Lorraines Story - WHAT IF?!

One of the things as an anxiety sufferer I struggle with is getting sucked in to a viscous cycle of worrying, the endless what if’s. What if I faint, what if I panic, what if I make a fool of myself. I've always been a bit of a worrier but I guess it got worse when I’d had my first baby, all of a sudden I didn't just have me to worry about, and the world of what if’s got even bigger. I would sometimes tell my what ifs to my partner, he never looked at me like I had 2 heads he would just try to reassure me that the chances of my worries actually coming true were really small, but when you’re anxious even a small chance of something happening is a worry. At times my what if’s were probably really quite frustrating for my partner, what if my headache is a brain tumour, what if we have a car crash, what if the world ends, how could he possibly answer these questions to a point that I’d be happy. So this was my life for about 4 years, a really emotionally draining and tiring 4 years, I realise not just for me but for the people around me. So how does a worrier survive in a world where there are no certainties, I've had to learn to be ok with the fact that I just can’t have control over everything , I have to stop being intolerant of uncertainty. All of this was a whole lot easier said than done, it didn't happen overnight, there’s no magic wand and I've had to learn techniques that I’ll probably always have to use. The one thing I have found out is that with anxiety it’s not a case of one treatment fixes everyone, I've had CBT in different formats with different people and it’s only now that I can look back and see how far I've come. For a long time I was really sceptical about CBT, I thought that I was just too stubborn and stuck in my ways to change my ways of thinking. The first and probably most helpful thing for me was identifying some of my behaviours and the worst behaviour for me was seeking reassurance. I’d seek reassurance in a few different ways, asking my partner, asking my mum and visiting good old Dr Google. As soon as I figured out I seek a lot of reassurance then I needed to be aware of how many times I was doing it. Something that helped me do this was practising mindfulness and learning to live in the now and not let my mind wander. So now that I know I shouldn't be asking for reassurance I stop myself, when I have picked my phone up to Google something I'm worried about I ask myself do I really need to do this, will I get an answer that will make me happy? Or if I am about to ask someone for reassurance I ask myself what would I say to someone if they were asking me for reassurance. These techniques have helped me massively and it helps me feel a bit more in control of my worrying.