OCD and health anxiety

I hear you. This is exactly what I’m going through now. For the past year I’ve been slowly building compulsions surrounding diet, exercise, sleep, and other wellbeing. I fear I will get cancer and leave my family behind, destroying them- so I do anything and everything to prevent that. My OCD considers any body sensation a sign of terminal illness. Any change that occurs in my body functions is a sign I’m dying. Then I key in on the sensation and check it so it doesn’t get worse. Then I doubt what I check. I check more. I google. I ask others for reassurance. I go see doctors who can’t find anything. I doubt the reassurance and doctors/tests almost immediately. I isolate in terror and my life is totally derailed. I don’t know what fun is. I don’t know how to enjoy life. OCD is a nightmare. Worst part is I rationally know what to do and what’s going on and how I want to live…but the OCD and What Ifs always take over. However, I started doing ERPs and am hopeful. I figure it can’t get much worse. OCD is so terrible.

This is exactly where I am right now as well. I have been powerless to stop the checking, googling, making doctors appointments, reassurance seeking. The past two months (starting august) have been horrifying. I recently started CBT (again), and I just had my first session today which caused a really bad spike in my anxiety. Here are some little pieces of advice from my therapists, loved ones, ocd groups, and reddit that have helped me the most. Our bodies are not perfect. They have gone through thousands of years of evolution and are incredibly resilient. They also grow and change and ache and crack and go through biological processes differently every day. Googling does much more harm than good. Anxiety causes you to be an inaccurate researcher, often looking for the worst case scenarios. Google has also changed and like much of 21st century technology, uses an AI search model. The top results are the most clicked on articles, usually with catchy doomsaying titles and clickbatey wording. Your symptoms have thousands of non life-threatening, simple, common, and more probable diagnostic possibilities. Cancer is NOT the baseline. The reason HA sufferers see so much media surrounding this topic is because that is what catches their attention and what they interact with. And these social media pages are made because these diagnoses are RARE. You don't see "my life without cancer" because that is the normal. Anxiety can cause so many terrible symptoms. Way more than you think. Even when you aren't thinking about it and "I have the anxiety BECAUSE I have the symptoms". This is wrong. We have anxiety all the time, its just a part of life for us. And that is okay. Anxiety can strike whenever and it can present as random tingling and pain in your head that convinces you to go to the ER. Especially for those with health anxiety. We're gonna be ok. Go to therapy, take your meds, stop googling, and train your thoughts every second of every day. Its not easy! It's really hard work and even exhausting sometimes. But we're gonna be ok!