(Part 2) Top products from r/HealthAnxiety

It Starts With Food is a phenomenal book to start with just to understand how food affects us. Another one that covers autoimmunity is The Immune System Recovery Plan. Both of these books revolve around diet and not anxiety, but it is my firm belief that in order to find what is triggering the anxiety, you must work on other areas of your life first. If diet, exercise, and sleep do not subdue your symptoms, then keep searching. I’d be willing to bet if you tried the elimination diet, whether Whole30 or Dr Blum’s Recovery Plan, this will help you.

I’d love to hear about your progress. Please feel free to follow up. You’re so young!! You have so much potential!! Don’t let something like this control you. Initially, you might find yourself resistant to try new things, so it will take what I call ‘just making the decision’. This means that if you want to find peace with your health, you just have to decide to do it and push through whatever doubt (or anxiety) you might have.

It’s one thing to make the decision, so how do you stick with the decision you might be thinking? Especially when the stress really peaks. Three things.

1. Know the why. If you do not have a ‘why’ to what you do in life, regardless of what it is, there is no way you’ll stick with it. The why gives us guidance. It gives us dedication and strength. When part of you says who cares, the part that knows the why will say, I do. Really think about this. Take a few days and literally write down a mission statement for yourself. When the anxiety is really affecting you, go to wherever you have this hanging up and read it. Breathe! Deep breaths! If you have to, say, Progress, not Perfection! to remind yourself that it’s okay to feel the way you because you have a plan to get to a better place. This is merely a bump in the road, not a road block.
   
2. Once you have the why, make some goals. The rules about goals: they must be measurable, have a time of completion, and they must be assessed regularly to see if they are still effective.
   “I will work on being less stressed”. This is not a goal. It has none of the components of a goal. “This week, I will take 10 minutes each day to meditate before starting my day.” That is a proper goal. It’s measurable, it has an end date, and at the end of the week, you can measure its effectiveness. Write these goals down to make them real and tangible. Put them with your mission statement and at the end of each week, assess your progress. This might sound time consuming, but after a couple weeks, this new habit will take very little time.
   
3. Make the goals small! So many people who make goals want to go for the gold immediately. Perhaps the person wants to lose 50 lbs. so their goal is to lose fifty pounds, within 6 months, working out 6 times a week. That meets all the requirements of rule #2 technically, but if the person has never worked out or has no idea what diet they should be eating, what’s the likelihood of sticking to this goal? Instead, maybe some goals should be, pick up 3 different whole foods I have never ate before to cook with at the grocery this week. Boom. Small, obtainable, measurable, and can be assessed. Smaller goals also give us the chance to start getting some momentum. They build optimism and positivity, which, in and of itself, can work wonders for anxiety.
   
   For you, being anxiety free might be the ultimate goal, but to reach that, you will need to make smaller, more focused goals to reach that bigger one. You can do this. You might need to enlist the help of someone you trust. Find an accountability partner so when you do hit rock bottom (and that’s okay if you do!), you have someone to lean on who can help you stay on track with your goals.
   
   Again, feel free to reach out if you have more questions. Patience is going to be your friend here. However, just on elimination diets alone, people have made sweeping recoveries to all sorts of illnesses. I won’t go into the details but look at those books I suggested to see how food can truly affect us.
   
   Life is a journey. No one lives your life but you. Make it yours. Make it awesome!

Haha, yay for another person who is both fascinated and frightened by sickness! :)

I think my favorites are prion diseases because of how completely godawful they are. Being super sick is a thought that scares me, but at the same time, I'm amazed at the weird stuff our bodies are capable of doing.

If you're more of a book person than an ebook person like I am too, these are some of my favorite reads:

101 Diseases You Don't Want to Get which lists a pretty big variety of conditions - not all are fatal, some just make you feel like crap.

The Strange Case of the Walking Corpse This one discusses really nasty conditions, old-timey remedies, weird fetishes and just plain bizarre illnesses.

Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It Title's pretty self-explanatory on this one. :)

Yep! There's an entire chapter about Health Anxiety OCD in "The OCD Workbook," which is one of the first books that my therapist recommended that I use early in my therapy. https://www.amazon.com/OCD-Workbook-Obsessive-Compulsive-Harbinger-Self-Help/dp/1572249218/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511722537&sr=8-1&keywords=the+ocd+workbook

For what it's worth, she also recommended the book "Coping with Anxiety" https://www.amazon.com/Coping-Anxiety-Simple-Relieve-Worry/dp/1626253854/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1511722618&sr=1-1

I have been struggling with health anxiety on my blood pressure for almost a decade now, and I can relate to everyone here also. It has been a really long journey that has taken me to the ER multiple times, multiple visits to cardiologists, etc. I've seen numerous doctors and tried every BP medication (which didn't help me). I've discovered some interesting things in my case:

• My anxiety plays a HUGE role in my blood pressure. When my arm first goes into the cuff, it doesn't matter how I feel, my first couple of readings are always off the charts (my highest so far was about 200/110)
  
• My high readings can be really scary, it's not uncommon for my top number to be in the range of 160-180. Of course, when this happens at the Dr they are alarmed and that makes me alarmed so my anxiety goes up, and everything just gets worse
  
• Blood pressure is a terrible anxiety target because it causes a feedback loop. You get anxiety, so your BP goes up, and then you can either feel the effects or you get a high reading, which causes more anxiety, and the loop repeats.
  
• What I found helpful in my case was to force myself to sit down several times during the day and take many readings. In my case sometimes I'd have to sit and do readings one after another for 20-30m straight and write down each one. I don't do this all the time now (probably not good for you), but it was useful for a while because I learned something important: my first few readings are always sky-high, and then they eventually go down and begin to stabilize as my anxiety wears off. Sometimes it takes a LONG time for this stabilization to occur, because each time the BP cuff tightens, my anxiety goes back up, but over time I found that the anxiety does start to go down as you become desensitized to the process
  
• For me, I've discovered that while my BP is still not great, it's not nearly as bad as it seems. My numbers usually tend to stabilize to an average of around 145 in the morning (still high, but not ER-level high), and when I'm feeling calm or I take readings after exercising, they're even lower (stabilize around 130's, or high 120's)
  
• The biggest things that have helped me personally (everyone is different) is doing the following: - Regular exercise / cardio - Forcing myself to take lots of readings at home to slightly desensitize myself (it is also just useful information, because chances are you'll find that eventually your numbers do start to go down over time) - and of course, NOT WORRYING about it.
  
  About the "not worrying" part... this is one of the hardest things. I had to really go thermonuclear on my anxiety and tackle it from every angle. I did the following:
  
  
• Began writing lists of every quote, technique, or anti-anxiety trick I could find, and keeping track of what would help and what didn't. I basically started curating my own health anxiety "cheat sheet"
  
• Began exercising (jogging) almost every day. This is huge, if you can do it. I can almost guarantee it will help.
  
• Yoga, and stretching, at least once a day
  
• Diaphragmatic breathing techniques. These are legit (you can google it, it's really simple, sometimes called 'belly breathing') and can sometimes have a very noticeable effect on my health anxiety and other issues (palpitations etc.).
  
• Tried to work regular mindfulness / meditation into my schedule (tough to do but it also has been hugely helpful). My highest recommendation for meditation books is 'Mindfulness in Plain English' by Bhante Gunaratana (https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-English-Bhante-Henepola-Gunaratana/dp/0861719069/)
  
• Read books on anxiety. Some that have helped me are 'The Worry Cure' by Robert Leahy and 'Badass Ways to End Anxiety' by Geert Verschaeve. When you read them, treat it like homework. Keep a pen handy and underline passages that you find insightful. Then come back and re-visit those when your anxiety or panic attacks are bad.
  
  Beyond not worrying, or tackling your anxiety directly, the most obvious way to reduce health anxiety about blood pressure is to eliminate the problem to begin with. For me I've never been able to get my BP numbers normal, but as I mentioned above I started exercising more and taking regular readings at home (sometimes many in a row). I'd keep a log book actually, of the day/time, and a series of sometimes 20 or more readings in a row. This was useful because it provided concrete information on the reality of my situation* I was no longer just speculating or worrying, I could see, clear as day, on paper, that while my BP is high (or at least elevated, at best), it was not so high on average that it was going to cause my imminent death.
  
  Another thing to remember: a lot of people have high blood pressure. ALOT. Like 1/3 of the country. And another 1/3 are pre-hypertensive. And that was before they adjusted the numbers some time ago to lower the 'ideal' range even lower. Why is this important? Because people are not dropping dead left and right from high BP, even though 2 out of 3 people you see every day are outside the normal range. Yes, it's not a great condition and you want to address it if you can, but chances are it is not going to kill you any time soon.
  
  Also, your BP numbers during the day don't even matter that much. Numerous studies have found that the numbers taken at home or at the Dr. actually aren't nearly as important as your systolic while you are sleeping. This is of course nearly impossible to measure at home, but chances are while you are sleeping you BP is probably MUCH lower than when you are awake and experiencing anxiety.
  
  Just wanted to share some of the things I've found / learned in dealing with this myself. Of course, everyone is different but you're definitely not alone. Good luck and hang in there