Today I want to talk to you about something that so many people have written to me about and something that is often associated with being raised in a dysfunctional home,
But we oftentimes don't connect it to.
It's health anxiety.
If you've ever felt a strange sensation in your body and within seconds your mind spiraled into the worst possible scenario,
This session is for you.
So what is health anxiety really?
Health anxiety is when the mind becomes preoccupied with the fear that something is seriously wrong with your body.
Perhaps you feel a headache or a flutter in your chest or a little twinge in your side.
And instead of your brain registering it as a normal human sensation,
Your brain sounds the alarm.
And this is not your fault.
But once that alarm goes off,
The checking in begins.
Scanning your body,
You're Googling at like two o'clock in the morning and you ask your partner,
Your friend,
Your doctor,
Is this normal?
Then you say things like,
Are you sure?
Are you really sure that this is normal?
And here is the trap.
Every time you check or seek reassurance,
You get a little hit of relief.
You start to feel,
OK,
I'm fine and I've been reassured.
But that relief is temporary.
Within hours,
Sometimes minutes,
The doubt,
It starts to creep back in.
And now it's even louder.
The sensations are even scarier.
You're checking to see if you still have a symptom,
There's a brief relief and then you're right back at it again.
Now that loop is the engine of health anxiety and the more you feed it,
The stronger it gets.
Now here is what I really want you to understand and I hope that you're open to just thinking about.
The problem is usually not your body.
The problem is a threat detection system that is doing its job.
On overtime.
It's just doing its job too well.
Now,
Research suggests that an anxious brain treats uncertainty itself as a threat.
Uncertainty.
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined threat.
So when your mind says,
What if something is wrong?
Your body responds as if something is really wrong.
Then your heart reacts,
Your muscles tense,
Your stomach begins to churn,
You can even start to feel dizzy.
And then this is really the cruel part of it.
You notice those sensations and you say,
See,
There really is something wrong with me.
Anxiety about the body creates sensations in the body.
And the loop feeds itself.
It is so cruel.
It is so mean.
And if we don't see it,
We can't come out of this loop.
And if you grew up in a home where you did not feel safe,
Where you learned to stay hypervigilant,
Where you had to scan the room to feel safe.
Where you read the moods of the adults around you,
Your nervous system was trained to look for danger.
It's in that state constantly,
Constantly.
And for many of us,
That scanning never turned off.
It just turned inward.
The child who once monitored a parent's face for signs of trouble becomes the adult who now monitors their own heartbeat for signs of disease or every tingling feeling for a sign of some awful disease.
And that's not a weakness,
That's an adaptation.
It means that your brain learned to survive by never letting its guard down.
So how do we begin to shift this if we even think like maybe this is health anxiety?
Here is the one key idea that I think is really going to help and I want you to take it away with you today.
The goal is not to feel certain.
The goal is to learn to tolerate uncertainty.
Health anxiety keeps making you a promise.
It whispers that if you just check one more time,
If you do one more Google search,
If someone,
Just one more person reassures you,
Then you will finally feel settled down.
But it never delivers because Total certainty about the body is not possible for any human being on this planet.
Peace does not come from finally proving that you're safe and a thousand percent healthy.
Peace comes from learning to sit with not knowing.
It comes from being able to handle the uncertainty.
If you've had your test done and you know that you're okay and you're starting to feel like maybe this is health anxiety,
Then we really want to help you understand at a conscious level,
Above the veil,
That the problem isn't the body.
The problem is that your nervous system doesn't know how to deal with uncertainty.
So that means we have to clarify the real goal,
Which is teaching our nervous system to better handle uncertainty.
So the next time you feel that urge to rise up at 2 o'clock in the morning to Google,
I get you because I've been there,
To scan the internet,
To ask for reassurance,
I want you to pause a minute and take a breath and say to yourself.
This could be just my anxiety.
Looking or asking for certainty.
This is not my body asking for help.
This is just my nervous system looking for certainty.
Now,
Here's the self-mastery part.
Then you sit with the urge.
You let the urge be there without acting on it.
It's going to feel uncomfortable and like you're crawling out of your skin and that's okay.
Discomfort is not danger.
I want you to know what the beautiful part is.
Research suggests that every time you allow that urge to rise and fall without feeding it,
You are retraining your nervous system.
You're teaching in a new lesson.
You're showing your brain that the sensation is tolerable and the alarm was false.
So little by little.
Doesn't happen overnight,
But practice,
Practice,
Practice.
Little by little,
The alarm starts to quiet down.
The good news is,
Actually the great news is,
You're not broken.
You're a human being with a nervous system that learned to protect you the best way it knew how,
By scanning,
By seeking certainty.
Why?
Because everything was unpredictable for you.
And now,
As a conscious adult,
You get to teach your nervous system and your brain something new.
You get to become the calm,
Steady presence your inner child never had.
Dear one,
It was never you.
It was just your programming.
And programming can always be rewritten.
Until next time,
I so hope that this session has been helpful.
