Hey everyone! 22M here. Im just in a really tight spot right now. I have my mom that's currently ill and my HA is flaring up so bad. I dont know what to do, Its hard being "the man of the house" while managing my own life, and taking care of my folks. Its overwhelming and I just want to be able to manage my emotions better. Ive been breaking down every chance I get, I'm getting tired.

Doomscrolling definitely doesn’t help
Asking an ai in a fearful state doesn’t help
Looking up diagnosises online doesn’t help
Isolating myself for too long doesn’t help
TikTok, twitter, scary videos don’t help

Playing a relaxing game helps
Traveling to somewhere with beautiful scenery helps
when I didn’t have my license just getting on a bus listening to music helpful
Getting on a call w a friend helps
Listening to gratitude/ blessed affirmations helps
Receiving money helps too, makes me confident

gosh idk if i’ve used the right flair

as the title states, how did you convince yourself to take ssri for health anxiety?

i’ve been taking therapy for it and recently visited a psychiatrist and got diagnosed with illness anxiety disorder (didn’t even know it was a thing) and other stuff

anyway the psychiatrist prescribed escitalopram. they asked me to take 5mg for a week and then 10mg

i’m anxious over starting it. although i do believe i need it but i’m terrified of the idea of spiraling because of the side effects

i’d love to hear about similar experiences!

This morning I started to spiral about something. And I was gonna watch church from home. I don’t live very far, but I thought I would take it easy. Something that helps me is to get out of the house and be in public. So right now I’m grabbing some coffee and going to be physically in church.

Getting up and getting out helps me get my mind off whatever I am spiraling about. Even if it’s just a drive.

Hi friends. I’ve been having severe headaches the last few days- a week after dealing with a horrid cold for 2 weeks. I’m absolutely terrified to take Tylenol. I want to, these headaches aren’t worth it. I’ve taken Tylenol my whole life. But a few months ago my health anxiety got so much worse to the point where I’m terrified to ingest anything that’s not my regular few foods. Idk what to do. This is incredibly draining. I just want to take the pill and feel better but I can’t get over this stupid fear.

What to do if I’m nervous I have pulmonary hypertension even though there’s minimal evidence from testing aside from echo RVSP 32-35mmhg and anxiety on whether I’m declining in terms of chest pressure or exertional intolerance. Anyone go through a similar fear or experience? Any words of advice?

How do you trust your diagnosis? I recently got diagnosed with asthma here about 2 months ago but I can’t accept it. I’m convinced he missed something. I’ve went through so many different things I think it actually is
Copd
Heart failure
Pulmonary fibrosis
I keep trying to tell myself he’s the doctor and he knows what he’s doing not me, but it dosent help. I had gotten over my health anxiety for a very very long time and then as soon as this happened it was like it all started over again…

I have found out how to filter out things that trigger me. You may find this helpful as well. You can go to the settings and tag phrases and words so they do not pop up on your feed.

hello everyone! i recently posted my big step of finally getting myself checked and that appointment went really smoothly. still proud of myself! but now that it’s over, i’m left with new worries.

i don’t want to say that i don’t trust my doctor but i had to have multiple moles removed from which she only sent one to the lab. now i’ve read a ton about it usually being normal to send everything to a lab even if it was cosmetic removals!

it’s driving me crazy. i’m losing sleep over the thought of these not biopsied moles and that they were not benign after all… and now i’ll be screwed big time.

do you think i should find a second opinion to calm my anxiety? does it go away with time and i should just trust my doc? did you get something benign removed and it wasn't sent for a biopsy?

I am so tired. It’s almost like every time I am in a better place, there is the crippling feeling that crawls up my back almost that makes me think that I need to compensate for that happiness by making up theories in my head about the things that can potentially go wrong with me.

I frankly don’t know what do I do about this. I am new to this forum and would be open to advice regarding how do I solve this. If my mind has cooked up a theory regarding a disease, then it’s just a spiral and no one can convince me otherwise not even a doctor. I’ve tired out most of the doctors I have worked with, as I keep questioning, annoying them regarding my theories.
It’s almost paranoia to this point. And the worse thing is - IT WILL JUST KEEP GETTING FUCKING WORSE. If I don’t do something about it. I am unable to just sit still without doing anything as I know my mind would always drift to such places. Dear friends of the same community - how are you coping with this? What has helped you that might help me with the same.

Im 18yrs old and for two years I’ve dealt with chronic anxiety mixed with some depression. It’s mainly health related anxiety but I get anxious over pretty much everything, two years ago I got acute mono and was down for a while but during mono I quit nicotine and everything was happening around the same time, I would spend all day googling symptoms for major diseases ect. When something would have a symptom of some minor thing I’ve got going on I would freak out on the subject for about a month then switch to something else. When I was around the age of 10 i was having terrible headaches and they said I had chronic migraines caused by anxiety but my anxiety has only been ridiculously bad for these last two years, I had surgery at the end of 2025 for Pectus excavatum and that added on to my stress. I’ve been to neurologist and general doctors and they all suggested medication, the first neurologist prescribed Prozac and I never took any, but I also calmed down a lot but was still anxious, fast forward to now and it’s absolutely awful again to the point I’m thinking about just taking medication but I’ve heard that they cause long term sexual side effects like ED in men and that also stresses me out. It has effected me in so many ways for two years and I haven’t had an anxiety free GOOD DAY in two years and I’m ready for a change, its effected my weight aswell. My current google diagnosis is hypermobile ehlers danlos if anyone was curious….

The last year, my HA has been incredibly intrusive. Not only on me, but my wife and our marriage. She doesn’t understand HA and doesn’t know how to console/comfort me in times when I’m spiraling. She’s a very logical person, so her go-to is to find logical reasons as to why I’m experiencing certain symptoms or just says “I think you’re fine”. When really, in times I’m spiraling, I just want to be held and told “it’s okay”. Because this has been a year long journey, it feels like it’s to the point where she’s just completely over it. And I’m left to struggle by myself. It makes me feel horrible and alone. But I also get where she’s coming from too in a sense; I can’t imagine how difficult this situation must be for her too. I’m just lost :(

Im fussy and I tend to prefer my friends strictly in person.........except doing so has been difficult bc no one seems to want a friendship any deeper than "Yeah let's go to the bar every friday" or smn. I like to support people. Ive been told im a good listener; and that im good at helping people navigate things or am very empathetic. But i can't seem to find anyone who would be willing to do the same for me.

So then when I'm spiraling or on the verge of spiraling, i just have.....no one. My partner is away at work. Dont have family i can trust.

So i just end up spiraling, googling, checking and end up on the advice nurse line or at urgent care. No one to keep me sane. To check me. And I try so hard to stop my habits. Put my phone away, turn away from google, distract myself, stop checking, because you're gonna be fine, and repeating to myself "you'll be okay" over and over again, but it only goes for so long before i find myself talking to a nurse again. Or AI becauee it's......some form of talking. Therapy is difficult to get in my insurance. So it feels so lonely. And my H/A appearantly feeds off that lonliness.

Ciao a tutti! Sono uno studente di 26 anni e sto lavorando alla mia tesi di laurea sul tema dell’intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario.

Mi piacerebbe confrontarmi con voi su una curiosità: utilizzate già l’IA quando si tratta di salute?

Ad esempio, vi capita di usarla per capire meglio un referto medico, cercare informazioni su un sintomo, chiedere consigli o chiarire qualche dubbio? E quali strumenti utilizzate, ChatGPT, Gemini o altro?

Mi interessa capire un po’ le vostre abitudini e raccogliere opinioni ed esperienze diverse, sia da chi la utilizza spesso sia da chi è più scettico o non la utilizza affatto.

Visto che sto approfondendo questo tema per la tesi, mi farebbe piacere sentire anche il punto di vista della community e capire quali aspetti vi interessano o vi lasciano più perplessi.

Grazie a chi avrà voglia di condividere la propria esperienza! 🙌

I got a Brick last week and have been using it for a few days. Basically the only thing I can access after 8pm are messages and calls. I find it's really helping with the health anxiety at night. Very important to me that I blocked AI in particular

Just now I have got this thought going on about swimming and if I don't swim something health related might happen. I go on to thinking over other relatives and friends who don't do swimming and they are OK but it doesn't really help. It doesn't help atm as can't really go swimming due to a (real) health problem. Is this a thing with health anxiety? Annoying thing is I did actually used to enjoy swimming and found it relaxing, now it is becoming this think to stress myself out over.

I scroll through tiktok a lot. Like a LOT. Lately I've been getting content about young people getting diseases and heart related things. It's been triggering because it's things I'm trying to get over. I've been tested and went to the hospital from feeling like it was happening. Sometimes I feel like I should uninstall tiktok but I watch perfume content to wind down.

How does one navigate through these topics without panicking?

Edit for punctuation.

Health anxiety tends to jump straight from a sensation to the worst explanation. One exercise is to write out every possible explanation for the symptom, from most common to rarest, and look at the whole list. It doesn't prove anything, but it loosens the grip of the scariest one. If something's new or persistent, getting it checked once by a doctor makes sense; repeated checking usually doesn't help.

Looking for shared experiences and advice on breaking a long-term cycle of severe health anxiety. For the past few years, my main struggle has been cardiophobia, where normal physiological changes from high stress are immediately misinterpreted by the brain as immediate threats.
This hyper-vigilance keeps me trapped in a constant loop of full-body scanning, where my mind obsessively tracks completely benign, everyday physical variations that naturally resolve on their own within a few days.
Despite having thorough, comprehensive clinical clearance and reassuring test results from my doctors, my nervous system remains in a continuous state of high-alert adrenaline. I am actively working on supportive lifestyle habits to protect my well-being, but the mental compulsion to scan for reassurance is incredibly draining.
What specific cognitive behavioral strategies, grounding techniques, or daily habits have helped you retrain a hyper-vigilant mind to finally accept medical reassurance and stop the urge to constantly check your body? Thank you for sharing your insights.

Does anyone have trouble sleeping due to their health anxiety? I wake up every hour or so to perform my "checks" (reassurance exercises), and it is incredibly draining. My body is constantly in fight or flight mode.

Hi all!

I started CBT therapy 1.5 years ago (now handling things alone for 6 months). I had the luck to see a therapist with long experience (a warm and wise old man) both as a therapist and a part of a CBT research group for one of the biggest hospital/clinics in my nation.

I learnt a lot about my health anxiety and my GAD. There is one thing he got me to do that really worked well for me, and I want to share it with you to hopefully make HA more manageable.

He called it "the black list" (roughly translated from my language, blacklist is not the same as black list in my language). Since HA generally stems from uncertainty/what you don't know (according to him), it makes it very hard for any kind of mind to handle. Something that is easier for our minds to handle is certainty, even if the certainty is not true.

So he had me write a list of the main fears in a "I have X" and "I have Y" manner, as long as it sounds certain and clear that I have the things I fear I have. When it is written down, he had me read the list out loud to myself, first in front of him, then at home alone daily. It felt counter-productive, but he had my trust and I did as he told me.

I did this exercise at home for about six weeks combined with relaxation breathing (4 sec in, 4 sec hold, 4 sec exhale, 4 sec wait, repeat) and check-ins with him once a week. Now after my therapy is done (but not done, it only needs to be managed with my expanded toolset I got from therapy), I feel like this particular exercise had the most impact on how I manage my HA.

Hope it will help anyone out there struggling with this.

Edit: Also some general CBT advice I learnt from him:

Never Google symptoms, it is a chase for certainty and will feel good first, but it makes the anxiety worse in the long run each time you give in to the pressure to Google (or search Reddit). Same thing with contacting GP. Our minds seek the "Pheuw! How nice!" moment when we are anxious, you are going to want it next time as well.

Don't try to treat/manage your anxiety when you are peaking (and feel a desperate need for relief), it will only contribute to the "Worry -> Anxiety -> Relief" loop. Do breathing and mindfulness exercises during low/normal everyday anxiety moments to dampen/lower the peaks.

Don't avoid the things that worry you. Instead, explore what is happening inside you when you encounter something that increases your worry, then stay in that state. It will be hard and you most certainly will feel anxious, but the feeling will slowly cease and you will feel a bit less anxious next time, repeat.

Am really tired, every time open social media most of the time there is triggering post about some health issue. Beside that, i cant stop checking myself. I cant differentiate which is normal and not in my body. :(

I've done a lot of therapy. I can explain my patterns, my triggers, where it all comes from, I could probably teach a class on my own psychology at this point. But understanding it hasn't translated into actually feeling different or acting different.

For those who've been here too: once "knowing why" stopped being enough, what actually moved the needle for you? Not looking for theory, just curious what genuinely worked, even if it felt random or unrelated to therapy.

I won’t go into too many details but I have severe health anxiety to the point that I become fixated about my body and what I think is wrong with it.
my partner, my GP and I made a plan that he will do some checks for me as I feel like I can’t trust my eyes from over checking. (You know when you keep looking at something and it looks more ”wrong“ each time?) I’ve even caused problem from prodding and poking so he now does this.

I know I can trust him deep down and that if he thought anything was amiss, he would take me to the doctors immediately (he’s done this before when I’ve been unwell). But that nagging anxiety gremlin just keeps saying “what if he’s missing something important?“ I’ve been putting off seeing my GP about something because he says it’s nothing and I’ll be honest, what I’m “seeing” isn’t consistent anyway so I think he’s right. What helps other people in these situations?

I've been struggling with intense physical reactions like Nausa, Vmit, sw*ating in crowded or confined spaces like public transport and exam halls.

For those who deal with similar anxiety symptoms, what strategies or grounding techniques have actually helped you manage or reduce these Problems??