The GAD and Health Anxiety Combo: Experiencing Symptoms Even When You Aren’t Anxious and Having a Brain That Tells You That You Are Dying

I remember being a teenager, in my room, worrying about yet another symptom and feeling deep feelings of despair and frustration wash over me as I asked for the millionth time “Why do I have to deal with this?!”

I would think about other people my age, enjoying their life, and feel like my youth was passing me by as all I did was worry. 

While my symptoms seemed to flit from one to the next, some liked to linger a little longer than others and muscle twitching was just one example. 

I won’t go deep into that here, I have a separate post diving into that horrible time of my life, but the fear that I felt was truly indescribable. 

I walked around always feeling afraid. 

Either because I was worrying about a very specific symptom or because I was anticipating the next one. 

That’s a major theme with both health anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder; anticipation. 

With health anxiety we have come to expect that there will always be something, and so, when we seem to be going through a lull period, we still feel on edge, as we just know there will be something soon. 

You may find yourself often thinking there’s always something with health anxiety!

Or you may currently be in a spiral, worrying about something specific, and you’re anticipating what the doctor will say, if the symptoms will get worse, on and on it goes. 

Then we add GAD into the mix, you know, just to spice it up a little 🙄

One of the symptoms of gad is an unexplained sense of anticipation, like a sense of impending doom. 

We feel like something is coming, but we have no idea what it is and so our brain tries to make sense of it any way it knows how, and this may come in the form of telling you that you must be psychic and sensing something coming.

I actually thought I was psychic when I’d get this impending doom feeling and surprise, surprise, I’d then obsess over it, to the point I’d feel physically ill with fear. 

Oh, how I wish I had known just how common this feeling is with generalized anxiety disorder. The truth was that I didn’t know I had gad and I walked around for many more years before even hearing the term for the first time. 

Don’t underestimate how physical GAD really is

Anxiety IS extremely physical and causes intense physical symptoms.

It’s not just a racing heart and shaking hands, symptoms that may make sense in terms of anxiety.

It’s also really strange symptoms like constant dizziness, head pressure, weird throat symptoms and many, many more.

I know how hard it is to believe it’s “just anxiety” when you are dealing with some really strange symptoms that you can’t make sense of, but trust me when I tell you that anxiety causes a heap of strange symptoms and I am pretty sure I have experienced every one, so that’s fun 🙃

Why do we experience symptoms even when we aren’t anxious or on a “good day”

I think we tend to think that we may only experience symptoms during major stressful moments or during a panic attack. 

But when your body is flooded with stress hormones 24/7, and your body is in almost permanent fight or flight mode, you may experience symptoms to some extent all the time. 

They may just become more intense during panic.

Stress hormones cause inflammation in the body and, when we are stressed out long-term, this takes a massive toll on our adrenal glands and soon you may experience adrenal fatigue or burnout that can cause many anxiety-type symptoms and leave you feeling horribly exhausted and on edge. 

I go deeper into adrenal fatigue and all the adaptogens that can help in my Anxiety A to Z Encyclopedia. 

I was dizzy to some degree non-stop, I had constant muscle twitching, shortness of breath, fatigue, a racing heart, and a knot in my stomach. These were just a handful of my symptoms. 

How do I know if it’s serious or just anxiety?

I understand that it can be really scary and confusing, as anxiety symptoms often mimic serious conditions (thanks, Google!) and anxiety can cause allergy-type symptoms too due to increased inflammation. 

Of course, if you have been diagnosed with anxiety by your doctor then that is already a major indication that what you are experiencing is anxiety, and those scary thoughts telling you otherwise are all part of the anxiety.

One thing I can say is that anxious thoughts are loud. Your natural intuition is often clouded by those loud, scary thoughts, so when you feel those symptoms come up and take over, and you feel yourself starting to spiral, the best thing you can do is to sit quietly with yourself and put all of your attention on your breathing.

I know that breathing may seem like a small and insignificant thing when it feels like you are drowning in anxiety, but it’s one tool that really helped me tremendously in my own journey.

That is when I stopped dismissing it and actually made it a daily practice.  

Starting to find ways to connect to your body will allow you to better understand your body so you’ll naturally know when a symptom is related to anxiety. 

Alternate nostril breathing is one of my favorite techniques for panic, as well as simply breathing slowly in and out through my nose only.

This helps to streamline the air coming in and out of my body to avoid taking in too much shallow air that can cause dizziness, face tingling and even headaches and chest pressure. 

OCD goes hand in hand with health anxiety

This makes things even more difficult.

It’s hard enough feeling the immense fear that comes with health anxiety, but OCD goes hand in hand with health anxiety, as well as death anxiety OCD, and it may make you feel like you are losing your mind. 

Not only did my OCD cause constant compulsions aka checking, checking and checking some more, not to mention the Google rabbit hole, but it also caused me to believe that everything was a sign or omen and the intrusive thoughts were horrifying.

Read all about how OCD affected me in this blog post <3

OCD is known as the doubting disorder, as you never trust yourself or even any outside reassurance you receive, as your brain has other stories to tell. 

If you weren’t doubting then you wouldn’t have health anxiety, it’s all part of it, unfortunately.

Frequency illusion

You’re worried about a symptom or illness then start seeing it everywhere and think this has to be a sign/bad omen. 

It’s called frequency illusion. It’s literally just your brain looking to gather more information because it thinks that’s what you want. Your brain thinks it’s helping you. It’s not a sign, it’s just your brain doing what it does best.

Also, something worth mentioning here is that when you interact with any kind of illness video or any video that is triggering for your health anxiety, the algorithm will then think you want more of this content and soon these videos will pop up constantly.

This is not a sign, it truly is just the algorithm. Just watching the video counts as interacting so do your best to scroll away.

Health anxiety makes us think EVERYTHING is serious

When we suffer with health anxiety we are constantly feeling our body and checking over and over. 

We’re human, we have natural lumps and bumps and moles and whatever else. The more we keep poking and prodding, the more likely we ARE going to feel muscle tissue or a lymph node, but this doesn’t immediately mean it’s something bad.

Health anxiety is not logical

Logic flies out of the window when fear takes over so one of the best ways to break down overwhelming fear is to let some logic seep back in.

However, when you’re triggered, you need to let those initial overwhelming fear waves subside before you can start to think more clearly about the situation. 

The trick is to not let those initial spikes of fear dictate your next steps. 

What I mean by this is that you don’t want to act impulsively when fear is running the show. 

My main compulsion when I was triggered was to hop onto Google or Reddit, hoping for reassurance, even though I knew I was not likely going to find that comfort I was so desperately seeking. 

In the moment, when you are in a blind panic about something, it can feel almost impossible to hold yourself back from looking up your symptoms, but I ask you to try your best to wait at least a few minutes. 

My stomach would drop, my vision would blur and I’d be physically shaking while typing in the Google search bar, yet I could not seem to hold myself back. 

While you may still be terrified a few minutes later, the fear would have subsided to some extent, as our anxiety can only peak for so long. 

I talk about how health anxiety affected me recently and how illogical it can be in my most recent podcast episode. 

I know that the Google cycle is one that keeps us stuck, but I also know it’s incredibly hard to break.

I ask you to please come to my Instagram or TikTok page when you are triggered or use my Anxiety A to Z Encyclopedia to look up anything you need.

I also share all of my health anxiety stories and tools in my latest book, Health Anxiety is Ruining my Life! which pairs well with my Anxiety A to Z to give you all the info and tools you need in your health anxiety journey. 

I hope this has helped to bring some relief for you and has helped to remind you what a mental, physical and emotional toll anxiety can have on you. 

I recommend browsing through my other blog posts, as well as having a listen to my podcast where I share more of my story and tools with you. 

I know this is easier said than done, but try to drop all expectations and allow yourself to feel how you feel. 

When I felt good, my brain just kept going on a loop: 

“How long is this going to last”

“What if my anxiety comes back while I am out” and on and on.

Of course these thoughts quickly brought my anxiety on because I hadn’t allowed myself to enjoy feeling good and I was putting pressure on myself and trying to control it. 

You need to say, “you know what? I feel good right now and I am going to enjoy it. If I feel anxious later or in the next minute, that is okay, I will deal with it then.”

When we try to push it away, it likes to creep in, but when we accept how we feel moment to moment, we let our body know that we are safe and you’ll start to experience less intense symptoms. 

I share my story from beginning to end, living with gad, panic disorder and health anxiety, through my worst days, my meds experience and how I finally started to move forward in my first book, Help! Why am I so Anxious?!

If you’d like all three of my books then consider my book bundle, as you’ll save $42 😊

Hang in there okay. All you can do is continue taking it one day at a time, one day at a time. 

Sending love, always.