My BEST advice as a health anxiety therapist

Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel. My name is Cheryl, I'm a health anxiety therapist and advocate and I'm going to be sharing with you in this video what you need to start doing if you want to recover from health anxiety. So when it comes to health anxiety what we are doing is we are addicted to problem solving right? This is why health anxiety is very much like with OCD in the same way that we develop loads of obsessive thoughts and compulsions and the more we do the compulsions the bigger the problem that we create for ourselves. So what we tend to do if we think of just like a classic stereotypical health anxiety example, somebody's got a headache right? So they're being triggered by that headache, it's making them worry, they start ruminating, they get lots of catastrophic thoughts, they're thinking very tunnel visioned and they're thinking in this all or nothing kind of way. So because they're thinking and feeling that way they want to problem solve, they don't want to sit with this uncomfortable feeling, they want to do something about it. So the person with health anxiety is very likely going to try and go onto google to try and convince themselves that they're okay to try and get to the bottom of this problem or they might seek loads of reassurance, they may book loads of doctor's appointments and when it comes to booking doctor's appointments with health anxiety sufferers, sometimes the reassurance isn't enough. We go back again and again and again and then we need to see a specialist, then we want to scan, we want an MRI, we want a CT scan. So it's this never never-ending cycle of problem solving. Now here's the thing, the more we problem solve the further away from the solution that we go and I mean that quite literally, the more we problem solve with health anxiety the further away we go because we're forgetting about the elephant in the room, the real actual genuine issue which 99% of the time is anxiety but we're looking for every other answer bar anxiety. We sort of ignore anxiety and we continue to problem solve something yet we're ignoring the real answer. So I remember back when I was having loads of weird neurological symptoms and I could not accept that it was anxiety, I was like there's no way that anxiety is doing this to me. I was having left-sided tingling on my face, numbness, weird crawling patches on my skull, myoclonic jerks, twitches, deja vu, dream flashbacks, depersonalization, like I could go on and on and on. So I had these strange neurological symptoms and I went on, I embarked on this like five-month journey of problem solving. I went to go and see the doctor, I went to go and see the first neurologist, the second neurologist, the third, then I wanted scans, I had loads of scans then. I travelled somewhere far away to go and see a different kind of doctor then I was looking at like maybe this is an autoimmune disease, maybe I need to see an endocrinologist, maybe I need to see a functional sort of doctor, maybe this is fibromyalgia. So I'm doing all of this stuff, I'm trying to problem solve, I'm researching all the time, trying to find the answer, yet the answer was anxiety and by doing all of that problem solving all I was doing was making my anxiety worse. So I'm aggravating the very thing that it is, it's like if somebody had a broken leg right and they're complaining that it hurts but they're still standing on it, it's that exact same thing that we do with health anxiety. We're like assaulting our nervous system time and time and time again because we cannot accept that the outcome, the actual real cause of all of these things that we're feeling is our anxiety. So we need to cut out the problem solving, that is the missing link, that is the thing that is really going to help us way more than anything else. I mean I work with clients like from all over the world, I see about 40 people per week and don't get me wrong that there's loads of tools that I do with them and breathing exercises and we look into acceptance and diffusion techniques and all of that stuff but the biggest thing of all and it's just something that I reiterate to everybody, the biggest thing of all is we learn to sit and wait and deal with the uncertainty and it's really hard. I'm not saying it like it's an easy thing, it's definitely not but if we continue to problem solve, we drive ourselves insane because we're so desperately looking for an answer that we're never going to find because the answer is anxiety and so a lot of us we have to suffer for months, years, even decades until eventually one day something clicks and we're like do you know what this is anxiety, it's been anxiety the entire time right and we all get to that stage in a different you know the time frame is different for everybody. For me it took a couple of years for me to reach that realisation of like ah there's the elephant in the room, that's what all of this is, the anxiety, that's what I need to prioritise now, that's what I need to work on, I don't need to keep seeing all of these doctors and problem solving because the issue is here from within, it's my anxiety. So it is a really difficult concept don't get me wrong like I said just then it's not easy and for the longest time I could not accept, I couldn't entertain the idea that I was possibly doing this to myself, that my body was really giving me these symptoms that were that intense so I was like there's no way that this could possibly be anxiety, it has to be something more, it has to be a disease, it has to be something more sinister right but this is the missing link, you have to work on your impulsive need to problem solve, it's the only way out of health anxiety is working on that, getting better at doing that and you know healing's never going to be linear, it's very up and down but you do have to consistently work on that in the same way with OCD, you have to stop doing your compulsions, if you look at OCD and you look at all of the various types of dedicated therapies for it, they have their own methods and tools and techniques but you know what it is deep down, what the therapist is trying to tell the client is just stop, just stop doing your compulsions right and we can apply all of these fancy techniques which is yeah I mean I do that in my own therapy and with my clients but if you want the simplified version it's this, it's working on this need to problem solve, challenging yourself, trying not to right and it's hard, it's a hard thing to do because when there's something going on in our body and we believe that there's something wrong with us, we have this huge urge, this sense of responsibility to save ourselves, to get the answer, to figure it out because human beings are very good problem solvers right and that's why we all live in houses and we've got electricity and I can record my message and send it out to the world so we've always been good as problem solvers and that hasn't stopped but in this instance we don't need to problem solve every strange sensation, every stomachache, every headache, every tingle, every twitch because we'll just go on this way forever, it never ends, the body's always doing something like always like today, like I'm bloated for no apparent reason like the body's always doing something, there's always something to problem solve so we've got to break our needs to do that you know. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up if you did and don't forget to follow me on Instagram, Instagram is the place where I'm posting daily health anxiety content every single day so there's something new every day that I am posting and not to mention I'm also advertising workshops on there, group therapy session dates, all of that. If you want to work with me and you want therapy with me, click the link in the description of this video and you'll be able to fill out a short form and either myself or just my PA will get back to you. So take care guys, remember to work hard on this problem solving and I'll see you soon, bye!