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Do You Get Anxious About Your Health?

Worrying that something’s wrong or that you might get sick. It’s natural to care about our health, but with health anxiety, our worries can start to take over. Let’s look at what health anxiety is and how to relieve it.

What Triggers Health Anxiety

Often, health anxiety gets triggered by a physical sensation. We notice a strange or uncomfortable feeling in our bodies and start worrying that something is seriously wrong.

Or we might read or have someone tell us something and that gets us worried. Or maybe our health is just something we’re anxious about all the time.

When health anxiety gets triggered, we can start over monitoring symptoms, looking for any sign that something might be wrong. Or we might seek excessive reassurance from health professionals or by looking things up online or just avoid thinking about our health altogether.

But these types of responses to health anxiety can only provide temporary relief and they increase health anxiety in the long run. So, let’s look at what we can do instead.

Replace Catastrophic Thoughts

With health anxiety, we tend to imagine worst case scenarios. We worry our headache is a brain tumor or aneurysm. Stomach pain is bowel disease or cancer. If we feel dizzy, we worry it’s a neurological disorder. The list of possible symptoms and self-dagnoses is endless.

So, we need to replace these catastrophic thoughts with more realistic and reassuring interpretations.

People get headaches for all sorts of reasons, and they’re usually harmless and go away on their own. Mild stomach or chest discomfort could just be something I ate, or stress, or anxiety, or maybe I strained a muscle. This tightness in my throat is because I’m feeling sad or anxious.

These are all common body sensations that healthy people experience all the time, and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong.

And these more accurate explanations reduce anxiety and this helps relieve symptoms since anxiety often makes physical sensations stronger and more uncomfortable. And as these sensations subside, our anxiety does as well.

Schedule Health Check-Ins

Now, there’s nothing wrong with occasionally monitoring symptoms or checking for new ones, but with health anxiety, these behaviors become excessive and go far beyond what’s necessary to evaluate and catch health issues.

Instead of allowing ourselves to worry about our health all day long, we schedule a brief health check-in every evening. And when worries or symptoms come up before that, we just write them down and then set them aside until the planned check-in.

Then during the check-in, we acknowledge any concerns we noted during the day and briefly consider whether anything actually needs attention. And if it does, we figure out what we need to do about it, which could be making an appointment with a doctor, for example.

But if what we’d written down was just a passing worry or something we can’t or don’t need to do anything about and we just let it go. Perhaps reassuring ourselves that it’s just a normal feeling that people have all the time.

By postponing thinking about these worries, we learn that health anxiety doesn’t control us and we can do things to stop ourselves from getting stuck obsessing about it all day long.

Use Mindfulness

And mindfulness can help. It’s normal to experience things like aches, tension, tingling, and other body sensations throughout the day.

So, when we notice a sensation, instead of reacting to it, we simply acknowledge it mindfully. I’m feeling dizzy. There’s some tightness in my throat, and that’s okay.

Maybe reassuring ourselves with a phrase like, “This is just a natural body sensation, and it’s completely normal for feelings like this to come and go. I don’t need to do anything about it, and I can just let it be here.

We can also be mindful of our thoughts. When we have a thought like what’s this feeling? Something must be wrong. Instead of reacting to it with anxiety, we simply acknowledge it.

I’m having the thought something must be wrong. This is just a thought. It’s just a worry. It’s not a fact.

And we can label the thought as worrying or obsessing. This helps us step back from our thoughts and then as best we can, we let them go instead of getting caught up in worrying about them.

Distraction and Grounding Techniques

And if we do get fixated on a body sensation or catastrophic thought and have trouble letting it go, we can try to distract ourselves by switching tasks, going for a walk, exercising, or engaging in any activity that requires our full attention.

And grounding exercises that focus on the external environment can help shift our attention away from our health anxiety. Such as naming five things we can see, four we can touch, three we can hear, two we can smell, and one we can taste.

Or we can use our breath to help ground us. Bringing the focus of our attention to our breathing instead of our symptoms.

We can do any mindfulness of breath practice or just a simple breathing exercise like breathing in through our nostrils for a count of two, pausing and then breathing out through our mouths for a count of four and just repeating this.

Avoid Excessive Reassurance Seeking

Now let’s look at reassurance seeking. One of the most counterproductive things we can do with health anxiety is research our symptoms online.

If we look up every body sensation or symptom we experience, we’re going to find that they can be associated with any number of serious diagnoses. So, we end up increasing our anxiety by giving ourselves lots of different health issues to worry about.

And we’re unlikely to be able to make sense of the information we find or be able to distinguish what’s harmless from what actually needs attention.

Of course, there are times when getting reassurance from a health professional is warranted. It’s important to seek help for new, concerning, or severe symptoms.

But frequent or unnecessary visits, especially for issues that turn out to be minor and insignificant, can reinforce health anxiety by making us believe that we can’t even handle small concerns on our own and always need outside reassurance.

So instead of constantly seeking reassurance online or from health professionals, we need to learn to reassure ourselves.

Tolerate Uncertainty

Now, it’s impossible to have complete certainty about our health. We can’t control what’s going to happen in the future. We usually can’t know for sure whether a symptom is serious. And waiting for test results or doctor’s appointments is stressful.

Trying to eliminate uncertainty by checking symptoms constantly or seeking reassurance only feeds our anxiety and makes it harder to cope.

A better way to handle uncertainty is to use strategies we’ve discussed earlier. We tell ourselves reassuring thoughts. Most symptoms turn out to be harmless even when they feel concerning. Waiting for results is uncomfortable, but worrying about it doesn’t do anything and just makes me anxious.

And we can respond to our desire for certainty with mindfulness. We simply sit with the discomfort and acknowledge it. I’m feeling uncomfortable not knowing. I’m having the urge to seek reassurance.

And we tell ourselves, it’s okay to feel this way, and it’s natural to want answers, but there’s nothing I can do to get them right now.

We can focus on breathing with these feelings, repeating silently to ourselves something like, “Breathing in, I feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. Breathing out, I allow this discomfort to be here because struggling with it only makes it worse.”

Face Your Fears Through Exposure

And sometimes health anxiety involves avoidance. We might avoid thinking about our health and ignore any symptoms or avoid going to the doctor or doing activities we fear could trigger symptoms or make us sick.

We might also engage in safety behaviors like repeatedly washing our hands or not touching things so we don’t catch any germs or constantly checking our vital signs.

These behaviors can provide temporary relief, but they prevent us from learning that we can handle these situations and circumstances. And so our anxiety about these things continues to persist.

So, we need to use what’s known as exposure and start facing the situations we’ve been avoiding, which helps us learn that feared outcomes are less likely than we expect, and we can manage our anxiety on our own.

Key Takeaways

So, the keys to relieving health anxiety are to replace our catastrophic thoughts about our health with more realistic interpretations and schedule a health check-in instead of worrying about health all day long.

Be mindful of our body sensations and thoughts and use grounding techniques and distraction when we can’t let our worries go.

Learn to reassure ourselves instead of constantly seeking reassurance from health professionals or the internet.

Practice tolerating uncertainty and face the things that make us anxious about our health so we can learn that they’re not as dangerous and threatening as they seem.

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