30. 3 Strategies for Medical Anxiety That Actually Work with Dr. Mark Su

If your stomach drops every time your doctor's office calls, or you find yourself spiraling into worst-case scenarios before a test result comes back, you're not broken and you're not overreacting. Medical anxiety is real, and it's especially common for people who've spent years navigating chronic illness, uncertain diagnoses, or being told their labs are "normal" when they know something is wrong.

Why this episode matters

Most anxiety advice tells you to "just breathe" or "stop worrying." That's not helpful when your nervous system has been shaped by years of appointments, imaging, and being dismissed. In this episode, Dr. Su shares three strategies he uses himself, and has learned from over a decade working with his own therapist and from countless conversations with patients, to actually work with medical anxiety instead of just pushing through it.

What you'll learn

• Why confronting the anxiety directly, rather than avoiding or running from it, is the hardest but most effective first step
• How to flip the "what if" spiral in the opposite direction, and why grounding yourself in the feeling of good news matters as much as the logic of it
• The "so what" game, a simple but revealing exercise for uncovering the real root cause underneath your medical anxiety
• Why the fear you're carrying into an appointment is often about something deeper than the appointment itself

Dr. Su's perspective

Dr. Su doesn't position himself as a therapist, and he's clear about that in the episode. What he offers instead is the perspective of someone who has walked this road personally and who has sat across from hundreds of patients carrying the same dread. These are the strategies he's seen actually move the needle, not textbook talking points.

Connect with Dr. Su and RootSeek Health:

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only.  Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.

Transcript

Why Medical Visits Trigger Panic

Dr. Mark Su 0:00

Hey friends, Dr. Mark Sue coming at you again. Here today, we're going to talk about three strategies for addressing medical anxieties. All right. If you're a person who feels kind of amped up, jacked up, stressed, anxious, or outright panicky from going into a doctor's office, from getting test results, you know the story. You know what it looks like, you know what it feels like. Here's three strategies that you might employ or deploy, put into use and practice to try to overcome the inside scaries.

Strategy One Confront The Facts

Dr. Mark Su 0:33

So number one, it's just confronting the issue. And I'm not going to say this is easy. It certainly isn't easy for me, because most of us, we'd rather avoid or run or hide. Um, and it's it's largely why we get anxious, all right? But it's confronting the realities of it. And in medical or mental health world, we might throw this into the category of cognitive behavioral therapy. All right. Dissecting and analyzing the thoughts and coming to realities in terms of, hey, what do I really know and what do I really don't know? And just facing the music and saying, let's base my thoughts and my feelings on what I really actually know instead of constantly perseverating and fixating on the on the the what ifs. Okay. Not easy to do, but it is a re it is a it is a true strategy.

Flip The What If Story

Dr. Mark Su 1:23

Number two, I comment on the what ifs. That is what most of us are doing as a sort of root cause mechanism, if you will, in the mental health world of our anxieties, okay? What if I get bad news? What if the imaging shows I've got a nodule? What if it shows what if that nodule is cancer? What if I'm told I have high cholesterol? And what if that means that I'm I've got plaque? And what if that means I'm gonna die early because I'm gonna have a heart attack? The catastrophizing that often stems from the negative what if thinking, that's a lot, that's a lot of people's experiences. All right. So if you do that, you're not alone. And there's no judgment here, there's no criticism. That's a real common experience. We're not gonna get into why, from my observations, why that seems to have become more frequent and more intensified over the last number of years, especially since the pandemic. We're not gonna touch that today. But yeah, just know you're not alone. All right. But here's the strategy. We can use that what if game if we're intentional and purposeful and put real effort into it, and we can flip the script and play that what if game the other way within ourselves. Well, what if it's actually normal? What if I'm I'm told it's better than it was before? What if my cholesterol numbers are better than before? What if I don't have diabetes, even though I think I have diabetes because I'm kind of eating like crap the last few months or whatever the case may be, right? That what if game can be used in the opposite direction. And the more ideal application of that goes beyond just the cognitive thinking. What if the opposite were true? We can even go to the point, if we can make that effort, to really envision that outcome and then stop and think about what it feels like to hear those words, to hear that report. That, hey, it's good news. Hey, there's nothing there. Hey, your results are better than you expected. Hey, your blood pressure's fantastic today, right? Hey, you lost weight, whatever the case may be. Okay. What does that actually feel like? And grounding ourselves in those feelings. For those of us, especially who are a little more feeling oriented and more in tune and touch with our feelings and our emotions, that can carry further than just the cognitive, factual, sort of concrete imagination of getting good news. All right. It's the emotional part that really often has a deeper seated

The So What Game For Root Fear

Dr. Mark Su 3:34

impact. The third technique or the third strategy for medical anxieties is a similar game that we can play within ourselves. And that's what's called the so what game. All right. Now, these strategies are not the best. I'm not going to purport, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a therapist, but I've learned these strategies in partly from my own personal experiences working with my godsend therapist who I've worked with for 12 plus years, I think. And a lot of these also are derived from my experiences and observations talking with patients and what they've learned from their therapists and also the recurring common strategies that I hear. All right. So these are the three I commonly talk about with patients. So here's the third strategy. And the the point of this is to dig into the root cause of our triggering thoughts. All right. So for those of us who love root-cause medicine and we think about root cause this, root cause that, what's the root cause of my blood sugars being high, how much of it's my eating, how much of it's inflammation that's not related to my eating? Um, what's the root cause of my uh fibromyalgia? Is it how much of it is stress mental health related, how much of it might be chronic Lyme, et cetera, et cetera? Okay. What's the root cause of my feeling so anxious and panicky, especially in a medical setting? This is a game to try to delineate that, all right? And that's the the the the that's the so what game. All right. So here here's how it goes. I'm gonna go in for a visit tomorrow. It's to review some labs. I'm getting panicky, I'm getting revved up. I start asking myself, okay, so why am I revved up? Well, because I'm getting labs. So what? Well, they could be bad. So what? Well, if I've got high cholesterol, maybe that means I've got plaque developing. So what? Well, if I've got too much plaque, then maybe I have heart disease. And I think about how my dad had a heart attack at 62, and I think about how my mom's brother had a heart attack at 58, and so I've kind of got family history, and so that puts me at higher risk. So I could have a heart maybe I'm gonna have a heart attack soon. So what? What do you mean, so what? Of course I I don't want to have a heart attack. I don't wanna be be injured, have my heart be damaged and die. Okay, yeah, but so what? To play the exercise, right? It might be so obvious to us, but so what? Well, I don't want to die early. Why not? So what? Well, so this is where it could go into two different realms, right off the top of my head, A. I don't want to lose out on opportunities to live life with my family and the memories that are developed from that. That's meaningful. All right? We'll come back to that in a second. The other common first route experience or uh explanation about so what if I have a heart attack and die? I'm not sure what happens to me after die. And I'm not comfortable with that. That goes down a different road of uh maybe spirituality and such, okay, and that's it, that's it for another time. But you see where this goes. It could be really obvious to say, I don't want to have diabetes, I don't want to have high cholesterol, I don't want to have a heart attack, I don't want to be injured and have a stroke or heart attack, much less die. Isn't that obvious why I don't want to die? Not necessarily. I've got a lot of patients who they're okay if they pass. They've lived a full life, they're at peace with things, they're not so concerned about that, right? It's not such an obvious presumption. But if we start digging, bottom line is no matter what level of thought you may or not may not have had, most commonly, very, very, very, very frequently, far majority of times, there's a deeper level of fear, of concern, of worry that we're not aware of. And when we identify those root causes, that's something we can do about. If I'm worried I haven't spent enough time with my family, and I am gonna feel regretful and guilty and remorseful for having a heart attack and then not being able to travel with them, or I'm gonna die and I won't have spent enough time making memories of my family because I've worked too much or spent too much time ignoring them or just not caring, I haven't said I love you enough. That's something I can do something about starting now. All right, starting now. So regardless of what my labs are, I can take action on that, regardless of my lab results. All right. If I'm worried about what's gonna happen after I die, hey, that's a personal journey, but I can start investigating that. I can start exploring that and going down those roads regardless of my labs, okay? And that's a whole different rabbit hole because now if I'm worried about my labs, I'm really actually targeting the wrong problem internally. Okay. The real root cause issue here is not about my labs. It's about what I worry those labs will have consequence to me that then will create further internal conflict about something else that I'm really worried about.

Practice Consistently And Get Support

Dr. Mark Su 7:52

So uh I hope that's been helpful for some of us. Um it gets a little deep because I uh as people who know me well, as patients, as friends, family know I I love mental emotional health. Uh I think it's super, super valuable. I know Peter Tia has spoken about this being uh in the longevity world. The Drive podcast podcaster and New York Times bestselling author has stated many times that hey, uh, mental emotional health arguably as are more important than our physical health, all right? And again, that's for another time, but think about it. Feel free to explore this and walk that journey with yourself. If you're a person who struggles with anxieties, medical anxieties specifically, commonly there's a reason, all right? I covered that in a previous session, in a previous recording, as to causes. Here we were just talking about some coping strategies. And um, hey, I'm not gonna say that it's gonna work for everybody. There's a reason we have therapists, there's a reason we need to get out of our out of ourselves and out of our own heads and seek some help. But for many of us, if we put this into practice enough, and that's the key, putting it into practice frequently, consistently, commonly needing some help with accountability or somebody to to check in on us to say, hey, are you practicing that regularly? You know, are you exercising that muscle? Are you going to the gym regularly? You know, as a parallel, are you how are you doing keeping yourself in check with not snacking so much at night? In this case, how are you doing practicing those strategies to reduce some anxiety? It's not easy. All right, we're humans. It's not easy. We're in America, we've got all kinds of busyness, but it can be really worth your time and your quality of life can be way, way better. And you could have a much better experience with your healthcare practitioners, whoever they may be. So this is Dr. Mark Sue. Again, our goal is constantly to help create clarity, help you live your best life. Uh I hope this has been helpful. Check you next time.