I’m so afraid of getting cancer. I’ve been to the doctor so many times for false alarms, it’s starting to cost so much money. I hate this subtype of OCD. I’m hyper-focused on small pains in my body and I always make them out to be much more than they are. Literally the past few days I had a pressure headache and I was convinced it was brain cancer. This is ridiculous. I don’t know where to begin with ERP for this type of OCD. My compulsion is going to the doctor and that’s becoming a very expensive compulsion... My other compulsion is googling my symptoms, which always freaks me out cause every symptom means “cancer” according to google.

I know a few of you saw my posts about my ERP and the googling urges. That didn’t end up going well. My therapist actually decided we needed to halt it for now. The thing is it’s almost like I learned googling is harmless from those few exercises and my brain keeps generating more things to google. Normally I would just spiral and be done but now I can barely hold back from searching for long. I eventually give in. I’m horrified because it feels like I want to find illegal content. I swear on everything I am, I don’t want to find anything even close to it. I’m freaking out because I don’t understand what’s happening. I keep compulsively searching/testing/checking or idk. I keep remembering details and I feel like I need to google again to be sure of something. I feel absolutely insane can someone please help me??? I’m petrified I’m going to get in trouble.

I've never been diagnosed with OCD, but have thought for a long time that I do have it. I've tried to bring it up in therapy but have been shot down as "OCD tendencies". Luckily I'm with a new therapist and am planning to bring it up again. Especially after reading a lot of your posts, I'm really resonating with them. Especially my anxieties and obsessions with my health. God forbid I feel any weird pain or ache, I instantly think I'm dying. Sometimes I get a weird pain in my head and think it's a stroke or aneurysm. Ill go as far as the perform the stroke FAST test. This happens multiple times a day. I also have HUGE anxieties about death and my mortality. If I think about it too much, I get this deep cold pit in my stomach and spiral. Even talking about it causes me sooo much distress. I'm just worried I'll be dismissed or told I'm just self diagnosing because I related to a post online. But if any of this sounds accurate, please let me know. I'd love to be reassured of my obsessions rather than just dismissed as being anxious.

It started when I became an adult, and started receiving my mental health diagnosis. I hyper fixated on each and every action I did and how it could be related to my diagnosis’s. It then lead to fixation to my physical health — making appointments and seeing every specialist I can to rule out every possibility. I currently have been suffering with obstructive sleep. I woke up the past few days with severe pain from the lack of sleep whilst believing I was oversleeping. Luckily my fit watch tracks my sleep cycle and it turns out I am not receiving any sleep. I had an extreme panic attack — bursting into tears on the phone with my mom wondering what this case might be. She told me it could be sleep apnea and that a simple sleep study could figure this out. However, knowing my family history I made appointments to every specialist I can to make sure it is nothing serious. The unknown of health can be scary to me. Watching my mother suffer with her physical health chronically since I was a child lead me to be very conscious and aware of how my body is functioning. This morning was one of the worst moments of physical pain. I should just take one step at a time with the sleep doctor instead of taking measures to see every specialist that could pertain with this issue. However, that is very hard to me. I don’t want to ever wake up in the pain I was this morning. Does anyone else suffer with health-related OCD? And if so, how do you find a sense of ease during moments like I expressed?