For those with health anxiety...

So, I have GAD and one of my biggest anxiety triggers is health related stuff. Despite having a constant fear of illness/injury I find myself obsessed with watching medical shows? I'm just wondering if anyone else who has health related anxiety does the same thing? I think for me it is a case of thinking that the more knowledge I have about medical conditions the less anxious I will be about them. This obviously doesn't work but I still do it anyway . I suppose my fear of the unknown is greater than that of illness/injury.

Hello retro chic: I don't have the proclivity you have. But, years ago, I worked in a number of different hospitals. And I did tend to find myself imagining that I had every malady I happened to come into contact with! I don't do this type of work anymore. In fact, I'm now retired. But I do find that anytime I develop a new ache or pain of any significance (which is pretty often at my age) I start to wonder what it might be a sign of.

By the way, I've been watching a TV series on our local Public Broadcasting System (PBS) station (U.S.A.) titled: "The Brain with David Eagleman". Eagleman is a brain researcher. In one of the segments, Eagleman talked about individuals who watch scary movies. He pointed out that the fright that one experiences while watching a scary film activates some of the same centers in the brain that are activated when one experiences real life pain. And the subconscious mind does not have the ability to distinguish between the two. But it does control more of who we are, & what we do, than we would ordinarily imagine to be the case. So, if you tend to have significant levels of anxiety over medical-related issues to begin with, watching medical shows may be negatively stimulating areas of your brain to which you have no conscious access. Maybe you'd be better of watching sit-coms instead! By the way, my personal predilection is for the English murder mysteries they show on PBS.

The health anxiety is the part that effects me most, I think I'm bordering on hypochondria sometimes and I hate it. I've found that the more knowledge I have the worse it is. I thought the same way you did, that the more I knew the more I could rule out, but I found instead it made any little ache or pain trigger my anxiety and made me think I had some terrible illness. I've spent hours reading websites and all it has done for me is made me more paranoid. I've been off of those websites for a few weeks now and I have noticed my health anxiety has decreased a bit. I think when we inundate ourselves with information like that then it's on the top of our minds and can't really help ourselves from obsessing over it.