Health Anxiety: Check Your Thoughts

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. - Elizabeth Gilbert

Now that you have had a chance to do some attention training we can now get to the nitty-gritty, your thought process. As previously mentioned what we think, impacts how we feel. However often time we are unaware of our thought process.

To help you become more aware of your thoughts you want to take the following steps: 1. Identify your unhealthy thought

2. Challenge your unhelpful thought

3. Develop more realistic thoughts

This week we will work on helping you to identify your unhealthy thought(s).

To help you do that you want to ask yourself a couple questions next time you experience an episode of health anxiety

* What am I worrying about? * What conclusions am I jumping to?

Once you have answered these questions underline the thought that is most bothersome to you and goes ahead and rate how much you believe this thought to be true 0-100%

You will then go on to ask yourself the following questions: * When I have these thoughts how do I feel? * Rate the intensity of the emotion using the following scale 0-100% * What physical sensations do I notice?

Go ahead and take some time practicing doing this first. As mentioned before you often are unaware of your thoughts, and you can't change what you are not aware of.