04:Your Health Anxiety is Affecting Your Kids

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Your health anxiety is not your fault, but it's a severe problem that you need to take action on.

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Transcript

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Can I be real with you for one second? Your health anxiety is absolutely affecting your children. In fact, it can be devastating to your child's life. Now I know that may feel terrible to hear. You may immediately even want to just shut off this episode. Be like, I'm not listening to that. I don't want to talk to that. I don't want to hear that. Because often when we say that, we feel guilt, we feel shame. Because I know as the mom to your child or the parent to your child, the last thing you want is your health anxiety to be negative, affecting your kill your children's life. The last thing you want is to be your experience be harming your kids. And I really want to talk about this for a moment because it's so critical and important that you understand how your health anxiety is like an emergency. It's something to deal with. It's not something to put off. And this is so critical. And if you just take a moment to look at how it's affecting your kids, even if you feel guilt or shame, I want you to see that the way through this is when you heal the health anxiety, and you don't have to feel that guilt or shame anymore. Guilt or shame, when we experience that, we can want to shut it down. We can want to ignore it. We can want to just pretend it doesn't exist or it's not happening. But the cold hard truth of it is your health anxiety is affecting your kids. And I want to share some thoughts and ways that it might be showing up for you in your household because you may think that you're hiding it, but I can tell you, I can guarantee you, you are not hiding your health anxiety from your kids. And it is affecting them and it can pass down to them. Some studies show and stats show that children with two anxious parents had a 41% rate of anxiety disorders. And there, if you've ever heard of anything called about generational trauma and anxiety, this can be passed down through the generations. And that's how cycles happen. Maybe you even got yours from your parents. So something that happens when you have health anxiety and why it affects your kids is children learn what is dangerous by watching their parents. They learn about fear, they learn about what's safe and what's not safe by watching you. You are the one who's showing your children and your child how to show up in the world, what is safe, what is dangerous. And if you're constantly on edge, if you're going to the doctor all the time, you're constantly checking health symptoms, you're talking about sickness all the time, you're panicking over super small health issues, you're not letting your kid go play on the playground because there might be germs there, your child interprets this as the world's unsafe. Sickness is dangerous. Something bad might happen. And so even if you feel like you're trying to hide it, there is no way if health anxiety is in your life, if you are experiencing it on a daily or weekly basis, there's absolutely no way that your kids don't see it and that your kids aren't learning from you. Children's nervous systems regulate in sync with their caregivers. So if you are in a chronically anxious state, if your body is in this fight or flight state all the time, your child's nervous system is gonna regulate to that fight or flight state, that state that you are in all the time, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Even if you're hiding it, even if you think you're hiding it, if your stress levels are chronically high, your child's baseline stress level increases. Your child's brain becomes more threat focused. And your child may also develop this hyper-vigilance about their body or about life, kind of like always alert on looking for danger. Not because you want to give that to them, not because you're trying to. I want you to hear me loud and clear. This is not because you want to do this to your kids or because you want to pass this on. I know you want to do everything to protect your kids, and that's why this conversation is so important. I want you to hear how critical this is, that just ignoring your health anxiety and trying to push through and ignore it, is actually one of the worst things you can do for your children. You might not even notice all the ways that your health anxiety is affecting your kids. But if you think about it for a moment, somebody who is living with health anxiety, when they're going through their day and they are, you know, overprotecting their kids, not letting their kids make choices for themselves, in this more controlling trying to protect their kids from sickness or protect themselves from sickness, they're in a lot more controlling state. They're trying to protect their kids overbearingly in a way that doesn't give their kids autonomy and freedom to test their boundaries and to see, you know, to live life. You might be stopping your children from living their life to the fullest, not because you want to, but because your health anxiety is preventing you from that. So it could be showing up, like you saying, oh, don't do that, you might get hurt. Oh, don't go on that, you might get sick. Let me check your temperature again. And constantly asking if they're feeling sick. All of these things truly, truly, your kids notice, and they they even notice without noticing their their nervous system and their subconscious mind just takes it on. They catch the anxiety from parents emotionally. Studies have shown that during COVID that when the parents had more fear about illness, the more the kids in that family of those parents had about the illness as well. And if parents weren't as worried or stressed out, then the kids weren't as worried or stressed out. Your health anxiety absolutely is affecting your kids, and it's ruining their life. It is ruining their life, my friend, and it's time to do something about it. Again, I'm not saying that this is your fault. I'm not saying that you're broken. That's why you're here. That's why you're listening. But I want you to understand how critical this is, how critical of a situation this is that you actually take action and you actually do something about this.