How anxiety made me think I had every malignant disease in the world.

Heart palpitations? Must be an onset of a heart attack. Shortness of breath? Must be congestive heart disease. Lightheadedness? Has to be a stroke. You think it, I've already thought it. From schizophrenia to AIDs...I've literally thought I've had every single disease out there. Turned out to be nothing. Just anxiety. The only difference was that I spent thousands of dollars in unnecessary medical tests, lab work, and ER trips to be told the same thing over and over.

But how does Anxiety play into this? How do your symptoms, as exaggerated as they are, end up being nothing when you go to the doctor?

I suffered with this specifically when I dealt with health anxiety. Now that I've recovered over the last several years, I never google symptoms and convince myself I have a deadly ailment. Nor do I constantly search deal with my exaggerated symptoms.

Let me explain:

Many people suffering from anxiety understand that they are going through a flight-or-fight response. Many people even understand that their symptoms are a result of anxiety. But many people don't recognize that anxiety also leads to exaggerated, scary and irrational thoughts.

They don't realize that one of the survival mechanisms of anxiety is to think of the worse possible outcome. THAT IS the role of the fight or flight response.

These thoughts about "what if's.." cross people's minds who don't suffer from anxiety as well. However, because people suffering from anxiety are constantly in this fight-or-flight response, their minds shift from "what if" to absolute certainty that they are abnormal or diseased. AND WHY WOULDN'T THEY? If your body felt your life was in danger, and you deal with a bad situation, doesn't it make sense for you to think of the worse case scenario first in order to eliminate it?

If you dealt with this, there a couple of things you can do to really combat this. These are things really helped me:

1. Recognize that with anxiety comes exaggerated thoughts. So while dealing with anxiety, or when anxious, take all your thoughts with a grain of salt. As real as they feel to you, as convinced as you are, recognize that this is your mind trying to escape and avoid your anxious symptoms.
2. Stay away from the internet. Most people don't realize how google works. Specifically search engine optimization and the fact that google is set up in a way where if you type "headache" it will display the worse possible outcome first. It's just part of the algorithm. In my opinion, the worst time to have anxiety is now a-days with the internet, because all it takes is a google search to catastrophize a head ache to a brain tumor. BEST THING TO DO IS STAY AWAY FROM IT.
3. Practice mindfulness. This comes back to the first point. Recognize your thoughts as just thoughts. And not necessarily something you have to act on. What really helped was thinking "these thoughts are just another outlet for anxiety to release my body" and I continued on my day. This was HUGE for me.

Lastly, say what you want about the medical community...but it's amazing at one thing. Diagnosing. If you have a serious condition, ailment, disease, the medical community has amazing techniques, procedures, labs, and tests it can perform to get to the root cause quickly. If you've felt like you've been neglected by your doctor...recognize that they are looking for something anatomically wrong with you. Once they haven't found it, they give it a default diagnosis of "anxiety." If you've been cleared by your doctor, have faith that they've ruled out anything serious!

Hope this helps!