Hello, first time posting here. Does anyone else suffer from bad health anxiety? Due to stress mine has gotten pretty bad recently and for a week now I've been REALLY scared of skin cancer to the point I have difficulties sleeping and I worry all the time. Logically, I've had my moles all my life and most of them are very small and round and I don't think the bigger "weirder" looking ones have changed at all (ofc, my brain keeps telling me to check them constantly and looking at them makes me imagine things and causes anxiety). I also keep imagining I'm finding "new" small ones all the time (probably just haven't noticed them before bc they are so tiny, light brown and I haven't been checking myself like this before..). This is just really frustrating for me and is causing distress. If anyone else has experienced similar worry, do you have any tips to calm down or force yourself to stop searching your skin for marks and spots? This new obsession is driving me crazy, and makes me feel really foolish, but the feelings are real and scary!

My mind keeps telling me “something is wrong with you. the weird feeling you are feeling or the weird tingling you are feeling or there is a weird mark on your body. Those are actually a severe symptom and by ignoring it you could die!” Or especially the constant, “go to the emergency room because this impending doom you are feeling, yeah that’s because your gonna die shortly” It doesn’t help whenever people say “well if something was wrong your body would tell you” because my mind keeps telling me that what I’m feeling is proof something is wrong and I need to get it checked out. That I actually am severely sick and that I need to get it checked out as soon as possible, that if I get one more test than I’ll be okay because it will prove nothing is wrong. How do I tell my mind that it’s just anxiety whenever my mind keeps telling me “well if you keep saying that you could be ignoring something more serious.” Or “the doctors are just brushing you off..something is wrong with you” It’s hard to live with my thoughts whenever they are constantly coming up with ways to challenge me and challenge logic. New reasons on why I need to get this checked out because “I’m just being ignored” or “no one is listening to me so I’ll just end up dying” My symptoms range from weak and shaking legs and body to dizzy and unbalanced and dissociated. Recently I’ve been getting this tingling feeling inside my head and on the back of my neck. And my temples have pressure on them. My body keeps coming up with new symptoms I need to worry about, whenever most of them are probably caused by severe and constant anxiety. So severe I can’t even leave the house because I constantly worry about whether this is severe and something will happen if I leave the house. I need immediate ways to start fixing this because it’s especially horrible whenever my period comes around and my anxiety/depression is already higher than usual. I’ve even started considering taking medication (Zoloft, 25mg) which is another trigger for me, I worry about the symptoms I might get from taking it. That’s how you know it’s gotten pretty bad whenever I’ve come to taking something that I’ve been actively avoiding. What are your thoughts? Do I take the medication? What are ways I can deal with my symptoms that seem so severe in the moment but pass by once I’m not anxious? What are ways my thoughts can ease and I stop taking every symptom as something serious, because at the end of the day my anxiety is most likely the reason I have these horrible symptoms. I’ve always been extremely healthy and everytime I go to the doctors they express how healthy I am with all the tests I’ve had.

This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.

Very brief mentions of pocd and nsfw jokes,id like this to be adults only . Repost bc i had to edit something Does anyone have experience with real event ocd attached to your online footprint etc? I keep checking old messages,trying to find old people i knew i used to talk to etc. To find out every problematic thing I did and if I've ever been unfollowed or blocked by anyone I used to be friends w online/atleast on good terms w. I am particularly concerned abt doing something bigoted,esp racist bc i have racism ocd,and doing something predatory bc of my pocd. I remember hanging around people who could use 'edgy' or offensive humour in my teens and i remember a lot of sex jokes and that i would join in on sex jokes sometimes . i dont remember details w the offensive humour as much,i feel like i didnt join in on it as much but i was definitely WAY passive abt things and prob let a lot of bad stuff slide i shouldnt have bc i didn't speak up it was wrong,I remember one friend in an online community would say slurs and horrible jokes when i was 16. I dont remember my response to it as much but i feel i didnt speak up abt it aside one time i found in the dms where he made a bad joke on a thing i shared for social justice. I cant stop going thru old messages and stuff or trying to find ppl from the past. I feel like if I don't check it now,that eventually it'll come to haunt me or that I'll stumble across it eventually. I worry what if someone messaged me on one of these apps I un-installed or on one of the accounts I don't have access to,confronting me abt all this stuff I did. I had an obsession w this back in 2020 and did check in depth on all my accounts,but now that it's been 4 years the obsession is back in full swing.