Health Anxiety and Somatic Hyper Focus (Episode 77)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Somatic Hyper Focus - That thing where an anxious person becomes hyper aware and hyper fixated on specific bodily sensations or bodily functions. This is a common issue seen in health anxiety, OCD, and panic disorder.
This week Drew and Josh are going into detail on somatic hyper focus. What does it look like? How do anxious people get stuck in this loop? What are the mechanisms at play? What tricks does the anxious mind (our friend the amygdala) employ to get us to remain focused and convinced that closely monitoring our bodies is a good idea?
We're talking about hyper focus on heartbeat, breathing, muscle twitches, stomach sensations, aches and pains, and a slew of other common somatic fixation targets. We're also talking about a way to conceptualize this issue that might help you turn away from it and learn through behavioral change and experience that its OK to not urgently analyze the results every time your frightened mind scans your body for signs of danger.
Of course, there's the usual dose of humor and silly music and sound effects to round out the discussion, along with a reminder that overcoming somatic hyper focus takes time and requires patience and self-compassion. Nobody fixes this problem overnight, so tune in, take what you can from this episode, and be nice to yourself as you address this disruptive and unwanted habit.
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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out Worry and Rumination Explained, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolveable problems.
https://bit.ly/worryrumination
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Josh andrew, thank you for your podcast. I'm Luca from Italy. So my anxiety disorder started |
| 0:07.9 | 12 years ago with, in a very clear week's way, nocturnal panic attacks, days of war, second panic |
| 0:14.0 | attack, full anxiety disorder. Now, I wanted to ask, in the beginning, I mistook the second panic attack as a heart attack. |
| 0:23.6 | Due to a physical sensation while running, I think I hurt a nerve in the back and it just shot pain in my body and I thought I was dying. |
| 0:33.6 | But in the following months, I developed very, to me, very scary sensations in my stomach, |
| 0:41.3 | for which I've done endless checks, always hoping to find an organic nature. |
| 0:47.3 | Now, I've checked off basically all the possible tests, and all of them, apart to some gastritis, all of them came up negative. |
| 0:57.0 | So in the end, I asked myself, are these sensations just normal sensation that I perceive as amplified and threatened just because I've been |
| 1:07.0 | scanning my chest so much. I think this is called somatic hypervigilance. I ended up asking |
| 1:13.9 | chat GPT if some of my symptoms were normal. Some of my, what I call symptoms were normal. |
| 1:20.7 | And chat GPT said, yes, this is a normal body sensation, not related to anxiety. Everybody has it. |
| 1:26.5 | But to me me that was that |
| 1:28.4 | still is very very upsetting I think willful tolerance is the key here too but can you speak |
| 1:35.0 | about somatic hypervigilance welcome to Disordered this is episode 77 of the podcast today |
| 1:43.8 | we're talking about health anxiety and |
| 1:45.4 | somatic hyperfixation. It is a thing. I'm Drew Lin Salata. I am a therapist practicing under |
| 1:50.9 | supervision in New York, in the U.S., specializing in the treatment of anxiety and anxiety disorders. |
| 1:55.7 | I am a three-time author on this topic, anxiety and anxiety disorders, a social media dude, an advocate, |
| 2:00.7 | an educator, former sufferer, anxiety disorders, a social media dude, an advocate and educator, |
| 2:01.6 | former sufferer, anxiety disorders, OCD and depression for many years in my life, on and off, |
| 2:06.1 | but better now, thank you very much, and one of the co-hosts of Disordered, who sit next to me. |
| 2:10.4 | I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh. I'm a psychotherapist based in the UK who |
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