The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

Hello.

What's up you guys?

Welcome to this week's episode of Don't Think.

Podcast for anybody whose brain is kind of like a slot machine and every time you

pull the lever you get one million chances to have a negative thought and one chance to have a

positive thought. Does this sound familiar? Honestly, it feels like lately my slot machine is jammed.

It's flashing error and spitting out intrusive thoughts nonstop. There is actually

no chance to have a positive thought. It's just all negative. In fact, I don't know if you guys

will relate to this. Who am I kidding? You will because you're me and I'm you. But my health

anxiety has been going off the wall lately.

And the thing with health anxiety is that it's this trickle effect, like this loop you get stuck in,

where the more you think you're dying or have some kind of crazy health defect, the more

anxious you get about it. And the more anxious you get about it,

and the more anxious you get about it, the more symptoms appear and prevail because of the anxiety.

So, for example, lately, I get the most random symptoms lately. My hand has been hurting so bad. My middle finger in particular. Yes, I know. My middle finger hurts. Like, I sound like a two-year-old. But it does. Every night I wake up in the middle of the night and my hand is cramped and I have to massage my finger and I go, what the fuck's going on? I think it's honestly from holding my phone probably 14 hours a day, which is my average screen time. It's a workplace injury for me. But anyway, we've got that. Okay. And then I'm getting

these headaches lately. And it's even today, even now, like I'm living on Tylenol and Advil

around the clock. I'm just taking it like candy. But I get these headaches and they feel so intense. And I've had headaches like this before and I've never died. But every time I get them, I'll convince myself I have a brain tumor or I have cancer. I have something seriously wrong with me. And then the more I think about that, I'll start to get really anxious about it. And then I start to feel like lightheaded all the time and I'm dizzy and I'm tired and I'm not well. I'm really, really not well. But really it's like the anxiety.

Even as I say that, I'm like, it's not the anxiety. It's the diseases. So that's where we're at.

That's how we're doing today. And it's really on brand with what we're going to talk about

for this episode, which is

challenging negative thinking. I do not know where I think I get off talking about

...