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.