The Worry Tax: My Health Anxiety Confessional
This was the beginning, or perhaps the end.
When I was 19, I found a lump in my testicle. Two months on a hospital waiting list, scared out of my mind. The anxious uncertainty of waiting changed my brain and life forever. Then the ultrasound found a second one. This was it. This was the beginning, or perhaps the end.
I am scared to die. That’s a normal sentiment for most people, right? Yet when you suffer from health anxiety, responses to risk become obsessive-compulsive. You become hypersensitive to events in your own body. You’ll perceive the smallest changes, scrutinized by that trapped mind as worst-case scenarios. The fight-or-flight response triggers, pumping your body full of unnecessary adrenaline and cortisol. And you know what that does to you, eventually? It makes you ill. Imagine it. No, wait, imagining it is the problem. Stop imagining it!
Carcinophobia, or “the big C”
This condition has trapped me into years of rumination, a victim of my own mind. And the big one for me is fear of getting cancer, or carcinophobia. We all know about news outlets’ “scientifically backed” statements about this or that causing cancer. The adverts are always reminding us of it too. It’s everywhere. And when I look up my symptoms online, it nearly always could be cancer amongst other things, so I mustn’t don’t that. I always avoid anything on television that mentions it. Just seeing someone with it can set me off.
A pain in my arm that won’t go away for weeks? Bone cancer. A part of my throat that is hurting may be a tumor, slowly growing. Catastrophising all the time. My stomach pains that lasted for weeks were a sure sign of stomach cancer as far as I was concerned. I was already dealing with the diagnosis before I even got it! I ended up having a camera up to my bottom (endoscopy), probing my lower intestine, which found nothing amiss.
This scene from Hannah and Her Sisters portrays how it feels for a sufferer:
These thoughts become unavoidable once ingrained. Some people avoid their fears, but avoiding your own body is impossible. So what do we do? We have to take it with us everywhere we go. It’s great that negative visualization worked so well for stoic philosophers like Seneca, but sufferers of health anxiety have brains that work differently and need particular care.
Like a Ball & Chain
If I’m doing something that should be otherwise enjoyable, health anxiety looms like a massive, distorted silhouette. To admit it to others feels like it would ruin everyone’s mood and become an annoying hypochondriac. Plus, speaking it out loud feels like it could give the thing power. Like I am manifesting it.
The people I live with know about it and I often ask them for assurance, as if they would really know. They aren’t trained medical professionals, but that is how desperate it gets for sufferers.
I invented unhelpful, novel ideas, because that is what this is, an outlet to those inner voices, that running narrative that is constantly taunting us if we don’t learn to recognize it for what it is. I started down the slippery slope of confirmation bias and even named it “worry tax”, just to have some control over things. I felt like every time I had worried about a specific thing it had come to nothing. Therefore, I had paid my worry tax. It’s insidious because the hidden thought behind it is:
The one time I don’t worry will be the one time the universe hits me with something nasty.
So I kept irrationally feeding the fear.
This is important to understand: health anxiety is entirely irrational and largely untrue. Got that?
Please take this from someone who has suffered sleepless nights, worrying about pains that never came to anything. Or ruining a quality time by poking at that same part of me that hurts when touched, just to see if it is still there. The irony is, by always poking it, I often make it sore, sustaining that uncertainty.
And Those Lumps
Those testicular lumps I mentioned at the start? I made you wait until now to emphasize that period of stress for me. A few paragraphs of uncertainty to my wellbeing are nothing compared to two months. They were harmless cysts, but the mental damage had already shaped my future life.
How To Get Better?
But I can tell you the most effective way of getting better for most anxiety disorders. Two things in this order:
Confrontation
This is hard, believe me. Think of anxiety like a steep hill that goes up on one side and down on the other.
If you keep taking the shortcut straight through problems, they feel better for a while, but you are setting yourself up for long-term problems, please trust me on this. Push yourself to go properly up that hill. Which brings me onto point number two.
Testing Predictions
Having gone all the way up that slope on your own, what terrible outcomes did you predict? Did they actually happen? Make predictions in advance, write them down in a journal, and afterwards write about the outcome. You will see yourself proven wrong, time after time. Look back on this for assurance when you need it.
Then I noticed certain painful sensations that I had experienced years before, and they hadn’t killed me then, so why bother with them now?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) counseling will probably help you. It gave me some tools to work with. I still get periods where the doubt of anxiety takes over, but it has reduced. It went from entirely dominating my life to causing problems now and then. And That I can live with.
Do you suffer from health anxiety or know someone who does? What impact has it had on your lives? Did you find a way past it? Let me know what’s on your mind in the comments below.
Take care of each other and remember self-care too. See you on the next one.
