I have struggled with severe health anxiety since October of 2019. I’ve had mild health anxiety since I was like 11. This school year was the absolute height of my anxiety. I was miserable. But I started getting therapy in January and began to recover. In April I had almost no anxiety to speak of and I was so happy. But in the last week, I’ve started getting breathless whenever I try to sleep, and my GERD has flared back up. At this point, I cannot tell if my breathlessness is from a stuffy nose or anxiety, because I have the breathlessness during the day. It is so fucking frustrating to not be able to tell if a symptom is from anxiety or is something I actually need to get checked out. Looking back, pretty much everything I’ve worried about (heart palpitations, tachycardia, nausea, random body pains, headaches, trembling, breathlessness) is all caused by my anxiety in one way or another. I really don’t want to fall back into another anxiety spiral. This is my summer break, I’m supposed to be happy and healthy. Plus, I’m working for my dad in an office job that gives me hours and hours doing work that doesn’t really require a ton of brain power (it’s mostly repetitive). That means that I won’t be able to distract myself from my anxiety if it pops up during work. Along with all of that, my family does really try to comfort me when I’m freaking out. They just tell me that I’m fine and that nothing is wrong with me. I hate being treated like I’m crazy, because there’s always that thought of “what if it’s real and something is gonna happen to me because they wouldn’t let me go to the er for the fourth time this year?”  So yeah, if my health anxiety was a person i would fucking throw down.