Am I sick, or is this in my head?
With my anxiety I experience a lot of physical symptoms on a daily basis. They have calmed down recently because I have more or less settled into college and my routine is pretty normal now. Anyway, I never actually throw up due to anxiety, but I often feel like I'm going to. This is pretty much unrelated to my current problem, I just thought it may help you understand that my body is very sensitive to this kind of thing.
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Right now I feel like I'm going to be sick. I'm not anxious about anything, so it's not related to that. However, I believe I have mild 'emetophobia' -- fear of throwing up. I have been known in the past to 'think myself ill', which means that I worry so much about getting sick, that I become overly aware of my body, begin to associate any tiny little odd feeling with sickness, and end up literally feeling like I have food poisoning or something.
Tonight I ate a lot of junk food. I had a take-away meal, and I began to feel nauseous very quickly after starting to eat it. I assumed it was because it was so unhealthy and greasy, and I had already sort of eaten. A while later I felt fine, so I ate some more junk (really stupid, I know) but I still felt more or less fine for the rest of the evening -- slightly squeamish, but that's to be expected. Anyway, it's now after 1:00am, I'm still awake, and I feel really sick, like I'm going to throw up. But I can't tell if I'm really ill because I've upset my stomach with the junk food, or if I'm doing this to myself. I have been worrying on and off that I might have made myself ill, it's been at the back of my mind all night. Also, when I'm concentrating on something else, the sick feeling fades away. So all signs seem to point to it just being anxiety.
However, when I am not distracted, it feels so real, like I'm really ill, so it's hard to believe that I'm just imagining it. If it is just my crazy brain, how do I make this stop? I can't keep myself distracted for much longer, I need to go to sleep. But if I try, I'll probably throw up, which I can't stand the thought of.
I'm sorry for the length of this post, I don't have anyone to ask, or anywhere else to write this. I also apologise if this is in the wrong part of the forum. Please help.