Anxiety Symptoms. How Do I Stop Scanning and Self-Checking?

Lately this one keeps coming up. People asking how to stop checking. How to stop scanning their body for the next symptom, or watching their thoughts, or monitoring themselves for whatever it is they are afraid of feeling. And I will tell you something that might surprise you. When I hear that question, I take it as good news.

Someone might reasonably ask how anyone fighting symptoms and begging for them to stop could be good news. From where I sit, it makes sense. I hear from people at every stage of recovery, from the very beginning to the very end. And the questions people ask tell me as much about where they are as anything they actually report.

When someone asks me about the habit of checking for their symptoms, it tells me a couple of things. They may still be fairly new to this, but they have reached a point where they understand something important about what is happening. They have moved from simply experiencing and protesting what their body is doing, to recognizing that the constant interfacing with these sensations is not helping them. And that matters. Because as the old line roughly goes, you cannot fix a problem until you are willing to admit there is one.

What the question tells me

There is more to it than that. If someone has noticed the loop, symptoms, then checking, then more symptoms, and started to see that the loop itself is feeding the condition, that is not a small detail. I promise you it is not. One of the hallmarks of early anxiety disorder is a simple, direct wish for the symptoms to be gone, paired with a relentless effort to force them out. So when someone tells me their goal is to stop looking for symptoms, that already puts them a step past where most people start.

It usually tells me one more thing. It means they must be having breaks. Clearings. Stretches where the symptoms are not there, or at least not as loud. That might mean the nervous system is already settling and making progress. Or it might mean what it meant for me in my early days, that I had so many symptoms they had to take turns. Either way, it is an important question, and I am not surprised I hear it so often.

So how do we actually stop

Here is the honest part. Like a lot of things in recovery, the answer sounds simple on the surface, and the doing of it takes patience, some work, and yes, a little will. Now do not let that last word alarm you. I know some of you reading this are in a place where hard work and summoning up more willpower sound impossible. That is not what I am going to ask of you.

Think about how often this happens. Symptom checking, thought scanning, body monitoring. If you are in the thick of it, this is not a once in a while event. It can be daily. Hourly. Some days it feels like every minute. And when something comes at you that often, you already know you cannot white knuckle your way through it. We are not going to overpower obsessive thoughts, or a wave of panic, or dizziness, or whatever your particular flavor of this is. Trying only leaves you more exhausted and more confused, and often it hands you bigger symptoms than the ones you started with.

So if not force, then what?

The word everyone has heard

The shift happens when you stop trying to chase these symptoms away, because you finally understand that chasing them is impossible. And the real word, the one at the center of all of this, is acceptance.

Allowing everything the brain and body throw at you is what begins the process. It is what gives the nervous system the room to start settling back toward its own baseline. Remember, and I go into this at length in the book, disorder level anxiety comes down to a messaging problem. The thinking, conscious part of you keeps sending a report to the older, protective part of you, the part that runs on instinct and sounds the alarm. And right now, if you are asking these questions, that report probably reads something like this. These symptoms are dangerous. These thoughts are dangerous. That message travels straight back down to a system that is already worn out and begging for rest, and it winds the whole thing up again.

Now, someone will point out that a sensitized nervous system has other causes too. Life stress. Trauma. Any number of things. That is true. But in my experience, the body can process stress and trauma when we let it move through us. The trouble starts when we block that process, or when we layer our own fear on top of it. What if. How long. How do I make this stop. Anxiety can be set off by plenty of things, but it is kept alive by the fearful story we tell about it.

Knowing the goal is not the same as reaching it

By now some of you are thinking, I already know about acceptance. I have read the book, or Dr. Claire Weekes, and I understand acceptance is the goal. And you are right. That is exactly why you are asking the question in the first place. You know where you are trying to get. You just do not know how to get there while these symptoms feel this awful.

I understand that completely. The cascade of anxious thoughts and feelings and sensations early on can be so relentless that it is hard to believe your own body is capable of producing it. So me simply telling you to accept it, with nothing underneath that, is not going to help you. And this is where we reach what I believe is the real key to ending the scanning and the checking.

We have to change our agreement with the condition.

Change the agreement first

I outline this in the book, so I will keep it short here. Recovery tends to arrive when a person changes their agreement with what this condition is. That means redefining a few key things. What you believe it is. Why it is there. And how you are going to carry on with your life while it runs its course. That work takes time and understanding, and it is far too much to fit in one blog. But it is the answer. It is the thing you are actually looking for.

Here is why that first question matters so much. It forces you to confront the real reason the checking will not stop. Right now your agreement has this condition filed under danger, something that has to be watched and stopped. And if your brain truly believes something is a genuine threat to you, there is nothing in the world you can say or do to make it quit looking for that threat. Your nervous system was built to protect you. The scanning, the monitoring, all of it is part of that protection doing its job.

So you see where this lands. There is no way to stop checking for your symptoms while you still believe they are dangerous. Which means the question to ask is not how do I stop checking. It is how do I change my agreement with this condition. And that one opens up out of smaller questions. What do I believe this actually means. What danger do I really think it presents.

Because if you are struggling right now, your agreement probably sounds like this. You will put up with whatever comes as best you can, but you are still holding it as a danger, and you desperately want it gone. And who could blame you. That is completely understandable. It is also, as we always say, why recovery is one of the most counterintuitive things you will ever do.

From danger to discomfort

The end of self scanning starts with changing your whole outlook on what is happening in your mind and body. When you can see this for what it is, noise, a stirred up system throwing off feelings and sensations as a byproduct of being stirred up, something changes. When you reclassify these feelings from danger to discomfort, it suddenly feels a lot safer to stop checking. Acceptance stops being a nice idea and starts to feel reasonable.

Picture it. Waking up and getting on with your day whatever symptoms happen to be along for the ride, with no urge to run a protective sweep over yourself first. We can do this. All of us can do this. But it comes from changing what it all means to you, long before anyone asks you to stop engaging with the thoughts and the feelings and the sensations.

It takes time. Recovery is a practice, which is exactly why we lean on the word mindset. It does not take any superpowers. It takes patience, and it takes commitment to the handful of ideas that everyone who has come out the other side agrees are the foundation.

Keep moving forward. You will get there.

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