Focusing on your sensations too much
In my own experience, when you focus on symptoms or have been focusing on them recently, that only brings on more symptoms. It’s basic and even simplistic, but we do it anyway. Even though I overcame my health anxiety many years ago, it can still happen with no anxiety, just by thinking about symptoms. I don’t care any more. The only reason it happens at all is I go online and talk about it hoping somebody some where will be helped . When you are anxious, it’s only natural to want to focus on a sensation wanting to make it go away. You think you are accomplishing something by watching out for it. It’s hard to avoid sometimes and there’s no way around it, but the fact is, that trylng to hold it back, has the exact opposite effect. When you do struggle with it, you are keeping engaged with it and showing your body that you are worried. It just shoots back more nervous juices to you. It becomes a vicious cycle and then over the coming days and weeks it acquires a life of its own and you keep gettlng symptoms no matter what you do. You made it automatic. You aren’t necessarily thinking about it, but it’s fresh in your recent unconscious memory enough for it to keep it alive. It’s rolling around in the back of your mind as a pressing issue to you. Trylng to figure it out, worrying about it, asking online what your symptoms mean and who else gets those same symptoms, cursing your symptoms is giving into it. It precisely that concern that keeps the symtpoms coming. You don’t settle it down, it settles itself down once you’ve left it alone long enough. You might not be able to leave it alone right away. Your concern with your symptoms more than anything else is by definition your anxiety. It‘s quite a dilemma. My solution was to change my view of it when I could and at first that was when it wasn’t happening. Since it was hard for me not to feel anxious when my body was anxious, I changed what I was telling myself the rest of the time from, “that was terrible, I’m so sick of it, I want to find a way for it to stop forever” —-all kinds negative things that told my mind that I had this anxiety problem— to, “you see, you were wrong, nothing bad happened to you , if it happens again, remember, you can take it” Those anxiety symptoms came back, I expected it and accepted it as Barry McDonaugh of the DARE project says. I couldn’t help but be anxious, but the fact that I had been okay with being anxious before even to the point of throwing myself into challenging situations , made the severity and frequency gradually decrease. In other words, I changed my general overall opinion about it first, even though I didn’t FEEL okay with it when it was actually happening and that gradually reduced it to a once in a blue moon thing. My seeing it as no big deal when it wasn’t happening made it easier when it was. Another thing I did was to learn not to linger noticing a symptom the second they started. I would tell myself that it was a response to the concern I was showing it and learned not to show it that initial concern before they got out of hand by immediately putting it out of my mind. Instead of trylng to calm down wanting it to go away and watching it like a hawk, I would recognize that I was causing it, accept that it wasn’t going to go away at that moment, and not struggle trying to be okay. In my own mind I thought of it as going neutral. Not trying to think about it or not think about it. I couldn’t help being aware of its presence somewhat, but I didn’t engage in any particular thought about it. My mind wouid want to go back to the topic of anxiety, and wouid have to nudge it away. À minute would pass and something would occur to me about the topic of anxiety and I would have to nudge it away CALMLY again. I didn’t go out of my way to do anything about making it go away or not go away. The minute you try too hard, you get worked up about it and that IS your anxiety. Your other sources of anxiety in your life are secondary when your biggest concern is health anxiety and bodily sensations. Unless there is a good reason, don’t make it a medical issue or a psychoanalytic issue, Take care of any such issues, but treat them as a separate topic. Don’t make alleviating those other stressors a condition to your overcoming a problem that is mainly psychosomatic… if that’s the case.