you so much for being here today, and see you next time.