Something that I used to NOT want people to find out about me...

Was that I suffered from health anxiety. It was my dirty little secret. When it got really bad, I would convince myself that I had cancer. I used to scan my body every day for lumps, bumps and aches and my brain would start playing out some horrendous scenes in my head including me finding out that I had a terminal illness, me telling my daughters I was going to die and how my daughters would feel without me.

Exactly the kind of scenes you want in your head on a Tuesday morning whilst brushing your teeth.

These thoughts would terrify me, which would drain all of the positivity from out of me and would make me feel immensely sad and scared.

The reason being that my brain didn’t know the difference between what was happening in reality and what was happening in my imagination. So I was feeling EVERY scene as if I was there.

These types of thoughts would plague me for weeks. I’d try everything to get rid of them, I would journal, meditate, distract myself and I’d even go for check-ups.

Nothing worked in the long term.

I’d be good for a few months, then I’d be triggered (usually hearing about someone else being ill) and I would start checking myself again and fearing the worst, and I’d be back in the loop.

That was until I had the revelation that my anxiety was borne out of my not-enoughness.

I had a great life, BUT I didn’t feel that I deserved it. I felt that because I didn’t deserve it, something was going to go wrong.

My brain convinced me that what was going to go wrong was my health, and my anxiety was a way of being on high alert for something bad happening to me.

Knowing this, I decided to try a new method for battling my anxiety.

I decided to go on the journey of making myself feel enough and deserving of the life that I had.

I had no idea where the fuck to start. None of the self-help books that I had read said DO THIS and you will feel good enough. My therapist wouldn’t even tell me what to do!

So I started to practice ‘self-care’ whilst simultaneously beginning to question everything that my inner critic was saying and directing me to do, and in doing so I realised that MY ANXIETY WAS COMING FROM MY F*CKING INNER CRITIC!

My inner critic would tell me things like;

‘try and be liked by everyone!’,

‘you might feel good now, but something is going to go wrong’

‘there is something seriously wrong with you, you should panic’

‘don’t rock the boat’,

‘if you don’t have a jam-packed diary you’re a nobody’,

‘you’re going to get found out at work’,

‘you’re paid too much for what you do’

The things that my inner critic would say to me were VILE and it was holding me to ransom every day, saying if you don’t DO THIS you’re not a good person or if you don’t check this out you will die (sounds very dramatic I know!).

Despite being a self-care cynic I started to feel lit up by the little pockets of doing something JUST FOR ME.

Nothing flashy went down, my self-care was just a quick yoga session, a podcast whilst showering and commuting, taking in a view or taking the time to have a quiet snuggle with my pets.

I noticed that the more I made time for me, doing things that made me feel good, the less time I needed to spend seeking external validation AND more importantly THE LESS ANXIOUS I FELT.

I’ve been pretty much anxiety free for about 4 years now. Sure I get a teeny trigger every now and again but I know that it’s because I’ve not been looking after myself enough and that I need to get really kind with myself.

Self-care saved me.

That’s why I declare that from now on it should be known as SELF-PRESERVATION.