Health anxiety is not pleasant to live with, and it’s not easy to stop either. If you have this anxiety disorder then you already know all this. And you probably also know that the traditional treatments for health anxiety almost never work.
The reason that most treatments fail is because they don’t address the root-cause of your health anxiety.
So what is the root-cause?
It’s adrenaline. The reason that adrenaline causes so many problems for you is because you worry all the time. And your constant worry means your body never relaxes – not even for a second. Being so full of worry and stress causes adrenaline to be released constantly, and it’s more than your body can get rid of.
The answer is to do something to get your excess adrenaline levels back to normal, and the way to do this is to use what I call “Anxiety Timeouts.”
An anxiety timeout is simply a period of a few minutes where you get your anxiety to stop or decrease. If you can create enough of these short anxiety timeouts during the day your body can relax long enough that your adrenaline levels will begin to fall and your health anxiety will become less severe.
The good news is, anything can be used as an anxiety timeout. If it helps you relax for even one or two minutes then it’s working. Some anxiety timeouts you could use are:
Yoga
Meditation
Taking a bath
Taking a walk
Listening to music
So use the above ideas as anxiety timeouts, along with your own ideas, as often as you can throughout the day. You’ll notice that the more anxiety timeouts you include in your day, the better your health anxiety will become.