# Anxiety Disorders > Hypochondria (Health Anxiety) >  >  Just a thought for Hypochondriacs

## London28

First off id like to say that I have almost gone crazy in my past, mentally crazy because I thought I had heart problems at the age of 23, It was all ofcourse anxiety and panic which I didnt know about.

I want to talk a little about my great grandmother and how this relates to health worries, she is from a mediterranean country..she was born in one area and has never left it, she has lived and is now in her 80s and is still there.

When she was younger (in the black and white days) she was quite poor like most people there and had to work in agriculture fields since a child, in the summer she would have to work from sunrise to sunset in 40 degree heat and bare footed as she was too poor to afford shoes.

Look around nowadays for a minute...everything were told is a health worry, were told to drink water every hour to do this and that, my grandmother didnt go into the doctor to treat her athletes foot,  She couldnt drink water every hour, she didnt have anti depressants to cope with her poor life, she didnt have access to all the food we have today.

And yet shes 80 and reaching 90 years old and is still able to walk.

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## Cuchculan

My own view in this? Take a smoker and a non smoker. The smoker might live to be 100 hundreds years of age. Non smoker might die young. Just because we are told certain things it doesn't mean they have to happen. The famous slogan of ' smokers die younger '. This does not have to be the case. I saw a picture of the oldest known person alive today. Over 120 years old. She was smoking a pipe. Said it kept her happy. 

The same can be said with anything else in life. Things happen to some people. We are not denying that. But that does not mean it has to happen to everybody else. Even if you do the same things as the people who might have come down with something bad. You might be able to reduce your chances of certain things happening to you. But having said that, you could get knocked down crossing the road tomorrow. 

We live in a faster age. That means we also expect faster results as well. Trip to the doctor and an instant answer. My view on years ago and mental illness was that a fair few people ended up locked up and away from society. We can't ignore that fact if we are to look backwards. The treatments were horrible. To those who had them done. Drilling into the brain to remove a certain section is just one example of what they used to do to mental health patients many years ago. But a lot of these people bled out. Died quickly. So a lot of people would not admit they had anything wrong with them back then. 

I admit our grandparents had it tougher. The work they done. The foods they had available. Some still live on. As in the example of London's post. If I go back to oldest living person alive today, she worked using her hands all her live. Stayed active. Even into her later years. Fit body can mean a fit mind too. In China back when she was growing up they would have had nothing at all. No distractions either. Today our minds are full of TV and news and computers and phones and things like that. We are taken in so much more much quicker. Some call it advancement. Others don't see it that way at all. People have become a little bit lazy in my opinion. Even when I was a kid we were out all day playing. In the fresh air. What we had we made ourselves. I would love to take a kid from today and throw him back to when I was growing up. I am not that old. But even back then would be a shock to his system. Throw him back even further and he would not want to live. No TV. He wouldn't know what to do. 

I just think if we exercise the body and the mind and give ourselves some time off from modern day technology every day, we can improve how we are. Read a book. Go out to the garden for ten minutes. Do us all the world of good.

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## InvisibleGuy

Yup. Fwiw....I went through a pretty big "phase" where I did not take care of myself, mentally or physically, spiritually or in any other way. I went through a druggie phase in my early twenties. I went through a period where I was dependent on alcohol, and I used that to self-medicate my anxiety and depression. I smoked for 20 years, before I finally quit a year ago.

But overall, I'm actually in really good health. 

My paternal grandfather was as straight-arrow as you can be. He was a high school principal, and later on in life was appointed to be a county judge. He never drank. He never smoked. And he died of a massive heart attack in his fifties. 

Something is going to get you lol. You can spend your entire life on a strict diet of nothing but kale and the gym and still die at a young age. When I was a teenager I was really involved in a youth group and the priest that led that group had a massive heart attack and died, and he was 29 years old. So.There are no guarantees.

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## fordaisy

A lot of it has to do with genetics. My grandmother lived to be 85, my mom is 91 and still alive & doing well, my dad died at 56. But you can also cut your life short by how you live. My uncle died in his 70's cause he smoked.

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## PinkButterfly

I am fat and doing nothing except worrying that i am dying from something.. My own fault but the physical health is messing with me and I am scared of more surgeries and medicines ..I do not trust doctors at all.  I also do not wanna hear I have cancer that is my biggest fear .. hearing I had a brain tumor was bad and thinking it was cancer was horrible and then brain surgery sucked big time.. losing my mom to cancer, my dad to a heart attack and several strokes , my brother to a fall .. I stay a nervous wreck.

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## broccolini

Something I've noticed which seems to have a huge effect on health, one of the two largest influences, is hard work. People who grow up doing hard work seem to live to 1000 years and are very mentally and physically able even then.
The other factor is diet. People who grew up poor in remote areas probably didn't have a variety of food readily available. I think it's important but not the only big issue with diet. I think there's also not eating certain really terrible things, which there are a lot of in modern society.

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