Perception of the World: Twitches & Weaknesses

That is all very true but the trouble is that we live in a world of perceptions. From our earliest times we get our information about the world from our senses and our brains piece together our impression of the world from that, logic comes later.

So it is with this thing, we see or feel twitches, we percieve weaknesses and the first information we get that connects the dots leaves the strongest impression, especially if that information is emotionally loaded with a death sentence.

If we have that OCD turn of mind, logic doesn't get a look in and we are fighting a very deep seated mental process here.

I know that yesterday did nothing for my own process of thinking bad thoughts. I got up feeling optomistic hoping for and expecting good news and reasurance from the orthopedist I was seeing. When I did not get that my mind went into reverse and I equated thinking good thoughts with bad outcomes, whereas my default position of thinking the worst brings me good results when it turns out not to be as bad as I was preparing for.

For optomistic thoughts to triumph one needs optomistic outcomes too in order to reinforce the positive associations, it only takes one bad instance to throw you back into deep pessimism. Being autistic does not help either, because of my increased sensitivity to change of any kind which makes it hard to adapt and reinforces those OCD tendencies

I know enough psychology to understand what is driving the process, but again logic takes second place and has to fight hard to overcome deep seated associations and desire to default to "safe" rituals that are essentially destructive in the long run.

BTW I did have some good news today, I have recieved a grant towards my University expenses. I had just better live long enough, and not get mired in those negative thoughts, in order to make use of it.

I agree fully with you and I also had good results with CBT for my hypochondriaThis was not my first encounter with a possible health problem. Also the OCD aspects I recognize.
I am now at a point that I accept the fascics and I have more professional curiosity for its origin than anxiety. All the statements you made about ALS are true.
By the way, an important factor with the fear is the fact that there is a kind of great misconception, also with doctors about fascics. Eevry time I am on a meetin with collegues that I don't know, I present them my complaints and ask them waht they think about it. I then see the fear in ther eyes and they say: "this is not good'I would see an neurologist"and in their eyes you read ALS. They also have a fear of death. It has probably to do with our medical training where somewhere there has been made a wrong link between fascics and ALS. I think because of the emotional impact. ALS was one of the most favorite "Candidate diseases". It scared the s... out of us as students.
PlayfulPants gives a good picture of the dilemma's and the struggle