I can’t live a single day of my life without thinking about death. Media, conversation, and even just seeing an old person just triggers this thought that one day when I grow old, everything I’ve ever experienced will just be taken from me. In turn, I have so much anxiety when it comes to health and every little pain or discomfort has me googling the symptoms. I don’t know how to handle this but it’s gotten so bad
I do struggle with this big time. One thing that has helped is getting rid of social media, that way I am not assaulted by random triggering reels or stories and it helped me stay more present and find joy in my day to day life instead of doom scrolling and then spiraling with ocd. The other thing which is extraordinarily hard for me is doing my homework assigned by my therapist. I am not to research anything within the first hour of the onset of my health related anxiety and just sit with the uncertainty. It is so so hard for the first 30 minutes but by the hour, I find that I my anxiety is reduced and I push myself to stretch out that delay in research even longer. Sitting in that discomfort and uncertainty has helped me establish a new trust with myself that I know and can count on my body to send me real signals when something urgent come up and that I can parse out when they are just obsessions. Now that I have had a lot of practice with this, I do still get the buzz of anxiety with somatic sensations or vice verse and the desire to research it but I have found that my anxiety and fear is significantly reduced from practicing that delay and establishing that trust with myself and not my ocd brain. These feelings are so scary and hard to deal with and I want to thank you for sharing. It does get better. I am rooting for you!
I read that death is one of the beautiful things about our bodies, that someday when it's no longer to our advantage to be in this body, it will release us. I liked that way of looking at it.
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