Thanks for the resurrection - I thought maybe people weren’t interested in pursuing this, so I figured I’d leave it alone. And in doing so, somehow I missed olivesmarch4th’s latest post. SO glad to hear that the therapy has been going better! You have a lot of courage!
Indyellen, I think it might help to accept your emotions - you are “allowed” to feel how you feel - you don’t have a lot of direct control over that anyway. It’s worth checking in with your *thought *patterns to see if distorted thoughts are contributing to more bad feelings than you can deal with. But it probably isn’t something you should do constantly, or it would get old fast!
I just started Duke Integrative Medicine’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class, which is based largely on Buddhist practices (but not the religion per se). Just in the introductory session, the teacher talked about simply realizing and accepting how we feel as one of the exercises. I think CBT has the potential to take us down a rumination path that isn’t healthy itself. Sometimes it’s OK and healthy to realize, “I feel really sad right now,” and accept it without immediate analysis.
Is it OK to post here if I am not yet doing CBT but am going in for an assessment? I have had ‘health anxiety’ all my life and intermittent panic attacks. Right now, the health anxiety is not destroying my life or anything but I have noticed an uptick in the constancy of the thoughts and I certainly think it is lowering my productivity and reducing my enjoyment of things.
Anyone else here dealt with health anxiety specifically? My mother has OCD and my father has struggled his whole life with depression and generalised anxiety. I had a very good, privileged childhood and have always been successful, and nothing has changed. I can interact with people, speak in public, turn in work on time, &c. But I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worrying about my health, in some way. Whatever specifically worries me changes over time (I’m not one who worries about cancer or heart attacks, which I gather is the more common), and waxes and wanes.
Right now I think the health anxiety has increased because I’ve had a few actual, though relatively minor health issues (I had swine flu in the summer, I have been taking Claritin for idiopathic hives, and I seem to have a sinus issue of some kind, and a bit of a cough, that has gone on for a while). Just yesterday I did an online checklist for health anxiety and I ticked all the boxes!
Does it seem possible that I could be helped by CBT? My mother has had some success with it + Zoloft for her OCD, but she is still doing most of her rituals, just feeling less anxious about them! I get the feeling, though, that she’s not always putting tonnes of work into it.
It is not only possible but extremely likely that CBT can help you. My sister also has an anxiety disorder, and hers focuses on her health. She has found CBT and the support group very helpful.
I would agree that your mother isn’t putting a lot of work into it. She doesn’t need the rituals, so if she’s still doing them, she still believes that she does. That tells me that she hasn’t got it yet.
I agree. I think part of deciding to work on something or not is the end result - are you avoiding things or feeling lousy every day? Then you probably want to work on that.
Unauthorized Cinnamon, how do I love thee? I must have missed this thread the first time around, which makes sense since it was right before Christmas. I have the same list you posted in your OP (or one very similar to it) on my front door. At one time, I actually bought two different workbooks, but procrastinated about starting them, and then I felt better, so I took them back! I would love to see this discussion continue, either here or on a private group somewhere.
Well, I’ve scheduled my assessment for two weeks time from now.
What should I expect in the assessment? Should I bring anything with me (other than the massive amounts of cash it costs )?
I’m actually quite excited about this. For the first time, I think, I’m seeing that being health-anxious does not have to be the way I am forever and ever.
That would be #5 (jumping to conclusions) on your original list? or #1 (all-or-nothing thinking)? or #10 (personalization)? I’m new at analyzing behavior this way, help me out here.
Yes, thank you. I missed this the first time around, and would very much like to be involved.
I haven’t been diagnosed as depressed or anything like that, but like most people I wrestle with things. And I’ve been totally geeking out on stuff like this. Not just CBT, but a bit of NLP and other stuff.
I’m feeling fucking awesome today because this morning I made a decision to. I think it’s so important to start off each day with gratitude.
I’d say go beyond accepting them. Embrace them enthusiastically. Live them. Feel them. Integrate them. They are a gift.
There’s a great exercise that I’ve been doing lately and it’s been an immense help. If I’m feeling down about something, and it’s causing me emotional pain, I find a quiet spot and close my eyes. I then feel the emotion as intensely as I can. Not in my mind, not in my heart, but in my body. Did you know that every emotion has a physical feeling in your body? I’ll objectify it and picture it without judging it. Instead of “I feel sad” or “I’m worried” (judgements) I’ll think “Purple ball the size of a golfball over my left eye” or “Yellow green cone at the base of my sternum.” No judgement, just observation. After a few minutes, it might move to another part of my body, or change shape or color, or evolve in a way that I don’t expect. Five or ten minutes later, it will probably dissapate altogether, and I’m usually left feeling very relaxed and at peace.
Yes! I definitely get tired of analyzing my feelings. It’s hard work, but the payoff is EXCELLENT. Like anything else, it gets easier as you go. First, as you get healthier, you’ll have less stuff to analyze. Second, your analysis will become somewhat “automated” so it will take less effort for the routine stuff.
At this point, I spend an awful lot of time patting myself on the back for dealing with things particular things in good ways, which is in itself annoying, because it means that stuff hasn’t become automatic enough that I don’t notice it, but it’s still kind of fun. Now that I’m thinking about it, there is a LOT of stuff that HAS become ingrained enough that I don’t notice it. Hm…I think I’ll ask my therapist if we can spend some time reviewing my successes. That should be fun.
As far as your last comment–if you’re getting the message that your feelings are not okay, then something’s wrong. Please talk to your therapist about this. Whatever your feelings are, they’re okay! They’re your feelings! CBT is about fixing your thought patterns, not your feelings, and giving you tools to cope with whatever your feelings are. With healthier thought patterns, you’ll end up having healthier feelings anyway.
An example: On Sunday night, I was feeling kind of down in the dumps, which is unusual for me. Even when I’m really depressed, I feel more numb than blue. I had a few good reasons for feeling down–I had done poorly at a tournament that day and I hadn’t gotten some stuff accomplished that I had wanted to that weekend (cleaning out my son’s room and putting in shelving). But I was more down than that should have made me. So I thought about it a little. First, I gave myself permission to feel down about the tournament. I had been feeling bad about feeling bad about it, which was downright silly. Feeling (reasonably) bad about that is good! One of my goals is to become more competitive because I feel that my lack of competitiveness in general is holding me back in a lot of areas. Second, I was able to look more clearly at the status of the room cleaning project. I was feeling like a big failure, but I realized that my goals were too lofty in the first place, that we had really gotten a lot done, that we had elected to spend some of the planned time doing other fun stuff that came up–a decision I was perfectly happy with, and that the whole thing isn’t at all time-sensitive anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s not done. AND I realized that I was really really hungry and that I’d feel better once I had had something to eat.
So the result is that I only felt a fraction as bad as I would have without the tools I learned in CBT. Instead of kicking myself for all this stuff, I thought “meh, I’ll feel better in the morning,” and had some dinner.
Then the next day I got my period. Oh! I always feel a little down the day before I get my period. I hadn’t even thought of that as a contributing factor, though I know that I should have. So in the future I’ll try to remember to do that, and I should probably try and keep track of my cycle anyway. I’m not kicking myself for not remembering, and I’m proud of myself for linking it to my period, because I didn’t even make that connection until my therapist pointed it out to me. I had just attributed those bad moods to personal failure on my part.
Okay, that was a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to express above.
I totally agree. I don’t know the details of your past, olives, but I really admire you for not letting it get the better of you, and in fact getting the better of IT! I enjoy reading your thoughtful posts. Your contributions to this sort of thread are invaluable.
Hey Daphne! Haven’t seen you around for a while.
I don’t know anything about health anxiety specifically, but as you know, stress has a major impact on health problems. (Which makes having health anxiety wonderfully ironic.) CBT is generally very good for anxiety, so it sounds like it’s worth a try for you. I can also tell you for sure though that CBT can seriously reduce your stress levels now and over the long term, so that should help with any current and future health problems.
ETA: tdn–that’s wild! Does anyone else do specific relaxation (or whatever) exercises?
I have so many that I’ve pretty much forgotten what they all are! And not all of them are for relaxing.
There is one that I don’t do nearly often enough, but when I do it and it “takes”, the feeling I get is amazing. I did it once last spring and I ended up walking around in a daze for about an hour, feeling like I was making love to the universe. It was trippy!
I did it at the beach, but it can be done pretty much anywhere, anytime. This might seem a little woo woo, but trust it and go with it.
Close your eyes. Stop thinking. Stop thinking about stopping thinking. Stop thinking about stopping thinking about stopping thinking. Thoughts come and go, like butterflies through your mind. Let them. Take a deep breath.
The past is an illusion. So is the future. The only reality is Now. Feel yourself being in your body. What does it feel like right now? Is there a breeze? What does it feel like on your skin right now? What do your clothes feel like on your skin? What does the sun feel like?
Take a deep breath. Don’t judge your feelings. Just observe what your body feels like at this exact moment.
What do you hear? Give a little inner Buddha smile to every sound. And let it pass. Observe without judgement. The sounds you just heard are already in the past, and the past is just an illusion. Come back to now.
What do you smell? Breathe it in consciously. Observe.
Cultivate the feeling of transparency. The breeze, sounds, smells, thoughts, and emotions pass through you. Observe them, smile at them, and let them pass. Time ceases to exist. Feel the eternal.
Open your eyes. Take it all in. Feel the colors. Observe without judgement. Stay in this place of relaxation as long as you’d like.
You might not "get it" the first time. It can take some practice. Some people spend their entire lives trying to get it. In fact an entire religion sprung up around it. The "trick" that helped me was to start by observing some small insignificant thing, and to picture myself as transparent. You might find that something completely different works for you.
What Green Bean was talking about (feeling blue and figuring out why) we call “using our tools.” I pick mine up and use them so automatically now that I rarely think about it - I was using them pretty consciously before going to the dentist last Friday, but that is a special circumstance.
I also like the idea of not judging your feelings. One thing I’ll tell myself when I am getting nervous about something (and oh yes, you’ll still get nervous about things - you’re still a human being, after all) is that isn’t it wonderful to be alive and have such strong feelings to remind you of it?
Another simple but very effective “trick” I figured out for deciding if a thought is negative or not is how it makes you feel - if a thought makes you feel better, it’s a positive one. If it makes you feel worse, chances are pretty good it’s a negative one that you could maybe work on making more realistic - like Green Bean’s thoughts about cleaning her son’s room - yeah, it didn’t all get done, but a lot did get done, and it wasn’t time sensitive anyway. That’s a more realistic thought than, “Crap, we didn’t get the room cleaned today, and today was the day it was supposed to be done.”
While we’re on the topic, watch out for your “shoulds,” “supposed tos,” and “have tos,” too - “I should be better at this,” “I’m supposed to be an adult now,” “I have to feel better right away.” Says who? You are where you are, and you’ll get where you’re going from there, not where you think you’re supposed to be.
That’s why I love the idea of feeling them fully, transforming them, and integrating them. I think that most people cope with bad feelings by trying not to feel them. Does that strike anyone else as trying to go through life half numb?
People don’t want to feel bad; I understand that, but what I have trouble getting my group members to understand is that life is a cycle; you don’t get bad without good. You feel bad for a while, then you feel good - how would you know what feels good if you never feel any bad? It all has a place in your life, but they want all the bad out. As the Buddhists would say anyway, bad and good is just judgement; a feeling is a feeling.
You’re right, it’s not for everyone. Intellectually, I think CBT is great – but it was disastrous for me in treating depression. For some reason, I was able to go through the mental exercise of identifying distortions, but the identification did not lead to emotional or psychological relief or release. Trust me, I did the work. I did the exercises. But I didn’t feel better. It’s like I had a divide in my brain between thinking about my feelings and feeling my feelings. There was a missing link. But I felt even worse when it didn’t work – which lead me to a truly terrifying place.
I did this while under psychiatric care, by the way, and was advised to try other methods when things didn’t go very well.
So, please, like the OP said, make sure you combine the work in this thread with other types of medical/psychological care. Just so you have someone else keeping tabs on your well being.
That does jibe a lot with how I feel when I’m anxious as well. I’ve not been depressed, but it seems to me that the way I’ve tried to ‘handle’ anxiety has been similar to what you say, to talk myself out of my anxious thoughts and feelings. So far, on my own, it hasn’t worked. What has worked the best, actually, were some breathing exercises I was taught by a psychologist. I also really enjoyed a Stress Management class I took in college, but I didn’t put as much into that as I could have, I think.
So what do you think went wrong? I truly believe that our logic and our emotions come from separate parts of our brains, and often enough they just don’t sync up. Trying to solve an emotion with logic can be a little like using a hammer to bake a cake.
What was the final outcome, and what worked (if anything) for you?
In my experience, when people find that trying to talk themselves out of their anxiety doesn’t work, it’s because they are not changing their negative thoughts into realistic thoughts; they’re trying to change them into what are basically untrue positive thoughts, and (no surprise) you don’t believe them. For example, if your negative thought is, “I really blew that. I can’t do anything right.” the replacement positive thought is not, “I’m great! I can do anything! This doesn’t matter!” The realistic positive thought is, “Well, that didn’t go as well as I hoped. I’ll figure out what went wrong and do better next time.”
The other thing about “handling” anxious thoughts is that sometimes all you’ve got in your bag of tools is acceptance - “This is how I feel right now. I won’t feel this way forever; I’ll be patient and it will pass like it always does.” You can’t wish anxiety away by telling yourself it isn’t what you’re feeling, because again, you won’t believe yourself.
I’d also like an answer to the question about how often to do the CBT exercises. I’ve been through CBT and found it useful, but have had trouble getting into a routine and actually doing the work
I’m not sure I agree with your “worse” positive thought, although I think it depends on the nature of what it is that went wrong and your general level of optimism and self-esteem.
I totally agree that the less cognitive dissonance is created the easier time you’ll have of making change. If the problem is that you suck at baseball and totally blew the last game, a poor positive thought would be “I hit ten home runs.” Your subconscious mind is going to know you’re lying and reject the suggestion. However if you imagine yourself connecting with the ball and hitting it out of the park, and doing it over and over again, you’ll see actual improvement in your batting average.
I do a lot of worse-case-scenario thinking and also a lot of self-bullying.
I am not in therapy right now (but I am on an NHS waiting list, OP disclaimer :)) and I am largely relying on Paul Gilbert’s Overcoming Depression to help me with CBT.
So far I have read chapters 6 and 7 (the first few chapters are theoretical background which he says it’s not necessary to read) and it’s helping quite a bit.
My thoughts and what I’ve gleamed from by this book
It’s helpful to write things down; trying to do CBT mentally I find my brain moves too fast and I can’t analyse my feelings properly
-After recognising a feeling and a belief, and what triggered it, I need to challenge it…I feel that some of the CBT I have done in the past didn’t incoporate this enough. Yoga is quite good for focusing on your thoughts but not particularly bothered with carrying out the CBT to its logical end. (I mainly do yoga for the physical benefits but there’s always a time where you lie down on the matt and think about your thoughts…I always get distracted)
-Challenging thoughts should incorporate the rational mind and the compassionate mind. So, your rational mind might look at the evidence for and the evidence against your perception that everything is shit/my partner hates me/I will never achieve anything. And the compassionate mind will understand that you feel this bad because you had a tough phone call/day at work/week but encourage you to look at what you’ve done well and try and hold onto that.
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