What Health Anxiety Is, And What It Isn’t

Health Anxiety Is To Be Understood Before Being Cured.

It warms my heart when a #morethananxiety warrior comments on one of my podcast episodes or YouTube videos saying how they ‘feel less’ alone after listening or watching. Health anxiety is a lonely world yes, many don’t understand it or even have the capability to walk you towards freedom, but that shouldn’t break your spirits.

Health anxiety is a lack of trust in one’s body, a ‘falling out’ with source energy or God, and a deep need for certainty in an un-certain world

Health anxiety is a need that isn’t being met. A need for answers in the form of safety within a person’s mind and body. A need for consistency in an inconsistent world which troubles a sufferer deeply. Health anxiety isn’t just a fear of dying or just a misinterpreting of bodily sensations of anxiety, it’s deep seated guilt, self punishment, and feelings of rejection that began at an early age.

Health anxiety is a result/effect, so what’s the cause?

If the cause was as simple as fear of what a bodily sensation of anxiety means, wouldn’t a sufferer find themselves in a more neutral or pleasant emotional state when the sensations disappears? They don’t, they search for where it may have gone, what the next external situation might be that could be cause for concern, or how others never will truly understand them.

It’s literally a connection, a deep seated need for some kind of suffering. Whether that suffering comes in the form of mentally cycling around potentially catastrophic ideas, emotionally turbulent negative states, physical pains and discomforts, or even spiritual misunderstanding, the sufferer needs suffering to feel safe.

This is where the health anxiety roller-coaster gets confusing, because these attachments I’ve mentioned don’t fully get accepted by the health anxiety sufferer. It’s much easier to live in an emotionally re-active world, succumbing to a feeling, acting within the consistencies of past behaviours, than to analyze ourselves and how we got here.

Anxiety Disorders Affect 25% Of Children Today, Which Shows That Our Best Efforts To Cope With Our Own Anxieties As Parents Isn’t Working

You’re doing the best you can, I know. It’s just that we’re trying to tackle health anxiety (and anxiety in general) from a surface level rather than a subconscious level. You are the programs you’ve adopted from your own childhood, and those programs are wrong. They came from confused authority figures that had little idea on how to raise you, and how to respond to your most basic human needs such as love, respect, understanding, etc.

Back to health anxiety though…

Health anxiety is a group of lessons that need to be learned. Until those lessons are learned you’ll stay within the current emotional and physiological states you’re currently in. What are those lessons you ask, here you go:

Lesson #1) Embrace an uncertain future

Hardly anything is under our control. We’re spiritual beings having rented this physical body for a period of time, before embarking on a new journey in consciousness. Use that as fuel to start living now rather than wasting your time trying to protect yourself constantly.

Lesson #2) Body sensations are felt during excited moments as well as neutral or fearful ones

Therefore you have the ability to re-perceive them based on your responses and actions when in a pleasant state.

Lesson #3) No one cares about how bad your anxiety is

It was a tough one for me to swallow during my health anxiety struggles (this video explains), but the sooner you get this the sooner you can start speaking about your progress and new understandings around what health anxiety is.

Lesson #4) Just because you were neglected as a child, doesn’t mean you have to neglect yourself or feel neglected today

Every mental, emotional, physical challenge comes with fulfilling a need, so what need is your health anxiety providing you?

Final Lesson) Master what you have control over while putting your faith into a higher power for what you don’t

This isn’t a push to start becoming a spiritual or religious fanatic, it means start building a relationship with source energy, and start embracing a life of learning and understanding.

You have control over what thoughts you attach yourself to, what emotional state you want to experience, your actions, habits, verbal and bodily communication. So start seeing your current challenges from a brand new angle, knowing that they are a means to an end, and that end is a life of total fulfillment and self mastery.

I hope this post helped you understand more deeply what health anxiety is. Comment below and share your thoughts.