I feel like my stress and health anxiety feed off of one another. When I feel something in my body that doesn’t seem right, I look it up and it fuels my fears even more. Then my stress response is triggered causing other symptoms that can be symptoms of pretty much anything. The more stress I feel, the more symptoms I feel causing more stress.. it’s a vicious cycle that I can’t break free from. For the last three nights I’ve been convincing myself that I am going to die in my sleep from complications. I’m trying to stay positive and distract myself but can’t seem to overcome this intense fear of dying. This condition is becoming an overbearing issue in my life. I’m a 23 year old female who should be out enjoying my youth. Instead, stress is causing me to experience GERD, which I am convincing myself is esophageal cancer. Every day it’s something different. I look up symptoms and make myself sick,, until I’m able to read enough and reassure myself it’s fine. My partner is having a hard time dealing with this and it is putting a strain on our relationship which also causes me anxiety. Not only do I worry about my own health, I also worry constantly about my loved ones. I just recently experienced some unexpected loss in my life which I believe is triggering a lot of this. It’s gotten to the point where I want to go to the doctors office and beg for clonazepam. The weirdest part about this all is that when I was engaging in self destructive behaviour so wasn’t worried about any of this at all.. now that I am taking care of myself, I am constantly worried about my health.