Anxiety - #165

Hello! I’m 18 years old, and I think I might be dealing with anxiety. It all started about three months ago, and since then, the symptoms keep changing. I feel like it all began after I got food poisoning. My family and I were on vacation in Goa, and towards the end of the trip, I suddenly felt really sick. I couldn’t eat much, felt nauseous, but the worst part was that I couldn’t actually throw up. There was this strange discomfort under my ribs, like I wanted to lift something inside. My family didn’t take it seriously and didn’t give me any medicines—they just laughed it off. In that awful state, I had to endure a 15-hour car ride back home with six people in the car. When I started feeling somewhat better (though I think my panic attacks had already started by then), I made an appointment with an eye specialist at a private clinic. I’ve always been super anxious about visiting doctors, always fearing they’d find something serious like cancer. The eye specialist mentioned that I might have high intraocular pressure due to a growth in my head and suggested an MRI. That’s when my fear for my health really started spiraling. During the MRI, I was trembling like crazy, and even though everything turned out fine, that sense of relief only lasted a week before my anxiety took over again. Initially, I lost a lot of weight, constantly afraid that my heart would just stop beating since it was racing at 100 beats per minute. I then took Passionflower for about two weeks, which calmed me down a bit, and I stopped fearing the sensations I had before. But after a while, I became terrified that I was developing schizophrenia. I scoured the internet, trying to find an explanation for what was happening to me. At first, I was convinced it was a brain tumor and that the MRI had missed it somehow. Then I became convinced it was schizophrenia because I felt so different—so trapped in my physical sensations. Those sensations turned into dizziness; it felt like I was about to collapse, though the world around me wasn’t spinning. It was just a feeling. Then, that dizziness turned into something else. Now, I can’t seem to control my thoughts, which keep imagining the worst possible scenarios. It’s like my mind is trying to convince me I have every illness imaginable. For example, I was in the shower, and suddenly, my thoughts made me believe I was losing my mind and drowning. Or when my mom talks to me, I start imagining myself making horrible faces at her in my mind, and I have to hold myself back from actually doing it. I feel like I’m on the verge of passing out any moment, as if it’s just about to happen… Honestly, panic attacks have been with me for a while, chasing me for years, but they used to be infrequent and not as intense. I thought they were just because of fatigue. My breathing would get out of rhythm, and I’d feel this strange fear, but I wasn’t afraid of the fear itself, so it would pass quickly. I still don’t understand how I’ve become this trapped in my own mind. I feel like I’m wasting the best years of my life, struggling every day with something I can’t even fully understand. It’s not like I’ve had so much stress that it should hit me THIS hard. And I just can’t seem to tell my mind to “stop” and make it listen. To be honest, even now, I’m not entirely sure that this isn’t schizophrenia or something else serious. Though, I did get a complete blood test done just a day ago, and everything came back normal.