Hypochondria Support Group
Hypochondria refers to excessive worry about having a serious illness. Hypochondria is often characterized by fears that minor bodily symptoms may indicate a serious illness, constant self-examination and self-diagnosis, and a preoccupation with one's body. Many individuals with hypochondriasis express doubt and disbelief in the doctors' diagnosis.
I am so terrified of dying. I think that is the root of all of this. I think it started with when I was a child. My mother is an atheist and had no problem telling us what that was and what she believed happened when we died. I don't think she was trying to scare me or hurt me, but she absolutely did. Now every bump, bruise, heart palpitation, ache or pain, I am convinced is something terminal. A couple days ago I had a stomach attack (which has happened to me before, pretty sure I have ibs or chron's or some sort of ibd at any rate) and I was laying in bed feeling crappy like I usually would during one of those, when I decided to take my temperature. It was 101! Which is not even EXTREMELY high. But I don't get fevers, and so my mind immediately went to thinkingI was going to die of spinal meningitis or sepsis. I almost went to the hospital but cannot afford another bill from there! I go at least 5 times per year. I know that my suffering is mental. My mental problems are even causing the physical problems that I have. I know the way to healing but am slacking on putting it into practice! Mindfulness and meditation is the only way to true freedom.
What do you think happens when you die? Did your mother say you lay in your grave and rot? Because that's not what happens to 'you'. That's what happens to what's left of you.
You is the bit that's alive. You is the bit that's conscious.
Your body is neither here nor there, just a machine to trundle you around, help you interface with other machines and hopefully connect with other 'you's'. It's an extraordinarily strong machine, powerful. When you look at the odds of you even being here, that should make you realise how strong you actually are. This process that's got you through the last ten million years to where you are today is a remarkably robust process. And you're in a remarkably robust vehicle. (your body.)
If you are scared of dying, you need to confront that fear. You can't let something your mother said when you were a child control your adult life: Mothers utter too many sentences, some of which you can't remember. You'll never be able to live, there'll always be a sentence uttered by someone that controls you.
Whenever I disagreed with my mother or was cross with her, my mother would argue that my father had turned me against her when I was five. it took me till my forties to say bullshit to that. Nonsense. Whatever he might have said when I was five, if I was still obeying that sentence, a robot, a puppet, controlled by his actions from 1974 forty years later? Then I may as well kill myself because I was not alive and had no free will.
It's our duty to reevaluate what we were told as children that often had huge emotional content at the time, and look at it again from another point of view, and put it to bed.
And I recommend you lying in bed, and saying 'to hell with it' and actually facing your fear of death. I see no problem at all with being dead. You won't be there to be upset. You don't lie there conscious in your grave. Your conscious has left. It's nonexistent, the way it was nonexistent before you were born.
Perhaps try to confront the world before you came into it. Does that upset you? A time when you had not existed yet? Because that's what's happening after you're gone. You won't have any problems. You won't have any woes or worries. Being dead is a non-event.