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Health Anxiety
Cognitive Therapy Treatment For Health Anxiety
Health Anxiety refers to having a preoccupation with a fear of having a serious illness or disease, despite medical investigations that show the person is healthy. A person with Health Anxiety will often misinterpret normal physical sensations as a sign of serious illness. For example, flu-like symptoms may be misinterpreted as a sign of HIV and tests that indicate the person is HIV negative may be discounted as unreliable.
Health Anxiety can be treated effectively with CBT therapy, Edinburgh. The approach used is very similar to that used for treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This involves helping the person with the anxiety to realise that the current way they are dealing with the worrying health thought and feeling, actually keeps the problem going. Factors that keep the problem going include: trying to block the thought, giving health thoughts over -importance such as "It means I will never get better", constantly seeking reassurance from others, reassuring self with certain phrases or thoughts, looking on the Internet, seeing numerous health practitioners, stopping life activities and giving the thought lots of attention.
CBT therapy, Edinburgh can help you to accept that in fact your problem is not that you have a health problem and must constantly check whether this problem is real, but that your problem is that you worry too much about your health and that this is what's keeping your anxiety going.
A CBT therapist, Edinburgh, will help you become habituated to your anxious health thoughts, which basically means learning to accept your thoughts, let them come and welcome them in. They are just thoughts, not the truth or a prediction of your future. Accepting and letting our thoughts in, will trigger more anxiety at first but if you practice this regularly then your anxiety will naturally fade. This is called exposure therapy and must be done alongside a technique called response prevention, which means not seeking reassurance or trying to make the thoughts feel better!
Practising a form of meditation called mindfulness can help you develop the tools to accept unpleasant thoughts and feelings without trying to change them. This acceptance will mean that you will be able to overcome your problem. It's the worry that is keeping it going.
How to cope with missing a funeral thanks to anxiety?
I was waiting in my emergency room for the doctor and I looked backed at the heart monitor and it was 119 and soon after it went up to 169 and I had panic and the doctors and nurses rushed in and I swear I thought I was really seconds away from death and it was at 173 and one of the nurses looked panicked which scared me and they gave me adeniose in the iv and held my arm up and that was the worste feeling I have ever felt. It stopped my heart stopped I guess for a second or two and the rate shot back up then they gave metroprlol the beta blocker I was taking and it started to come down.
I guess I'm a hypacondriac and the funeral is in a rual dessert area, he died after suffering brain damage because it took an hour just for rescue to get their and get him to the hospital. I have heart palpatations and I have been to the ER 3 times this year because they scared me and only sinus tachcardia was found all test were normal and all I need now is a holter and maybe a stress test. I take a beta blocker to help but I fear being out in the middle of nowere with no help in sight especially what happend to my uncle. I want to go but I'm fearful of something happening to me or my heart and I won't get help in time. I live in the city near a hospital. All this week I have had trouble sleeping and having dreams about the funneral and things I worry about and fear. I really think I have a heart problem despite my age and normal test. Chronic chest pain with no answer but the symptoms I have point to scary emergencies, I still wake up everyday, and I still have yet to be diagnoised with anything bad. This health anxiety I think steems from the death of closed family memebers years ago in which I kind of kept inside so I guess its grief and pain and anxiety causing symptoms. So maybe not symptoms causing anxiety but anxiety causing symptoms. I fear bad things will happen to me and I leave the doctor or er with no answer and just baffled thinking they missed something or I have a
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Treating Hypochondria and High Anxiety with medication?
I suffer from post partum panic attacks which in turn stemmed tons of health anxiety and hypochondria for me. My life has been a living nightmare running off to ER after ER. I have a 7 year old, 4yr, and 7 month old who need their Mommy back! I took Prozac for 1 month which made me sick..very. Switched to Paxil 2 days after that and started to feel calm....but TOO calm. I found myself zoned out for almost 2 months. I got off of that after hearing everyone talking about Celexa. I tried that. It has been 3 weeks and my anxiety is in overdrive! Definitely not going to work. My question now.......what is the best medicine to control my type of depression???? My Mom takes Cymbalta and said it has worked wonders as it also has a pain management that could help my degenerative disc disease which I have had since a child. Any other options? Anyone found that one miracle pill that helps with calming anxious ocd type thoughts??? I am also starting therapy this week.
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Health Anxiety & Hypochondria
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