My Health Anxiety Skyrocketed After Having 2 Babies

How I overcame my biggest obstacle yet.

My anxiety has morphed over the years. It sprouted as perfectionism, blossoming into existential dread before wilting to a mundane social anxiety. Until I had 2 kids.

Photo by Kilian Peschel on Unsplash

Enter: health anxiety. It’s a crushing, all consuming kind of anxiety, especially since kids tend to get ill all the time. When my daughter started nursery she had at least 10 illnesses in the first year. Then when my son started nursery, we had a spell of about 6 months where we alternated bugs on a fortnightly rota.

Cue late night trips to the out of hours doctors and A&E. Hours spent on NHS 111 (a healthcare advice line if you’re not from the UK) and visiting doctors and pharmacists just to check. Asking friends and family about my children’s symptoms, blood tests, not to mention the endless googling.

I would take something as mundane as a cold and jump to the worst case scenario where they’d end up in hospital because I didn’t catch a warning sign in time. I drove everyone nuts. I drove myself nuts.

There’s a natural anxiety when you have small people that depend on you

This little person is totally helpless and under your wing. They can’t tell you what hurts, why they’re really hot, what they need from you. You have to figure it out. It’s a guessing game, but more like a game of elimination.

With Dr Google at your finger tips, it’s really easy to find rare diseases you’ve never even heard of and convince yourself you’ve got to act now or it’ll have disastrous consequences.

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

So how do you balance the need to be cautious with taking it to the extreme and fearing the worst every time?

Stupid as it sounds, I didn’t want to let go of the anxiety

I thought if I get rid of the health anxiety around my children, that’s when something was sure to go wrong. I’d say things over and over in my head, like a mantra, to ‘keep them safe’.

I felt incompetent. I felt most vulnerable if I was alone with them all day. I felt safe when someone was with me taking care of the children.

Not safe for myself though, my children were safe.

I’d go round and round in my head, all the worst possibilities, awful circumstances, disasters.

What if I take them outside, they’re stung by a bee, have an allergic reaction and I don’t save them?

I was neurotic, exhausted, irritable and depressed.

Photo by Josephine Amalie Paysen on Unsplash

Turns out, it’s a self esteem thing

My family couldn’t take it anymore, I was seeking reassurance on a daily basis. I was worrying myself into depression, so I self referred to mental health services.

I sought help in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), now I’m out of the fog of catastrophising.

My therapist showed me that after it all, it comes down to how much I believed I was capable. The truth was:

I felt totally out of my depth. I had zero self esteem and had no confidence that I could handle any situation that parenthood threw at me.

She helped me see that I do know how to cope with situations. In fact, I was far more competent that I’d given myself credit for. I’d been at home alone with my daughter for the first year of her life without any external help thanks to the Covid pandemic. My husband worked full time, so that added up to loads of time that I just had to figure out first time parenting on my own.

Also, I can tell you now, ‘getting rid’ of the anxiety didn’t happen. Not really. It’s just not controlling my life. And I can deal with my kids getting sick in a rational way, rather than spiralling into a pit of despair.

If you’ve experienced health anxiety, either for yourself or for someone who you care for, I’d love to hear from you! Hopefully, I can show you you’re not alone.

Here’s 2 tools that can help you overcome your worries like I did – >

I fixed my anxiety after years of suffering

Until next time,

Molly