Four small steps today: a few questions about where things stand medically, two short check-ins so we can measure your starting point, your checking inventory, and your counter set up for tonight. No techniques yet — just the starting line.
If you're here, your body has probably been talking to you a lot lately — an ache, a flutter, a spot, a sensation you keep coming back to. You check it. You look it up. You ask someone. For a few minutes it settles, and then it starts again.
Here's the first thing to say clearly: your alarm system is not detecting disease. It's detecting sensations — and every healthy body produces sensations all day long. Twinges, gurgles, skipped beats, passing aches. The problem isn't that your body is noisy. It's that somewhere along the way, a part of your mind got promoted to full-time inspector, and now it treats every sound as a case to investigate.
This program is CBT for health anxiety. Over six weeks, we retire that inspector — carefully, gradually, with your own numbers proving it's safe to do.
First, the rule that makes all of this safe, and it never bends: a genuinely new symptom, or a real change in an old one, gets one proper medical evaluation — not zero, and not five. This program treats health anxiety; it is never a medical evaluation and will never talk you out of getting one. If you have a symptom a doctor has never checked, that appointment comes first.
Second: around week two, as the checking falls, your worry will briefly rise before it drops below where it started. I'll show you that curve honestly, in advance, so it never reads as failure.
Right now: a few questions, two check-ins, your inventory, and your counter for tonight. That's the whole job today.