self-diagnosing

Miranda: I've been trying to diagnose myself on the Internet.
Charlotte: You can do that?
Miranda: Sure. Just type in your symptoms, hit enter, and wait for the word cancer to appear on the screen.
- "Hot Child in the City", Sex and the City 

I seriously love this quote and know from personal experience how true it is. I am always worried about my health (general health as well as stomach-related health) and have spent so much time online looking up any physical symptoms I experience. I've been trying to stop, and I have gotten a lot better. Sometimes I can talk myself out of doing it now. But I think it was just a week or so ago that I was looking up appendicitis and thinking I might have that.

I so strongly advise against ever self-diagnosing online. Especially if you have anxiety problems of any kind. It never helps. Yes, anything you put in will come up as cancer or something equally horrible. Yes, almost every diagnosis will include nausea and vomiting as possible symptoms (just as every single medication will have them listed as possible side effects). Rarely will you put in your symptoms and have "anxiety" come up as a prominent possibility, even though anxiety can cause every possible bodily symptom or combination of symptoms. Seriously. Some websites / books talking about anxiety will tell you it can cause muscle tension, digestive problems, headaches, sweating/shaking. Those are some of the more common anxiety symptoms. But it's nowhere near what's possible. Here is a more comprehensive list. 

You will probably notice that this list also has vomiting on it, so I just want to add that I don't believe emetophobics are wired to have that particular reaction to anxiety. If it is possible to have both emetophobia and a tendency to vomit when anxious, I'm sure you would already know you were one of those people. (Also, you would be my hero for dealing with that.) Most emetophobics feel anxious frequently, often accompanied with nausea, and never get sick from it.

I'm not saying you should ignore all physical symptoms, because sometimes it will actually be something other than anxiety. If you have anxiety, it can be hard to tell when something should be ignored and when it should be checked out. These are my own personal guidelines I use to try to navigate my way through hypochondria:

-- I try really hard to avoid looking up my symptoms online. (Don't do it!)

-- I remind myself that I am an extremely anxious person, especially when it comes to my health / body, and that I have had similar worries many times before. So for me, the odds are definitely in favor of any symptoms being caused and/or magnified by anxiety.

-- I tell myself that when it comes to having a serious medical condition, the symptom won't just exist, it will also be severe. So I may feel a shooting pain in my stomach, but how much is it actually affecting me? Can I walk, can I breathe, etc.? People get random aches and pains all the time. When non-anxious people go to the doctor about them, it's because the aches and pains are impairing their ability to function.

-- If I can still walk/breathe and all that good stuff, I tell myself to wait and see if it goes away. I don't have an exact time frame in mind, but at least one or two days.

-- Usually by the time one or two days has gone by, my symptom is gone. But if it ever wasn't, and I was still really concerned about it, I would talk to someone I trusted about it (my wife, I'm sure) and maybe decide to go to a doctor, who, unlike a search engine, will probably be able to give me an accurate diagnosis instead of an exaggerated worst-case-ever one.

It's impossible to know at all times what's happening inside your body, something that is very frustrating to me, but I'm trying to learn to accept it. I don't want to spend every second of my life being vigilant about it, or get into a habit of going to the doctor over every tiny perceived thing. Better to err on the side of under-reacting and believe that if something was really wrong, I would catch it in time.