The Therapy Edit - On some brilliant tips for health anxiety

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

In this solo episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna offers a few therapeutic coping techniques for managing health anxiety.If you find Anna's grounding and calming words on this topic helpful, you may find her one hour video workshop on the topic helpful and you'll find it here. Anna also recommends her first book, Mind Over Mother, which offers lots of explanation and background on anxiety and why many of us experience it in motherhood. You can get your copy of the book here.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi everyone, or hi you, because it's your ears that I'm speaking to right in this moment. This is a solo episode of The Therapy Edit and today I am answering a question that was sent to me for the newsletter. And I just knew that this was going to be a question that resonated with so many more people than my newsletter subscribers. So I thought I would share the answers on here as well. In fact, it resonated so deeply with me too. So today's question that I'm answering is Anna. I'd love some tips for health anxiety. I really struggle thinking something's

going to happen to my daughter's health and she'll be taken from me. Oh, that it, yeah, it got right to my call this one because it resonates so much. And if you find your mind going down the most heartbreaking parts of fear, you are not alone. I think every parent experiences health anxiety and this kind of fear at some point regularly. Love is incredibly vulnerable, isn't it? The flip side of love and all that we enjoy from that warm feeling, that feeling of gratitude and joy that comes with love, the flip side of that is vulnerability. And goodness me, I wish that love and vulnerability weren't two sides of the same coin. I often think of it literally as a coin. So in those moments, you know,

sometimes I talk about those different kinds of hugs that I give my kids and I identify that there's this one hug that is like the love hug and I'm holding them and I'm squishing them and I'm just full to bursting with love and gratitude and awareness of the privilege that that moment holds and then I have the other side of the coin, the vulnerability hug and I'm holding them and on my knuckles are white and I am my mind is racing and my heart is breaking and I'm thinking, goodness me, I'm so scared that I might lose you. And there have been times that I have found myself almost wishing that I didn't love anyone ever, that I didn't care, because with that comes risk, with that comes risk of heartbreak and heartache and grief and loss.

And sometimes I think I just feel like I wish I could shut my heart off from all the love, because then there wouldn't be the risk or the awareness of the loss that could come with that. But then doesn't that get us thinking that what would our lives be without that love? If we were just to shut ourselves off and live in this thick-walled castle of safety, how lonely would that be? We wouldn't have the richness. We wouldn't have the joy. We wouldn't have that connection that we have with those people that make our lives full and worth living and loving. So how the heck then do we find some kind of way to exist with this love, but also acknowledging the vulnerability that comes with that? And this is what I've got some

tips for in response to this question. But I want to say you're not alone in health anxiety. love. Sure does feel like that wildly risky and vulnerable thing to do sometimes. And if our kids are ill or if someone we love is ill, it really finds us getting in touch with this feeling. So here are my three tips for you. Number one, when you experience that anxiety and you feel it bubbling up inside of you and you've gone from that love hug to that vulnerable hug, imagine a compassionate, confident friend guiding you through your anxiety. Literally, imagine someone's standing besides your sitting next to you, just saying, yeah, I know this is tough, right? Use an interruptive technique. Count backwards from a hundred and threes. This is my

favorite one because it's really hard to go off down the road of some of these stories that we can find ourselves telling ourselves and we're counting backwards from 103s. So when anxious thoughts arise, this is a really good way to just interrupt them and say, well, I'm not going down that road. I'm going to focus on the love in this moment rather than that vulnerability. I'm going to flip the coin. I'm going to turn that coin over with love comes vulnerability, but I'm going to ground myself in the fact that the love is here and it is now and it is real and it is what I have the privilege of experiencing. Another thing to do is if your health anxiety is triggered, consider the most mundane, likely outcome. It might be a virus or a bug or a rash or something.

So you know what the most likely outcome? I'm going to watch and wait. Of course, it's a wise thing to do. I'm not going to tell those stories. I'm going to remind ourselves that this virus will pass. We will emerge tired, but okay, that is the most likely outcome. So take a watch and wait approach now that goes into my second point, which is make a plan fitting for your concerns.

Now it's really good to be vigilant when we're worried about certain illnesses, especially when our kids run well. it's good to be vigilant. Anxiety will find a struggling to focus on anything else that is going on. You know when you're really taken over by that, that horrible heartbreaking story, that worst case scenario and it's really hard to focus on anything else. It can find me totally absent from what's going on mentally because I'm living something really scary in my head.

So try to just bring that energy that you're projecting. into that story and use it instead to make a plan. If your child's unwell, you might plan to monitor your child at recommended intervals. Perhaps you check their temperature every four hours instead of every five minutes, which is I know what we can sometimes find ourselves reaching to do. So try and do it kind of the more medically recommended interval rather than that fear-fueled regularity. Seek your information from trustworthy sources.

Often we can be really tempted just to grab our phones and scroll through forums and articles, words that we don't even understand medical jargon. I often find myself reading medical research papers, just purely to seek reassurance because that's often what we're looking for. We find many other things. We can never get a definitive answer because there's lots of conflicting stuff out there. So seek information from trustworthy sources, whether that's the NHS website. or a friend in the know or a doctor, a professional. So make a plan that is fitting for your concerns. You know, I might think I'm really, really worried for me

because I lost my sister to cancer. I, my anxiety is really tricky if my children have headaches. So I can find myself wanting to ask them all the time, where is it, how long we had it? You know, this kind of over-questioning, over-researching, over-information gathering, and by means I'm just trying to reassure myself that it's not the worst case scenario.

So what I might tell myself is, I'm just going to keep an eye on them. And if they keep mentioning it, and it goes on for a few days, a few weeks, we're going to go and get some insight and support on that. So make a plan fitting for your concerns, which is very different from what I might feel like doing, which often then feeds that sense of frantic anxiety.

Number three, really understand anxiety. step into a student role learn more about anxiety my book mind open mother will give you lots of insight to really help teach you what is going on in your body in your mind when you feel anxious because the more you understand anxiety as a physiological response that is there to protect you the more empowered you will feel when it shows up for example when we're anxious our nervous systems cause our breathing to speed up so that we're kind of ready and poised extending our exhale So just extending that out breath, calms your nervous system. And then as a result, you're more able to engage in that kind of rational plan-making mind.

Now, there is so much more that I want to say. I've got lots of resources on anxiety. If you want to dive into it, more deeply and get some really solid tools and resources. I've got the health anxiety sofa session on my website, anamatha.com. that will give you a real insight into health anxiety specifically. But I want to just finish off by sharing something. It's a tiny conversation I had with my mum. So on losing my sister, we were reflecting back one day, years, years later.

And I said to her mum, do you sometimes feel like you wish that you hadn't gone through any of that? That perhaps you hadn't had a third child because she was the youngest, my sister, so that you hadn't gone through that heartbreak of losing her, really driven by that vulnerability side of that coin, that desire sometimes to shut ourselves off and I'd rather go without the love to avoid the pain, you know, that stance that I was talking about earlier. And she said, Anna, I would live every day again to have her and love her.

And goodness me, that really, really struck me because I think love finds this diving in, doesn't it? The risk of loss, the risk of bad things, sad things, scary things happening. The love is worth it all. So when you find yourself focusing on that vulnerability, it's feeding that anxiety, going off down those painful roads, just flip that coin. Focus on the love, focus on the person in front of you,

the connection that you have, the gift that they are in your life, focus on that and know that it is worth it all, that anxiety just takes us away from what is. But should the worst ever happen, it will still have been worth it all. So flip that coin, focus on that love, use the tools, get more support if you need it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do take a moment to subscribe, rate and review. as it really helps get these words out to benefit more juggling parents like us. And head to anamatha.com to find my resources on everything from health anxiety to people pleasing, starting at only 20 pounds.

And finally, don't forget to pre-order my new book, Raising a Happier Mother, How to Find Balance, Feel Good, and See Your Children Flourish as a result. I can't wait for you to have that. Take care and we'll chat soon. Thank you.