How to stop intrusive thoughts?
 

I know that all (including my wife ) will say that this is most likely related to Anxiety.

Unfortinately, to the person that the symptoms are happening too, ME, they dont feel life anxiety.

i have had a horrible weekend. I have been trying to meditate and stay positive but currently my throat is so useless i can barely swallow water.

This has made my life a living hell. Cough drops dont help and i cant escape the feeling that someone is choking me.

At this point i find myself wishing i could rewind to 5 dys ago when my legs were my biggest issue and the Difficulty swallowing was non-existant.

Dont really knwo where to go from here. Already e-mailed my neuro but i am sure she will dimiss it as well.

in my (brief)positive moments, i agree with the doc and my wife that this is jsut Acid reflux and anxiety causing my throat issues.

The rest of the time i am scared that i have ALS oo MS. How is one supposed to fight intrusive thoughts when you have constanting have intrusive physical symptoms.

How about using medical science to help you build facts to over-rule your intrusive thoughts? ALS is extremely rare. MS is also rare. You know you suffer miserably with anxiety.

There is a saying in medicine, When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. ALS and MS are zebras. Anxiety is the 1500 pound Clydesdale horse in the room.

There are some neck and upper back injuries that can cause inflammation in the throat and esophagus. Been there, done that. Esophageal Refux can also cause this. AND, Esophageal Refux can be caused by ANXIETY.

I suggest you ask your doctor for a script for Paxil or some such SSRI to reduce your anxiety. Stay away from the benzos. Too many side-effects to encourage your anxiety. Paxil will just leave you with no libido, with ED, possibly insomnia, possibly nausea.

Or, you can make intelligent thought choices.

Your choice.

My best to you.

CW,

I feel your pain, truly. This is so hard to deal with when you have physical symptoms that have psychological effects. I'm right there with you. What was troubling me just a few days ago has switched gears and wiped me out.

I wish I had more encouraging words but all we can do is get through one day at a time. Like you, I truly hope tomorrow will be a little better. :)

thanks
 

Thanks for your kind words.

Dear CW21,

I have just finished a bout of councelling. Her last words to me were obvious but potent. I think they may help you.....

"Every thought we have results in a physical reaction".

The trouble is, yes you can control these thoughts to a point but then the subconscious takes over and we start to experience symptoms with no seeming connection to thoughts.

Please practice for a few mins a day concerntrating on your breathing, become aware of how you feel when you think.
You have gone past the point of control over your body temporarily but you will get it back. For now deal with your physical horrid symptoms and remember what you have been through already.
Your body does not need to experience any more disturbing thoughts.

Take care

You cannot "stop" or "control" intrusive thoughts; trying to do so only makes them much stronger. The stronger your reaction to a thought, the more like it is to magnify in power and stay with you.

Let's say an intrusive thought pops up. Now you have a choice. You can treat the thought as if it is a real concern--that you have disease x--and surf the internet in an effort to reassure yourself that you don't have disease x. This is obsessive-compulsive behavior and will almost certainly make your anxiety worse--not better--because you will not be able to definitively convince yourself that you do NOT have disease x.

As an alternative, you can treat the intrusive thought as exactly what it is--an intrusive thought. I like to think of these thoughts as "mental noise" or "mental static." ACCEPT the thought and ACCEPT the possibility that you DO have disease x and that there is nothing you can do about it. Find an activity to distract yourself, but whatever you do, don't try to stop or control the thought. You'll end up spiraling downward.

This isn't easy and it takes practice, which is why I recommend in another post that you make an appointment with a psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders.

I reread my previous post and it sounds harsher than I meant it. I try to be firm on this issue because I had years of my life destroyed by panic and OCD before I learned how to treat it. And the longer one waits to treat an anxiety disorder, the more difficult it becomes.

Check out this site. It may be helpful:

http://www.ocfoundation.org/whatisocd.aspx

Maybe you just need to really accept, I mean really accept, that the anxiety disorder itself is not your fault.

You're not choosing to feel this anxiety. Whenever someone tells me I'm being anxious I feel like part of that sentence includes blame, so I tend to disregard what they're saying. I feel like shouting, "I'm not choosing to make myself crazy, thank you very much! This could be REAL you know!" And then I'm stuck on a train of proving my anxiety is justified. Not a good focus.

So remove the blame and accept that for whatever reason (I'd guess PCS obviously) your brain is wired on some high voltage anxiety setting. Fact.

That is not your fault. And when people notice your anxiety they are not telling you something you don't know, deep down. And they're not blaming you either. It's just a fact, like I have brown hair. Or I have brown eyes. I have an anxiety disorder. No one can reset that for you, so think of it as a factory setting. At least for now.

So what is your job? Your job is to learn how to accept this high voltage anxiety setting in a way that no longer disrupts your quality of life. That job is something you CAN control. Does that make sense?

You don't get to control when the anxiety hits. You control the response, that's all. It may never totally eradicate the anxiety attacks but you'll notice it builds your confidence. In turn, the attacks should become less bothersome because you're not fueling the adrenal furnace that keeps them coming.

Look up PMR (progressive muscular relaxation) or do deep breathing, until you can calm enough to rest. When settled down sometime tomorrow, see if you can get your wife to call around to find a counsellor who does CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy, which is what I went through years and years before this injury of mine and I still use the techniques to this day, drug free so far. I had gone through PTSD as a young woman)

Incidentally what Mark said to you was a form of CBT... Going through the least to most likely scenarios and letting you choose what's most logical. It isn't fluffy, it sounds uncaring at times, but it works. It disengages my "chicken little" tendencies to have a firm, fact finding talk with myself.

Here's a glimpse of what I was like:
Phoning husband. He doesn't answer.
Phone again. No answer
No answer on 3rd try
Hands sweating, throat dry, heart hammering
Try again no answer
What if something happened
No answer
Omg something happened to him
Heart racing legs weak body shivering stomach cramping
No answer
He's hurt! He's been in an accident! Or he's mad! Why would he be mad at me?
Etc etc etc until I was sick and couldn't be talked out of it.

So irrational, right? Ok so the CBT would take me though scenarios. All scenarios of why the phone was unanswered. Then I had to rate them. What is the most likely reason husband didn't answer? He was with a client.

I liken anxiety attacks to lions, and we're the lion tamers.

Sometimes medicine helps to get us over the humps while we learn the techniques, so you may benefit from medication... but NOT learning the techniques is just not an option. The work must be done to deprogram that level of anxiety, in my experience. I'm no expert, I'm just sharing what I've observed.

Very good MsRrio.

I'll add a simple bit. Many times the anxiety is the result of simple triggers. Learning to recognize these triggers so they can be avoided is important. I have never found a way to over-rule the trigger. That is why they are called triggers. They let go on your anxiety system very quickly.

The most common trigger is auditory. Next would likely be visual. Either of these make other anxieties take over, like worry etc.

So, even though a auditory trigger seems to not be connected to a worry or obsessing anxiety, all the brain needs is a little auditory trigger to push you over the edge to get consumed by the other anxieties.

A seldom mentioned trigger is ill fitting clothes or scratchy tags, etc. They are like that dripping faucet that never lets you relax. Others in your family or environment are rarely supportive of reducing these triggers. They just seem so far fetched. You try to explain them and they say you are making things up.

I have found some ways to explain most of my triggers. If anybody has a trigger they are struggling to understand so they can explain them to friends and family, post them here. We can try to help with explanations.

Biy, that was not as simple as I thought it would be. I guess I am obsessing. LOL

My best to you all.

Well, for me the answer was medication. So I would say, get thee to a psychiatrist.

Thanks so much!
 

I am learning much more about myself everyday here and i attribute some of these moments to my Neurofam-

I am still in denial (working on acceptance) on how these physical symptoms can be caused by anxiety.

I am now realizing that i do have a big anxiety problem........keep in mind that i was always the guy who felt like i was in control of everything.

I am slowly realizing that my anxiety is most likely the cause of the majority of my "new" symptoms"! Even though its so hard to wrap my mind around the thought of anxiety causing swallowing difficulties.

For example:
I am a really good "worse case scenerio" person. I think in the Anxiety world its called Catastrophizing! Before my concussion i had no idea about MS or ALS but when i heard on the news that a Hockey player got MS, i started googling the symptoms.

Prior to googling, i had no unusual symptoms. SHortly after, my skin was itching and some if not all of the MS symptoms started showing up. Same happened with ALS.

Currenty i have difficulty swalloing and ironicly enough, i jsut read about that sypmtom two days before i got it.

If this is......sorry, Since this IS anxiety causing or exaserbating most of my sysmptoms i am amazed at how powerful anxiety can be.

Is the Mind really that powerful that it can manifest symptoms?

Yes.

Go easy on yourself and don't feel guilty that you're in a bit of denial or having trouble wrapping your head around this. Anxiety is calling the shots right now and you can't be expected to catch up so quickly. So it's ok and it's normal to question just how much physicality that anxiety can cause.

But yes it can cause physical symptoms. Check out your PM's for my heart problem story. (All caused by anxiety)

Having anxiety doesn't mean every single thing under the sun is caused by it either, but it merely should be on the list of causes and considered a strong probable cause for most new and especially "hard to describe" or "weird" symptoms.

Be kind to yourself. You like to be in control as you say, so it's no wonder this is really difficult on you. That's ok. We're all trying to help and no one will lose patience that you haven't instantly been converted or cured :) be good to yourself, distract yourself with something that relaxes you and invest in some deep breathing time ok? Take care... Be patient with that lion, takes a while to tame them...

Some time ago I came across a line of videos made by Ajahn Brahm a Buddhist monk. Now, as an atheist, I was sceptical at first. But it seems like Buddhist psychology actually have a place in western medicine. Now I couldn't find the exact video I wanted, but take a look a this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpFPVYP92CM

It teaches you how to create some space between you and your thoughts. This will help with your anxiety as it prevents the sympathetic nervous system from reacting. Its really not a problem with your thoughts, rather its your reaction to your thoughts.
Give it a good chance. Sometimes he tend to speak in metaphors so don't take everything he says literally :)

Congrats to you all to often it can take a long time for a person to even begin to understand that an emotional component is involved. PCS is a long recovery! Even my own pcp told me the medical society takes too long to recognize it and does a poor job to treat it.

I'm going to make this short because reading about other people's intrusive thoughts used to be a trigger for mine.

About a year ago, I suffered from horrible intrusive thoughts. I found that taking Ativan, which is a benzodiazepine, made them go away. HOWEVER, they would always come back ten fold when the effects wore off. There was no way in hell I wanted to be hooked on benzos. So, I kicked the benzos, stopped looking up "intrusive thoughts" on Google, avoided reading about other people's OCD, and they eventually went away.

The more attention you give it, the more you feed the flame. Let this thread die, keep your mind busy with other things and stay off Google.

thoughts can cause physical problems!
 

Yes it's amazing how powerful a thought can be! I'm going to try to tell a true story that I read in my meditation book but I'll probably mess it up...hopefully the point comes across...

So there's a woman in the hospital with heart problems and she's being seen by a very talented doctor that she trusts completely. He tells her everything looks good and says goodbye. As he's leaving the room after seeing her he says to some interns that had been in the room observing. ..this woman is TC and then leaves the room.

A short while later one of the interns notices the woman is in distress and is crying. When he asks her what's wrong she says she knows that TC means terminal case and that she's dying. He explains to her what it really means (can't remember but it was nothing serious) but she doesn't believe him and gets further distraught.

He tries to contact the doctor that said it, and that she trusts, to come back and explain to her. He can't be reached. No amount of talking can convince the woman and she cannot calm down and ends up dying of a heart attack.

All of the test results were fine. If the woman had not been so worked up she would have been fine. I know I've probably mutilated this story but you get the point....the mind is very powerful!

It can also take away pain and you can train it to calm you, lower your blood pressure and all sorts of good things too!

I had a Dr. tell me I haven't dealt with my own humanity. I am just human. Things will happen to me that I can't control, that aren't my fault, and the effects of the situation aren't my fault either.
He was right. Ask for help, talk to others that get it, and that can help keep your feet on the ground. Family, although they love us, they don't get it all the time. Many people here get it. :)