Last summer, my mind imploded. No matter what I did, I was always terrified that I was going to have a heart attack. I couldn’t sleep, exercise, see friends, or watch a movie without worrying that my heart was going to give out. I was having palpitations a lot, but what was scarier was when it just felt like a stone inside my chest – not moving or beating. It was a suffocating feeling. No matter how deep a breath I took, my chest would stay heavy and locked up. It was really scary and worrying about it took over my life.

Eventually, I settled down once I got a job and went back to school; cutting the amount of free time I had to worry. But it was insidious. And the fact that I couldn’t just relax without convincing myself that I was about to die was really disheartening. I think my body and brain acclimated to being in college and the stress that comes along with that. Suddenly shooting back to being in my childhood bedroom and not having anything to do really messed with it. The new piece of evidence to support this theory is that it’s happening again.

We’re diversifying my portfolio now, though. Brain cancer is my new fixation and it’s arguably more invasive and uncomfortable. The symptoms are as follows: exhaustion, headaches, mild fever, brain fog. On their own, I’m able to come up with pretty convincing rationales for all four of these: lack of sleep, poor diet, no exercise, and college burnout to name a few. But, together, they become exponentially worse, and when I scroll through Cleveland Clinic and WebMD pages on brain tumors and see all of them pop up, I get hysterical. And like this summer, the more worried I get about these symptoms, the more they present themselves. My headaches are getting worse, I’m getting less and less sleep, and in general I’m just not taking very good care of my body. It’s sad and I don’t like living like this.

I know it’s not real. I know I don’t have a tumor in my head. But it’s really hard to stop this vicious cycle of worry and manifestation, and my health is just getting worse and worse. I think I’m through the worst though. My family’s going on vacation soon and I’m sure that will present more productive things to stress on than brain tumors. My biggest takeaway from all of this is that I physically cannot relax. It seems like my body is always going to be in fight-or-flight mode no matter what I do. I want to fix this and don’t know how. I’ll figure it out.

Being a hypochondriac is scary and filled with self-doubt and catastrophizing. It seems like a problem that won’t be leaving my life for a long time and certainly an underlying symptom of a more generalized form of anxiety. It’s not something I’m going to let run my life forever, though.

So in that spirit I want to share some of my coping strategies for health anxiety, just in case someone out there is struggling with something similar.

1: The subreddit r/healthanxiety. So so so helpful. A lot of great resources for both general health anxiety as well as on specific health worries (like heart health and brain cancer). I definitely recommend the affirmations/deescalation posts which work to throw a wrench in your panic spirals by actually making you confront the likelihood of what you’ve convinced yourself of.

2: Kind of obvious, but addressing your underlying anxiety problems. Get on medication! Do meditation and grounding exercises! Exercise! Be productive! Do whatever you can, even the smallest things, to make a difference in your relationship with anxiety. Are there stressors other than your health you can address (there almost always are).

3: Information! Adjust your relationship with Google and with tracking your help. To what extent is it actually helping and to what extent is it feeding into your anxiety. Having all of the knowledge in the world at your fingertips is great to a point. Try to keep an eye on when Googling things shifts from helping to enabling worry. Start by limiting the number of websites you allow yourself to look at. Now, I only look at Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic if I’m worried that I have something, and r/healthanxiety to see if I can find any commonalities with other peoples experience

4: Don’t suffer in silence. The people around you have their own relationships with health and wellness. This can help you snap out of your self-constructed perceptions of illness. Talk through your worries with others, let them know your anxious right now and to maybe keep an eye on you in case you check out. This kind of began my recovery process this summer (shout out to my friends and family ofc).

Those are all of my tips. Let me know if you have others, of course. I still worry a lot now and am always looking to improve. I’ll return to this topic if I feel I have more to share or if this all becomes deeply ironic due to the sudden development of an actual brain tumor. Let’s hope its the former!

-Henry