I hate living like this please help!

[Jesse1187]

Do I need a doctor, it seems like I pay attention to every twitch or movement in my body at all times, Whether it's my heart beat, muscle spasms or headaches I always worry. Is this normal?

I posted all my issues in the intro thread thinking it was for advice so I am reposting here. Here is link to my first post
http://www.anxietyzone.com/index.php/topic,67661.0.html

[kconnors]

Hi Jesse1187,

I scanned your original e-mail . . . now, I am not a medical professional, but you may need to look at your lifestyle, especially in having to pull over and go into a store for a beer to calm down or mixing a "doobie" with caffeine. Depending on how intense these aspects of your lifestyle are, they may be causing some or all of your symptoms. Let's assume you go and have a checkup with your family doctor and everything comes back fine next week. Make sure the doctor knows all of your symptoms and your lifestyle. Then, you may need to work with a counselor to find out what is triggering these episodes of anxiety for you. If your anxiety surfaces only every couple of years, there might be triggers that are causing the symptoms. It may well be that you were "controlling" your symptoms by not addressing the triggers and now things have gotten a bit overwhelming that you can no longer control them so you might need some guidance to help you to unravel the triggers and manage them. No one can force you to take meds and there are alternatives to try and include diet, exercise (remember that walk that helped to calm you down), mindfulness, etc. Check in with us when you can but as frustrating and potentially scary as things are now, you can learn to manage your symptoms but it may mean that you have to give up some of your lifestyle. Take care, kc

[stateman]

Hello, and sorry you are experiencing this. Is this normal? lol, well what the heck is normal anymore? No this not normal for someone perfectly healthy and without worry. This sounds completely normal for a Hypochondriac though. I share some of that with you. I worry about every heart beat that I feel, every ache and pain. Sometimes I can ignore it but most of the time I obsess about it and research on the internet that seems to do more harm than good.

What I would recommend is certainly to see a doctor. The first thing I did was to get ANYTHING physical ruled out immediately. Once I knew that it was all in my head I could start to focus better. And when the symptoms start to come on I can say things like "I just had a stress test that came back fine, so you must be anxiety because my heart is fine". I know it sounds silly, but it helps to know.

[kconnors]

Just a PS back to stateman . . . I used to think that talking to my symptoms was a bit "silly" also, but you are so right . . . it helps because I think it actualizes the anxiety so you can have a conversation and articulate the reasons why the anxiety is not real . . . I advocate talking to oneself . . . well, to a certain point in certain locations :) but it really helped me also . . .take care, kc