“I have cancer of everything”: what is cyberchondria and why we so love to diagnose ourselves after reading on the Internet

Psychiatrist-psychotherapist Ashmeiba Nino Anatolyevna talks about the obsessive fear of cancer.

Oncophobia or cancerophobia is the fear of cancer, including cancer. Most often, it occurs in people predisposed to increased anxiety and suspiciousness after encountering cancer in another person.

A predisposition may arise in a child whose anxious parents constantly take him to doctors. He learns to be attentive to his health and grows into an anxious adult.

If a relative, close friend or colleague dies of cancer, an obsessive fear of cancer may develop.

Often a person has something in pain, and his suspicions become stronger. He loses weight, begins to look bad, and loses his appetite. For most, these are signs of cancer. A person goes to oncologists, oncologists find nothing and refer him to a psychotherapist, because it is most likely depression, which manifests itself with the same symptoms - weight loss, lack of appetite, weakness, lethargy and even pain.

If a relative, close friend or colleague dies of cancer, an obsessive fear of cancer may develop.

A mild degree of cancer phobia may go away on its own. The man went for an examination, made sure that he had nothing, and calmed down. Fear may appear from time to time when oncology is mentioned in conversations, when someone around you is diagnosed with cancer. Then it passes.

If emotions prevail and the fear is very strong, one might say pathological, you will not be able to cope on your own. A person does not believe rational arguments, criticism of his condition disappears. Doubts are overwhelming - suddenly they missed it, they made a mistake, the doctor was unqualified. Obsessive thoughts interfere with work and communication, and sleep is disturbed. In this state, you need to go to a psychotherapist.

Dr. Google, tell me

Did your neighbor cough on the minibus? This is definitely coronavirus, I’ll get sick tomorrow - this is what the anxious patient thinks and rushes home to google the symptoms.

To search for medical information on the Internet, they even came up with a special word - “cyberchondria”. This is a variant of hypochondria - anxiety about health, which is fueled by scary stories about illnesses on forums or dubious sites.

I read a little about headaches - and now you’re sitting at the computer crying that you have brain cancer. And no one will come to the funeral!

According to Yandex, health is one of the most popular search topics: more than 7.5 million searches every day, more than 5 thousand times per minute. A third of them are about symptoms and diseases. However, if you tend to worry about your health, this is the first thing you should give up.

This type of anxiety is not new. The hero of Jerome K. Jerome's story "Three Men in a Boat and a Dog," written long before the advent of the Internet, came to the library to "inquire about a trifling illness" and eventually discovered that he had had cholera for two months, and after Anemia will worsen for two weeks. He went through the entire medical reference book and found symptoms of absolutely all diseases, except for puerperal fever.

“I entered this reading room as a happy, healthy person. I crawled out of there a pathetic wreck.”

About the same thing happens to us when we turn to the all-powerful Dr. Yandex or the brilliant Dr. Google. We come with doubts, but leave with the conviction that we have cancer of everything.

It also happens: a relative of a distant friend was diagnosed with stomach cancer - and now you have a stomach ache.

The star died of brain cancer - and you remember that recently you had headaches too often.

A Chinese man coughed in a minibus - you no longer travel on this transport. Yuri Dud made a film about HIV - and if you have had at least one unprotected contact, you decide that you definitely have the infection. You are not alone in this: after the release of the film, the demand for rapid tests to determine the disease has sharply increased.

On the one hand, this is great: getting checked is useful. But if you want to do this every week, panic that the nearest pharmacy doesn't have a test, and before going to bed you remember to Google how long you have to live before developing AIDS, then we have bad news for you. You failed another rapid test - for hypochondriacal disorder.

You don't know anything about yourself

What am I talking about? If you listen to yourself too persistently, you can discover a lot of internal movements and processes that you simply did not pay attention to before.

We all know that a person has a heart, liver and other organs. But as long as they don’t bother us, we “know” this purely abstractly. You've never seen your own heart, right? And the rest of the liver too.

Have you probably noticed how unusual it is to look at your own X-rays? Let's say a photo of your tooth with caries. And behind the tooth is a piece of a skull. Skulls, Carl!!! Your own. Just like what is painted on the pirate flag. Phew! What a horror! Is this really in me?

Same with the rest of the insides. While they work there quietly, we don’t even remember that we have them. But as soon as they start behaving in some unusual way, we immediately become wary.

And everything would be correct, caution is a useful thing in terms of evolution. If only it weren’t for our excessive suspiciousness plus an overabundance of information of the lowest quality and dubious reliability.

But this is also the solution to the problem. If you just stop consuming this unnecessary information, then life will become easier and simpler. It's like stopping watching the news, where there is only negativity.

The less you know the better you sleep!

There's definitely something wrong with me

The basis for hypochondria is the belief that a person should be absolutely healthy. And health is the absence of any abnormalities. If you often worry about your health, you probably do the following fun things:

• examining your body for spots, redness, pimples, moles, swelling, painful spots, or listening to internal sensations and sounds, constantly noticing something suspicious;
• check to see if new anomalies have appeared (and they do appear!);
• discuss with friends or relatives whether everything is okay with you, and then go to other friends so that they also confirm this;
• looking for medical information on the Internet - not only about your diagnosis, which the doctor has already given you, but also about potential ones that you suspect;
• you visit doctors more often than friends, or vice versa - do not go to doctors at all for years, because you are afraid to find out the “terrible truth”.

“No, I’m not a hypochondriac, I’m just reasonable and responsible,” thinks an anxious person.

This belief is one of the important features of anxiety: as long as we think that it is good for us, helps us to be more motivated or speaks to our responsibility, we positively reinforce its existence and even its intensification.

Am I so irresponsible that I don't worry about anything? Worrying is essential to being a good and responsible person. Therefore, you need to be constantly checked to exclude any diseases.

Constant self-examination drives us into a vicious circle of anxiety. When we get checked, we feel a decrease in anxiety and think: oh, this is working, there is less anxiety! The next day we feel anxious again - hurray, now we know how to reduce it. Check again!

Note: anxiety does not come when you know for sure that you have cancer - most likely, you will experience sadness, anger or some other emotion at this moment. Anxiety is associated with a feeling of uncertainty and an unwillingness to accept it. You want to remove any doubts and believe that checks will help. This is a trap: you still have no guarantee that nothing happened between checks.

Reassurances from acquaintances are also ineffective: one person confirmed to you that everything is fine with you, but this is not a 100% guarantee. Therefore, discussions of sores with other people continue.

Another belief that triggers our anxiety is the desire to be in control. It puts us at the center of the world and puts us on a pedestal: we are so powerful that if we try hard enough, we can control absolutely everything. However, we constantly have to deal with an uncertain reality, and this creates anxiety. Therefore, we have to strain more and more.

It also makes sense to test yourself for grandiosity. According to VTsIOM surveys, every third resident of Russia self-medicates. Queries about symptoms and treatment are among the most popular on Yandex. We don't trust doctors and look into reference books. But what do we think about ourselves? The doctor studied for 6 years at the university, then in residency, constantly attends seminars and undergoes accreditation, but never makes a diagnosis on the spot - and then we went online for 10 minutes and immediately understood everything.

Our idea of ​​what a normal, healthy body should be like also hinders us.

If only the absolute absence of any non-standard manifestations, noises and pains is acceptable, this is perfectionism - one of the most common cognitive errors.

But where do we get the idea that it should be this way? What are we comparing to? And why, if a doctor says: “Nothing to worry about,” do we immediately label him a charlatan?

Even if our body makes sounds that differ from its normal state, this does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with it. Think about your typical day: you wake up in the morning, have breakfast, drive to work, work, drive back. But then one day you got stuck in a traffic jam. Or you slept 20 minutes too long and didn’t have time to have breakfast. Does this mean that life is ruined? No, all these deviations fit into the norm. Everything is fine, there is no reason to worry.

Something is constantly happening in the body: cells are dividing, proteins are being broken down, white blood cells are fighting something.

Blood flows, the heart beats, nerves transmit signals, hormones are released, saliva is produced, air flies into the lungs, and oxygen is taken from there by the body. There are many processes going on in the body outside of our conscious control. And we do not know how this should happen, we do not feel and cannot control all this. But we can come to terms with these processes. Why then does one unusual sensation require so much attention?

The focus of attention is the hook that pulls us into an anxious loop. For example, we usually don't hear the clock ticking during the day, but in the quiet time we go to bed, it can seem almost deafeningly loud and distract us from sleep. The arrows did not start ticking louder - it was just a matter of our attention. It’s the same with sensations and noises in the body - it all depends on the focus of attention.

The Russian language even has a special word - “listen.” We hear something, but not clearly. And then we listen (that is, we collect all our attention through an effort of will) and hear better. The same thing happens with the body - and it is within our power not to swing the pendulum.

There is also a reverse attention trap, where we shift our focus to avoid anxiety. The cycle in this case is this: you read something on the Internet and transfer your attention from physical sensations to the text, so it becomes a little easier. It's as if knowing more symptoms will make you less likely to have a heart attack. But as soon as you step away from the computer, the anxiety is with you again.

That’s why we stay glued to the screen: reading about terrible diseases is not as scary as listening to suspicious sensations in the body.

Anxiety can also increase your heart rate, making you feel like you're on the verge of death—and it might just be a matter of misinterpretation. But while you are reading, you have the illusion of control. This is why we are so drawn to endlessly reading about symptoms. But when you know it's only making you more anxious, you can manage your behavior and choose something more productive.

By the way, cyberchondria is also supported by the network structure itself, which literally promotes our anxiety.

If you read about pain, keep 10 recommended articles about cancer, here are the blogs of dying people, and tomorrow you will be targeted with advertisements for medical centers, healers, or coffins.

So it’s better not to rely on willpower and the superpower not to notice the content that is shown to you, but to follow the rules of digital hygiene and not read what is not relevant to you.

And remember: if you do go to Yandex to read about medicine, use only proven scientific resources - there the likelihood of manipulation is reduced as much as possible. But the articles of marketers or copywriters “5-rubles-per-kilosign” definitely cannot be trusted: their goal is to undermine you and lure you into an appointment.

When advertisers write on every second website that if you have a headache, you need to urgently go to the doctor and it looks like brain cancer, it’s hard not to succumb to alarmist sentiments. Although in fact the statistics in Russia are quite optimistic: the detection rate of brain tumors is only about 0.00023%, and only 30% of them are malignant. That is, a very, very small proportion of headaches are serious illnesses.

Now remember your doctor. Imagine that he, just like you, is pessimistic about any complaint, sends every person to be checked for brain or lung cancer - and so on hundreds of times a month. Just in case. If you knew about such statistics, you would consider him not a professional, but rather a scammer who is trying to force more services and diagnostics on patients. So when it seems to you that your imperfections are just a disaster, you become like such a doctor. By the way, hypochondriacs spend 30% more on medicine.

Obsessions and compulsions

Obsessions are obsessive thoughts, fantasies, fears, and images. The person understands the abnormality of his condition, but cannot switch to anything else. At this time, pressing problems and tasks fade into the background, and the process of normal life becomes impossible. Against the background of these phenomena, the patient experiences pronounced fear and anxiety. Most often, obsessions occur in the form of:

• aggressive impulses;
• erotic fantasies;
• memories of unpleasant episodes in life;
• phobias of irrational content.

The second part of the manifestation of the disease is compulsions, or obsessive ritual movements that are repeated many times. The patient feels the need to commit them, and when trying to resist, a feeling of strong tension and fear appears. A certain action gives him temporary relief, relieves the severity of anxiety, forcing repetition. The most commonly observed compulsions are:

• washing hands and body before wounds and irritation appear;
• constant house cleaning;
• putting things in the closet;
• constant checking of the iron, stove, door lock;
• counting objects (pillars, trees, steps);
• walking around or jumping over cracks in the asphalt;
• repetition of a certain set of words.

The main feature of obsessions is that they are devoid of rationalism. And compulsions are the inability to refuse them.

The patient himself is in an adequate state at this time and understands the strangeness of his sensations and behavior, and most often realizes the need for treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And this fact further strengthens his position and multiplies the problem. He begins to be afraid of going crazy and worries about the safety of his loved ones. But, as practice shows, neurosis of this type does not lead to severe mental disorders, and even the most seditious and aggressive thoughts never turn into active actions. And this distinguishes a person with neurosis from a mentally abnormal patient in a state of passion or a patient with hallucinations.

The approximate number of people suffering from obsessional neurosis is 3% of the entire world population. But experts consider this figure to be underestimated, since many patients carefully hide their problem from others and do not want to go to the doctor. The manifestation of the disease is registered in the age category from 10 to 30 years in residents of cities with low incomes. Among the patients, there is a slight predominance of men over women. Usually, at least 5-7 years pass from the onset of the disease, after which a visit to a specialist for help follows.

If we describe the character of a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it can be noted that he is different:

• high intelligence;
• adequate thinking;
• a heightened sense of responsibility;
• conscientiousness and anxiety;
• diligence and pedantry in performing work;
• suspiciousness and the desire to be the best in everything.

A person suffers from this disorder for a long time and goes to the doctor only when the pathology progresses, when the neurosis becomes noticeable to others and begins to significantly reduce the quality of life.

Fears and anxieties do not always accompany obsessive neurosis. They occur at different frequencies in all people. Phobias in a normal person usually act as a defensive reaction of the body. The well-known worry about an iron or gas stove not being turned off, followed by a check, cannot be considered a pathology. But if even after one or two or more tests a person continues to have a desire to repeat the test and constant fear even after it, then we can talk about the presence of a disorder.

Anxiety is the mother

Hypochondria is usually called the experience of the presence of a somatic, that is, bodily disease, which in fact does not exist. That is, a person is convinced that something is wrong with his body, and not with his head. Therefore, most hypochondriacs do not go to a psychologist, only 30% reach therapy and even fewer complete it.

The idea that all illnesses are in our heads is offensive because it devalues ​​the patient's experience. The pain is real, not imaginary, so why go to a psychologist?

Firstly, psychosomatics is often associated with articles on dubious sites in the spirit of “your throat hurts because you can’t say what you want to say” or “your legs hurt because you don’t want to go towards your goal.” No, it doesn't work, and when a neurologist sends you to a psychologist, he means something completely different.

Second, most people who suffer from excessive health anxiety also have other problems: depression, OCD, generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, or physical complaints. To cope with health anxiety, you will have to work through other problems, if any.

And thirdly, if we learn more about the nature and physiology of anxiety, then treating diseases of the body with the help of psychotherapy ceases to seem so illogical. The feeling of anxiety is evolutionarily justified: it is an alarm in case of danger. The brain signals to the body that it needs to prepare to face a threat.

Anxiety is different from fear: we are afraid of something specific, and anxiety is caused by uncertainty (therefore, along with anxiety tests, your psychologist may ask you to determine your level of tolerance for uncertainty). And since it’s unclear what the threat is, it’s better to prepare for everything: fight, run, and play dead. Therefore, in a state of anxiety, we feel that the heart beats faster, the muscles tense, sweat appears, and breathing quickens because the lungs are saturated with oxygen.

The body gets rid of excess things - for example, food in the stomach, hence nausea or even diarrhea in especially anxious moments.

The body comes into a state of combat readiness, which is accompanied by natural changes in the body. And then our brain comes into play: there is no collision with a threat, but there are sensations, so they need to be interpreted somehow. And this is where problems arise that can lead us to a panic attack.

We listen to sensations, interpret them incorrectly, worry even more - and the sensations become stronger. Vicious circle! It is important that anxiety causes changes not only at the level of thoughts (in the cognitive sphere), but also at the level of behavior and physiology. Therefore, it is cognitive behavioral therapy that works with anxiety disorders better than other approaches to psychological help.

A psychologist's recommendation on how to stop worrying and stressing yourself out.

Below, there will be techniques so that you can stop your internal mental stirring, the task of all techniques is to remove obsessive thoughts so that you can switch your attention (thoughts) to something else and relax.

A breathing technique that switches your body into relaxation mode.

Slow, conscious breathing will help you get out of stress mode and enter a relaxed state. Slow inhalations and exhalations. You should shift your attention from your head, from thoughts to your body. Start breathing and observing your breathing.

When you observe, the focus of attention shifts and thoughts begin to drift away. Each inhalation and exhalation you count:

• Inhale – 1
• Exhale – 2
• Inhale – 3
• Exhale – 4, etc.

Try to breathe deeply and with your stomach, feel every inhalation and exhalation, feel how your body moves in time with your breathing:

• Inhale - the stomach rises;
• Exhale - the stomach retracts;

When your attention is completely absorbed in the breathing process, thoughts will stop and the body will begin to relax. It is better to breathe while lying down, but you can also breathe while sitting.

Count your inhalations and exhalations to 12, and then start again from one.

When you breathe, thoughts may slip through again, you will immediately “see” them, feel them, but with an effort of will, you should focus on breathing again.

Breathe until you feel calm.

Especially for people who are stressed, experience tension in the body, are emotionally wound up, I wrote “Brief instructions for relieving tension in the body,” this is a cheat sheet that you can use in a moment of severe stress and calm down. To this instruction, I have added an audio meditation for deep relaxation - all this, completely FREE! Click here and take your peace of mind!

Technique "Stop the ticker"

The procedure for performing the exercise “Stopping the ticker”:

1. Imagine your inner mental space inside your skull.
2. And imagine your thoughts as an electronic ticker of some color.
3. Having seen your mental ticker, you will immediately understand that the information is repeated; as soon as your thought ends, it immediately appears again.
4. Step back and see inside your mental space, where is your ticker popping up from? And how many of these lines are there?
5. Now your task is to stop the ticker, and since it is electric, it means there is a power source somewhere. And the source of power is your emotions. See where the cord from the ticker goes?
6. Disconnect your ticker from the battery.

And now, your task is to discharge the battery with your experiences. Do the following exercise.

Discharging the battery with emotions.

You saw a cord that is attached to your ticker.

Mentally take the cord in your hands and start looking - where does it come from? Let your imagination imagine some kind of container in which your emotions are located... it could be any vessel filled with a boiling composition, this composition boils and gurgles, and produces a lot of energy. These are your emotions...

When you see your vessel with emotions, remove the lid so that steam comes out and the tension decreases. When you open the lid, consciously relax your body and take several deep and slow breaths in and out….

Now that your emotions have calmed down a bit, unplug the ticker cord from the vessel.

Do you feel better?

You can continue to breathe and then you will calm down completely.

If you feel a little better, but you feel tension, then continue the exercise.

Change the composition and quality of emotions.

Now, your emotions have a negative connotation:

• Fear;
• Anxiety;
• Helplessness;
• Anger;
• Indignation, etc.

See what color the composition is in the vessel? Most likely, it is dark...

For a moment, imagine a blue sky and a bright sun... see how a ray of warmth, light is reaching out to you, and right now, this ray is falling into your vessel with negative emotions...

A thin ray of sunlight begins to lighten the contents of the vessel... and now, the ray becomes larger and stronger, and the lightening occurs faster and faster...

Let the sunshine completely change your emotions...

You see how the composition in the vessel has become lighter, calmer, it no longer gurgles and does not try to get out... and your body relaxes, you breathe slowly and see how a ray of sunlight changes your internal state...

Focus on the ray of light... and when the contents of the vessel become completely calm and bright, then pour the contents over your body, let your body relax even more, feel the sun inside you, how it warms you, gives you a feeling of warmth, care and love...

Stay in this state as long as you need..

I offer you a few more recommendations from a psychologist on how to stop worrying and stressing yourself out.

I won't think about it!

1. Ask yourself: what am I thinking about right now? (voice the thoughts that are in your head out loud)
2. I want to think about this? (no, I don't want to think about it anymore)
3. You say to yourself: “I won’t think about it anymore.” and if this thought appears again, then you say to yourself: “I already thought of you, get out of here!” Don't think this simple trick won't work, it really does.
4. As soon as some clearing appears in your head, you begin to breathe slowly, with your stomach, deeply and slowly. Take 5-10 breaths in and out, observing your breathing.
5. If your thoughts come back while breathing, then tell her, I’ve already thought of you, get out of here.

What to do?

First, as with any addiction, admit that there is a problem.

Secondly, understand what problems, emotions, hopes are associated with ideal clean eating? Often the basis is anxiety, the need for control, and fear of illness. But it is worth recognizing that a person cannot control his health 100%, no matter how “clean” he eats. Food is one of the factors of health, but not the main one and not the only one. A slice of pizza eaten in a moment of mental weakness today will not give you cancer tomorrow, and no ideal diet will give you one hundred percent immunity from disease. So some moderate fatalism will reduce the degree of tension.

Thirdly, it’s worth trying to expand the boundaries of proper nutrition. By and large, there are many more healthy foods than harmful ones. What is healthy is what contains nutrients in sufficient quantities, and this is a very wide selection of products, even if they are not grown organically in alpine meadows.

Fourthly, you cannot control the actual “purity” of the products. This is another point that is not in your control, and trying to control it is pointless. Even if eggs or meat say “free-range”, this does not mean that the animal lives in the field 24 hours a day. It is quite possible that free grazing is limited to a couple of hours a day, and does not have any effect on the composition of meat or milk.

In general, it is useful for any health practitioner to remember: while you are in the process of improving and extending your life, do not forget to live!

Why there is excessive anxiety about health

Health anxiety often develops in suspicious and worried people with a sensitive temperament, if the person was sick a lot in childhood, or if loved ones were sick, which is why the child was overprotected. Beliefs about health in the family and culture play a big role: “illness is a nightmare,” “one must constantly be on alert and worry about health,” “those who do not worry are careless,” and so on. Health anxiety can be triggered by some serious event, for example, the illness or death of someone close, your own illness, a doctor’s mistake, severe stress, or a panic attack.

Causes of obsessive compulsive disorder

Before treating obsessive compulsive disorder, it is necessary to understand its etiology. The exact cause of the disease has not yet been established, but a number of factors have been identified that can provoke it. And their complex effects are often observed. It can be:

• psychotraumatic situations;
• constant stress;
• conflicts with loved ones and within the individual;
• severe fatigue, asthenia;
• belief in the power of rituals that save you from problems;
• excessive pedantry;
• low self-esteem;
• inability to adequately respond to life's difficulties;
• hereditary features of brain functioning;
• disruption of the autonomic nervous system;
• low levels of hormones (serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine);
• disruption of the nervous system (muscle tension, stiffness);
• condition after an infection.

Recently, psychiatry experts have expressed an opinion about the great influence of characteristics of upbringing and other experiences in the formation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It could be:

• tough and picky teaching style;
• the influence of a person important to the child with signs of obsessive-compulsive neurosis;
• rigor and moralism, religious education.

In order to identify the true cause of the disorder and receive full assistance, you should simply call Dr. Isaev’s clinic. You can do this for free, make an appointment with a doctor and get a full consultation.

Wrong internal beliefs also play a huge role in the manifestation of the disease, including:

• the belief that if you think about something often, it will definitely happen;
• prohibiting oneself from certain types of thoughts and fantasies;
• equating thoughts with actions according to the degree of responsibility;
• accepting blame for everything that happens around you and trying to change it.

Symptoms of obsessions and compulsions

Treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in Moscow at Dr. Isaev’s clinic is carried out successfully, since an individual approach is taken to each patient and only modern techniques are used. Therapy begins with identifying symptoms of deviation. The main signs of a violation are:

• presence of obsessions (obsessive thoughts);
• anxiety, tension and fear associated with them;
• compulsions (the same actions that allow you to get some relief).

All these manifestations form a single cycle, which repeats from time to time. Some patients have a predominance of obsessions, others have a predominance of compulsions, and there are also patients with the same severity of obsessive thoughts and actions.

Since the manifestations of the disease are not always typical, diagnosis requires consultation with an experienced psychiatrist and psychotherapist. To make an appointment, you can call or leave a request on the clinic’s website.

Mental symptoms

The disease is a mental disorder and is accompanied by characteristic symptoms. The patient's obsessive thoughts may include the following:

• fear of getting infected, getting dirty;
• unreasonable concern for the life and health of loved ones;
• fear of discovering that you are gay;
• sexual images and fantasies;
• constant desire for order and symmetry;
• excessive superstition, passion for ritual and cult phenomena.

With obsessive compulsive disorder, the thoughts and images that constantly come to him are perceived by the patient himself as his own. This disease differs from split personality, when the patient hears “voices” from the outside or from his “other self.” With neurosis, a person tries to control thoughts and movements, but he fails to do this. The more he resists, the more anxiety and desire to perform the ritual grows.

The most common compulsive movements associated with this disease are:

• plucking or pulling out body hair;
• constant washing of hands and body;
• nail biting;
• wiping door handles and other objects;
• checking the stove, iron, door lock;
• arranging things in strict order;
• accumulation of unnecessary trash;
• frequent utterance of prayers, mantras and other phrases.

Doing these actions itself does not bring much pleasure, but it can reduce the level of tension, fear and anxiety. But this only lasts for a while, and then obsessions arise again and the phobia grows, and the cycle repeats. Compulsions may outwardly look like normal work, this applies to putting things away or cleaning the house. In some cases, they have no rational basis, for example, jumping over asphalt cracks. But for the onset of calm, a person performs them without fail, but at the same time is fully aware of their uselessness and absurdity.

Physical signs

Treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in Moscow at Dr. Isaev’s clinic includes providing assistance to relieve mental symptoms and eliminate physical signs of pathology. Patients with obsessional neurosis often experience dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. And this leads to the following deviations:

• insomnia;
• dizziness;
• heartache;
• headache;
• frequent blinking;
• seizures and tics;
• pressure surges (hypo- and hypertensive crises);
• loss of appetite;
• dyspepsia;
• increased sweating and chills;
• tachycardia;
• dyspnea;
• dry mouth;
• decreased libido, impotence.

All these disorders are complications of the underlying pathology. And with proper complex therapy they go away on their own. In some cases, additional treatment is required to speed up the restoration of autonomic functions.

The method of providing assistance also depends on the type of neurosis. It happens:

• chronic (from 2 months or more);
• recurrent (with periods of exacerbation and “bright” intervals);
• progressive (continuous manifestation with gradual deterioration).

When the disease becomes chronic, and the reason for this is often the lack of professional therapy, the type of obsessive states expands. If at the beginning of the disease a person could check that the stove or iron was turned off 2-3 times a day, then later this action begins to be repeated 5-6 times. With a progressive form of pathology, performing rituals can take the patient most of the day and there is no time left for other types of activity.