How do I stop googling?

I have significant health anxiety...any little thing I feel I tend to google the symptom and that only leads to panicking which eventually leads to a panic attack. My questions is, how do you stop yourselves from googling symptoms?

If I have the urge to google I try my best to search out things that make me feel better, and not things that further worry me. Instead of just googling "chest pain" ill google "how does stress/anxiety cause chest pain". That way I get results that are more specific. The first type of search will bring up tons of web sites about heart attacks while the second brings up resources and information about anxiety and more likely causes of my issues. For me, I do my eat to get google to prove to me that there are tons of benign causes for my aches and pains so that I stop worrying about the scary stuff. I try not to click the scary stuff! Doing it this way satisfies my need to google without increasing my worry.

Good luck, it can be a tough habit to break. It's too easy to google. Sometimes I think the internet is one is the worst things a person with health anxiety should have access too lol.

AG84,

Rather than spend your time and efforts on something that is going to ultimately make you feel more anxious...

Focus instead on disciplining yourself to seek and work on self-help when you are tempted to google symptoms.

Here are two great sources of help to get you started. (there are also great book recommendations for health anxiety help in our Resources.) If you will go through them and do the suggested exercises for recovery, you will start to feel better.:)

Health Anxiety - A Self Help Guide:

 

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hypochondria/pages/introduction.aspx

Helping health Anxiety

http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/resources/infopax.cfm?Info_id=53

 

Let us know how it goes!

S.C.

I guess I am a veteran of anxiety. I asked myself how and why did I stop googling my symtpoms. And the answer is that I am "googled" out. I have googled each symptom that I ever had probably over 1000 times. Eventually all the same old stuff kept coming up so I just quit.

Please don't take that as advice. Learn from my mistake and leave the diagnosing to your doctor. I added a lot of unwarranted stress and anxiety by googling my symtpoms. It was almost an obsession.

Good avice above from the other members. Wishing you the best of luck!