New to this - constantly seeking reassurance

[Mthecatlady]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post so here goes. Since November I have found myself struggling badly with health anxiety and obsessive thoughts. Despite tests assuring me all is okay, I find myself googling worst case scenario stories, prowling forums for reassurance and worst case scenarios. 
Things came to a head the other day when my cat caught a bat and a briefly touched it while moving it. I became terrified that I’d caught rabies. Despite reassurance from A and E, my GP, public health England, and the local bat conservationist. I keep having the doubts creeping into my mind. The thoughts are so distressing and I don’t know how to shake them. It’s like if I accept the reassurance I’m somehow being complacent. I’m worried I’ll never get any better. I’m taking citalopram and I’m restarting therapy when my last therapist can fit me in. 
Do these feelings ever stop? I’m less anxious today but finding I’m crying a lot as I hate feeling this way. 

[Gemma@OCDUK]

Hi Mthecatlady Welcome to the forum! 

I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling so much at the moment.  Like you say you're asking for lots of reassurance over these and other worries so it isn't surprising that you're feeling so anxious and unsure. Both health anxiety and OCD want absolute certainty that nothing is wrong or will go wrong and it's this search for certainty that causes all the distress.

It's great to hear that you're trying citalopram and that you're restarting therapy soon, so I hope that you find them both helpful. These feelings won't be around forever, even if it might feel that way. You just need the strategies in place to try to live with some of the uncertainty that life brings. It might be helpful to look into some self-help resources if you haven't already like Break Free from OCD or Overcoming Health Anxiety

Gemma

[Mthecatlady]

Hi Gemma,

Thanks for replying. It really does feel impossible to shake them off. I have times where things feel okay but then an incident takes me back to the dark place. I’ll look at the resources to try and help while waiting for therapy to restart. 

[PolarBear]

This is going to continue as long as you keep reacting in the same way. Contacting all those experts about rabies and bats is a compulsion. Do is Googling, catastrophic thinking and reassurance seeking. They need to stop

[Mthecatlady]

It’s so difficult to stop the compulsions. It is a regular response to stressful situations I face so I guess it’s changing a very entrenched behaviour. I managed a while without googling and felt better for a bit. I find I have been reacting to a lot more intrusive thoughts with compulsions lately, and feeling worse as a result. 
Have you got any tips to help stop them other than total willpower? 

[PolarBear]

To an extent it is willpower but that's where the cognitive therapy side of CBT comes in.

Cognitive therapy is learning to think differently about your obsessions. You take them seriously, which flies you into a panic and you feel like uou hsve to fix things with compulsions. Alas, compulsions fix nothing.

Instead, you can start to look at the thoughts as just erroneous thoughts that have nothing behind them.

[Mthecatlady]

I’ll be relieved to start therapy again. 
I think my trouble is my obsessions and compulsions are often related to my health, so it feels like it’s a ‘good’ thing. It really isn’t when I have spent hours googling horrendous things. The most distressing intrusive thoughts are often triggered by an event and are much more traumatic. It’s like I can’t decipher what is ‘healthy concern and responsibility’ and where I am letting the obsessions and compulsions take over. I think when I disbelieve experts is probably an easy point to recognise as an obsession, then googling is the compulsion. I hope this feeling passes soon. 

[PolarBear]

It will only pass when you stop reacting to the thoughts.

One point is that if you get a thought, with no supporting evidence, and it causes you anxiety, it's safe to call it an obsession.

[Mthecatlady]

I see what you mean. I have been reading Break free from OCD and found it fascinating. Especially on looking for certainty of things that didn’t happen. As well as health anxiety I have suffered from ‘hit and run anxiety’ where I have actually turned around to check I haven’t accidentally hit a cyclist. 
The book feels helpful and just taking it easy watching tv. Resisting the urge to google to ‘double check’

[discuccsant]

Isn't this basically Hypochondria? I also had that. I once spit blood out of my throat and went crazy. Not only that, but I was like I'm going to die for that. I then began to cough on purpose, to see if blood is coming. The whole day long. Today, I obviously cringe about that, because this was ongoing for like three months. What was I even thinking? Just because I once spit blood — which was clearly related to the fact, that I had nose bleeding the day before, I somehow assumed the worst. And I constantly, really constantly, began to cough. Google symptoms of lung cancer, COPD and whatever. I was so 100% sure I'm going to die. I even collected the minimal amount of blood I spit to let doctors see it in the hospital, and was waiting in the waiting room. But then a doctor herself told me in, became extremely furious with me, shouted at me and basically threw me out, telling me not to worry about anything. I suspect her having seen really something bad this day. Obviously it triggered her heavily that people like me, with no real issues at all, wasted her time. I immediately came back to my senses and felt ashamed by my behavior and how stressful I've acted around everyone. But then it just got worse.

The coughing became real. I coughed constantly without wanting it and not as a compulsion anymore. So my concerns felt this time valid, as I constantly felt a tingle or itch in my throat. And then again: I went to several doctors, let them check what's going on. And obviously, no one could “help” me.

The question now is: How did I overcome this? Well, my OCD focused all its concentration on another incident: I felt some kind of very tiny knob on my neck — just another silly episode. That's why I somehow didn't care anymore, that I constantly had to cough. Now guess what: Literally one to three days after the new episode, while I coughed for like 3 months constantly before, my coughing stopped completely, as I didn't focus on it anymore.

If you want to overcome this, you really need to not care anymore about it. Your brain needs to recognize, that it isn't important. And to do that, you have to ignore it and to focus on different stuff. Not fighting, not arguing with or whatever, but you need to learn to ignore it as brain noise. As a random thought, that doesn't hold any relevance in your life. It's actually super easy to overcome this. But as long as OCD has latched itself into this, it's very hard to overcome it. But in plain sight, it's so god-damn easy. I went from 100% focus on that to 0% focus on that, which basically let me forget it instantaneous. Can I ever know that I'm not having a serious health issue? Obviously not. But I just know that this isn't relevant, as my OCD was just letting me exaggerating it.

OCD for me is like a “second mind”. It's not part of my real mind. It is like a lens, that puts itself over the eyes of my normal mind. Making things different for me then they really are. It's so weird and even though I fully understand how it works, I can't figure out how to fight it, without my current episode getting replaced by a new episode. Super strange. I highly suspect that I suffer from some kind of physical brain related issue. Like it's more of a physical thing in me and not really a psychological thing. I just get this 100% focus on something. Literally everything. I get it on so many themes, it's just absurd.

But it also had its positive effects on me and my life: I was so convinced that I'll fail at school, that I basically memorized every single notebook of each school subject word by word (I'm not kidding), just to make 100% sure I'll not fail. Yeah, in the end I went from being a bad to average student to the best of the whole school. I even got an award by local companies because of how good my grades were. But in the aftermath I just  know that it was 100% OCD related, as it was a horrible time for me. But somehow I'm gladful that I had it, as it basically lead to the career I have today — a very well paid by the way, especially given that I come from a poorer background. Fascinating, isn't it?

But yeah, that's just some backstory I wanted to share with you and I really hope, that it somehow may help you.

Edited August 6, 2021 by discuccsant

[Mthecatlady]

Hi,

Yes it pretty much is. It will start with a small innocuous symptom, the doctor will check and say it’s fine, but I’ve already convinced myself of the worst. My fear seems to be based on something being missed, so I have to fill those knowledge gaps myself to see what could happen if something is missed, etc etc. It’s so consuming and just draining going through it all. 
I also find I’m quite ‘high functioning’. I’m working full time in a busy job, studying a Master’s degree part time, performing well in both but underneath the exterior of someone with it all together, I’m a bit of a fragile mess. 
It’s hard ignoring the thoughts, resisting the urge to quickly google something is incredibly difficult too. I am feeling a bit more myself today, which is good. I’m trying to put the incident out of my mind as much as I can. 

[discuccsant]

 

2 hours ago, Mthecatlady said:

Hi,

Yes it pretty much is. It will start with a small innocuous symptom, the doctor will check and say it’s fine, but I’ve already convinced myself of the worst. My fear seems to be based on something being missed, so I have to fill those knowledge gaps myself to see what could happen if something is missed, etc etc. It’s so consuming and just draining going through it all. 
I also find I’m quite ‘high functioning’. I’m working full time in a busy job, studying a Master’s degree part time, performing well in both but underneath the exterior of someone with it all together, I’m a bit of a fragile mess. 
It’s hard ignoring the thoughts, resisting the urge to quickly google something is incredibly difficult too. I am feeling a bit more myself today, which is good. I’m trying to put the incident out of my mind as much as I can. 

Yeah, completely understandable what you go through. I also had this feeling of doubt, like if they did miss something or like that and if they just could give me a diagnosis early enough, I could still be saved. I've also read a lot of stories about people, that were considered to have Hypochondria, but then in the aftermath it turned out they were right all along. Further alienating me from accepting the reality.

So your main issue is the doubt here. You basically have doubt in the doctors. But you did everything you could. You went to the doctor, got a non-concerning diagnosis, and you simply need to accept it. And I think what you could do here is trying to realize, that you can't do anything about being actually ill. Sounds harsh, but actually holds truth. A lot of people died of sudden heart attacks. Tons of people had issues concerning their back, just to later get a diagnosis, that they not only have issues with the back itself, but that in the MRI screening it was seen, that they also have a cancerous tumor somewhere, completely unrelated to initial pain itself.

You can't do anything about it. Your OCD just gives you the impression as if you could do, but you actually can't. That's the key here. You need to identify your OCD here. You need to understand the irrationality in this, and you need to relabel it as silly stuff, that doesn't need any further evaluation. Went to the doctor? Fine, that's all you could have done. Be happy, the diagnosis you didn't want didn't come. And let OCD dry out in its attempt, to mess with your emotions. 
 

Edited August 6, 2021 by discuccsant

[Mthecatlady]

You’re right the issue is doubt. The hardest thing for me is separating what is reasonable and what is the OCD. I’m slowly recognising what is the OCD. As the OCD thoughts usually result in possibility of death, it makes them terrifying and then I’m even more compelled to act upon them. As if I ignore them I’m somehow complacent, if that makes sense. 
I had a weak moment earlier and googled rabies in Turkey as I went there on holiday last year. I sent myself down the hole digging for evidence that I could be at risk. It’s like a tug of war in my head. Part of me is saying ‘accept the evidence that you’re okay’, the OCD on the other hand is telling me I could be that one in a million case. 
I still generally feel better than I have been though. Did you have medication and therapy for OCD?

[discuccsant]

31 minutes ago, Mthecatlady said:

You’re right the issue is doubt. The hardest thing for me is separating what is reasonable and what is the OCD. I’m slowly recognising what is the OCD. As the OCD thoughts usually result in possibility of death, it makes them terrifying and then I’m even more compelled to act upon them. As if I ignore them I’m somehow complacent, if that makes sense. 
I had a weak moment earlier and googled rabies in Turkey as I went there on holiday last year. I sent myself down the hole digging for evidence that I could be at risk. It’s like a tug of war in my head. Part of me is saying ‘accept the evidence that you’re okay’, the OCD on the other hand is telling me I could be that one in a million case. 
I still generally feel better than I have been though. Did you have medication and therapy for OCD?

Yeah, I also always had the feeling as if I'm the one in a million case, who happens to have this very disturbing illness. You seem to recognize it as a silly idea with your normal functioning brain. The problem is, that you try to argue with your OCD. Don't. It will always win. OCD is like a person, who is basically an idiot. OCD holds tight to ideas it creates in your mind, even though they can't be supported through any kind of reasonable evidence. Imagine you have to argue with someone, who believes the earth is flat. No matter what you try, the person will still hold on to his beliefs. That's also the case with OCD: It can't let go. And it happens to also affect you. The longer you try to argument with OCD, the more and more impact it will have on yourself. You start to believe it's reasoning. Even though your actual “You” knows that it's not the case, your loud and noisy OCD silences your mindful thoughts. And once in a while it happens to be the only voice in your head. This is when you fall into a rabbit hole, you can't seem to get out of again. Stop arguing with it. No matter how you do it. Whether it's done be seeking for reassurance through Google, whether it's done by going to doctors or simply by having an inner dispute with it. Just don't. Let this idiot talk, you don't need to listen or answer to that. Don't silence your OCD. Just let this fool say his stuff and ignore it.

At some point, your OCD loses interest in convincing you otherwise. Often we try to re-evaluate the happenings right then, but this just leads to OCD being revived again. Talking his silly stuff again. You just don't re-evaluate anything. Let it go. Let it go to this point, where you feel cringe thinking back of how much fear you felt over nothing. That's the point you can consider yourself free of OCD — at least regarding this topic. 

Edited August 6, 2021 by discuccsant

[Mthecatlady]

I like the analogy of the OCD being an idiot you can’t argue with. I’d say reassurance seeking or googling are in effect arguing with the OCD too. 
It does tend to move focus, if I’m not worried about one health worry another will come along and latch on. 
I’ve had these traits for a while but I think it’s definitely been a lot worse since lockdown started last year. I’d guess other people have found that too