5 TIPS FOR HEALTH ANXIETY DURING A DRS VISIT If you want my five tips for health anxiety during a Drs visit, especially if you have a medical condition that concerns you, this is the episode for you. Hello and welcome back everybody. Today, I’m going to share some updates about a recent medical issue I have had, and I’m going to share specific tips for dealing with health anxiety (also known as hypochondria).  A lot of you who have been here with me before know I have postural orthostatic tachycardic syndrome. I also have a lesion on my left cerebellum and many other ups and downs in my medical history where I’ve had to get really good at managing my health anxiety. I wanted to share with you some real-time tips that I am practicing as I deal with another medical illness or another medical concern that I wanted to share with you.  Here I’m going to share with you five specific tips, but I think in total, there’s 20-something tips all woven in here. I’ve done my best to put them into just five. But do make sure you listen to the end of the podcast episode because I’m also going to give some health anxiety journal prompts or questions that you can ask yourself so that you can know how to deal with health anxiety if you’re experiencing that at this time.  Before we get into it, let me give you a little bit of a backstory. Several months ago, I did share that I’ve been having these what I call surges. They’re like adrenaline surges. They wake me up. My heart isn’t racing. It’s not like it’s racing fast, but the only way I can explain it is I feel like I have like a racehorse’s heart in my chest, like this huge heart that’s beating really heavily. Of course, that creates anxiety. And so then I would question like, is it the heartbeat or is it just my anxiety? You go back and you go forward trying to figure out which is which. But because this was a symptom that was persisting and was also showing up when I wasn’t experiencing a lot of stress or anxiety, I thought the right thing to do is to go and see the doctor.  WHAT HEALTH ANXIETY FEELS LIKE Before we get started, be sure to make sure you’re not avoiding doctors. Make sure you’re not dismissing symptoms. We do have to find a very, very wise balance between avoiding doctors but also not overdoing it with doctors. We’ll talk about that a little bit here in a minute. But first, I wanted to just share with you what health anxiety feels like for me. Because for me, I’m very, very skilled at identifying what is anxiety and what is not. I’ve become very good at catching that by experience, folks. It’s not something that comes naturally, but by experience, I can identify what is health anxiety and what is a real medical condition or what is something worthy of me getting checked out.  For me, for the health anxiety piece, it’s really this sort of anxiety that is a sense of catastrophization and it’s usually in the form of thoughts like, what if this is cancer? What if this is a stroke? All the worst-case scenarios. What if this is life-threatening? What if I miss this and you are responsible, you should have picked it up. These are very common health anxiety intrusive thoughts or health anxiety thoughts that I think you really need to be able to catch and be aware and mindful of. First of all, that is the biggest symptom for me.  The other thing is when you have health anxiety, you do tend to hyper-fixate on the symptom and all of the surrounding symptoms that are going with that. And then you can really catastrophize those like, “Well, my heart’s beating really heavily and I feel dizzy. Oh my gosh. And I’ve been having a headache. Yeah, you’re right, I’ve been having a headache. Oh my gosh.” I call it ‘gathering.’ That’s not an actual clinical term, but I do use it with my clients. We gather data that is catastrophic to make it seem like, yeah, we actually have a really big point, and this is actually a catastrophe.  Some other health anxiety symptom that I e