Managing Health Anxiety: Stop Worrying About Your Health

Stop worrying about your health and manage health anxiety by breaking the cycle of health anxiety.

Managing Health Anxiety

Do you frequently worry about your health, preoccupied with having or acquiring a serious illness, or constantly checking for signs that something’s wrong? Worrying about every body sensation and symptom and obsessively researching them online or frequently visiting doctors? Or maybe you avoid doctors altogether out of fear of getting a serious diagnosis. While it’s natural to be concerned about our health sometimes, if we have health anxiety or illness anxiety disorder, these concerns can become debilitating and disruptive to daily life. So let’s look at what health anxiety involves and how we can manage it.

First, there’s a trigger which could be an uncomfortable body sensation or any sort of symptom, which we then misinterpret as a sign of a serious health issue, and this makes us anxious. The trigger could be some health-related news or something we read online, and this leads to anxiety. Once our anxiety kicks in, there are a few paths we can go down.

We can start over-monitoring our symptoms, looking for any sign that there might be something wrong, frequently checking our symptoms for any changes, and being on the lookout for any new symptoms that might arise.

Health anxiety can also lead to excessive reassurance seeking, checking with external sources to evaluate our health, which can involve frequent visits to the doctor or obsessively researching our health online. These behaviors sometimes offer temporary relief but often leave us even more anxious, and this hypervigilance about our health means we’re always going to find something new to trigger our anxiety.

Sometimes we respond to health anxiety with avoidance, either avoiding situations due to fear of getting sick or avoiding health professionals out of fear of getting a bad diagnosis, which can offer some temporary relief but may end up ignoring legitimate health concerns. This temporary relief can offer some short-term comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate anxiety long-term, and so our health anxiety will keep getting triggered.

We can reduce health anxiety by making changes to various parts of this cycle. With health anxiety, we typically respond to triggers by imagining the worst-case scenario. 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, and any mole or rash is skin cancer. The list of possible symptoms and self-diagnosis is endless. So we need to replace these catastrophic thoughts with more realistic 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 is likely due to something I ate, or stress, or anxiety, or maybe I strained a muscle. Modifying our thoughts about our symptoms from catastrophic worst-case scenarios to more likely explanations can help ease our anxiety.

This often helps relieve our symptoms because if we have a headache or stomach ache or any uncomfortable sensations in our bodies and start getting really anxious about it, our anxiety can make these physical sensations stronger, whereas calming our anxiety helps calm these sensations as well. Learning to modify our anxious thoughts can be challenging, and I have some videos that can help.

There’s nothing wrong with occasionally monitoring symptoms or checking for new ones, but with health anxiety, these behaviors can become excessive and go far beyond what’s necessary to evaluate or catch health issues. One way to start reducing monitoring and checking is to schedule a health check-in in the evenings. During this time, we take a moment to assess how we’ve been feeling overall. We can note any new symptoms experienced during the day or any significant changes from the previous day. There’s no need to spend more than a few minutes on this.

We don’t want to engage in a prolonged checking session, just aim for a general awareness of how our health has been throughout the day. If we’re keeping a wellness journal, we can briefly note any significant symptoms and the context in which they occurred, and if something needs to be checked out, we can make a note to contact our doctors. If we’re already checking less frequently than this, it’s certainly not necessary to do this every day to maintain our health. This is just a strategy to reduce excessive checking and symptom monitoring throughout the day.

Then if we do start worrying about our health during the day or a symptom arises unexpectedly, unless it’s something that requires immediate medical attention, we simply acknowledge it. We can write down the worry or symptom if we think it’s important, briefly modify any catastrophic thoughts, “something’s wrong with my heart, it’s probably just anxiety or indigestion,” then rather than fixating on it or seeking reassurance right away, we just set it aside for now and postpone thinking about it until our health check-in later in the day. Then we redirect our attention back to our current task because continuing to think or worry about our health right now isn’t going to be productive, and it’s not going to accomplish anything except make us anxious.

Knowing we have time set aside later to reflect on our health makes it easier to not get caught up in minor sensations or symptoms we might experience throughout the day. This teaches us that our health anxiety isn’t uncontrollable, and we have the ability to focus our attention where we want it instead of constantly being carried away by worries about our health. If you do experience sudden, severe, or debilitating symptoms such as intense pain, a high fever, or difficulty breathing that isn’t related to a panic attack, it’s important to seek immediate medical attention.

We can try responding to health concerns and perceived symptoms with mindfulness. It’s completely natural to experience a range of body sensations throughout the day: general aches and pains, muscle tightness or tension, or tingling, digestive processes, and so on. Often, uncomfortable body sensations arise out of our emotions and have nothing to do with our physical health. I have a video that looks at this in detail.

Most of these sensations don’t require our attention. We don’t need to do anything about them. So when we notice the sensation in our bodies, we simply acknowledge it, “I’m starting to get a headache, there’s some tightness in my throat, there’s a funny feeling in my stomach,” and then as best we can, we gently shift our attention away from the sensation and back to whatever we’re doing.

Anytime a new sensation arises, we just use the same process of noticing and acknowledging it, maybe even 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 throughout the day,” and then we gently shift our attention away from the sensation and back to what we were doing. We might want to breathe with the sensation for a few minutes, which can help ease tension and calm emotions, using our breath to bring our awareness to the sensation as we breathe in and then allowing it to soften and relax as we breathe out.

If we start having thoughts about our body sensations like, “Oh no, there’s something wrong with me, what if I have cancer?” rather than getting caught up in these thoughts, we can respond to them mindfully and simply acknowledge them, “I’m having the thought there’s something wrong with me, I’m worrying what if I have cancer,” and then as best we can, we let these thoughts go and redirect our attention back to whatever we’re doing. We can add the qualifier “just,” “This is just a thought, this is just a worry,” which can help make it easier to let the thoughts go. I have a number of videos with various mindfulness strategies that can help us manage anxiety.

If we do get fixated on a body sensation 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. Grounding exercises that focus on the external environment can also help divert our focus away from internal sensations, such as naming five things we can see, four things we can touch, three things we can hear, two things we can smell, and one thing we can taste.

Now let’s look at reassurance seeking. If we have health anxiety, one of the most counterproductive things we can do is engage in online health research regarding our symptoms. If we look up every body sensation or symptom we’re experiencing, we’re going to find it could potentially be a symptom of any number of serious diagnoses. Also, we’re likely not qualified to make sense of the information we find and be able to distinguish between something that’s harmless or might indicate an underlying health issue. So this sort of checking doesn’t reduce our anxiety, it increases it by giving us lots of different health issues to worry about. Even if we do learn something that eases our mind for a moment, checking and reassurance seeking offers at best very time-limited relief. Once this time runs out, anxiety returns, and we feel the need to check again.

Of course, there are times when checking with a health professional is warranted, but it’s easy to go overboard. If we frequently seek medical advice for symptoms that turn out to be insignificant or get second and third opinions that tell us the same thing, we should talk to our health care providers about how often we should be consulting them. Instead of constantly seeking reassurance, we need to learn to reassure ourselves, which we can practice with a couple of strategies we’ve talked about already: modifying our catastrophic thoughts with more realistic interpretations and practicing mindfulness. We can reassure ourselves that a lot of the sensations we experience in our bodies are related to emotions: “This tightness in my throat is because I’m sad, this feeling in my stomach is anxiety, why am I so hot? It’s just my anger.”

Another key component in managing health anxiety is building up a tolerance for uncertainty. It’s impossible to have complete certainty about our health, and that can be stressful. Seeking constant reassurance or excessively monitoring symptoms doesn’t resolve the uncertainty, so instead, we need to learn to manage the uncertainty of not knowing whether a symptom is serious or not a big deal. The uncertainty associated with waiting for information from an upcoming doctor’s appointment, for test results, and so on. This practice of accepting uncertainty can reduce the compulsive need to seek reassurance and monitor symptoms excessively. I have a video that looks at ways to build up our tolerance for uncertainty that I’ll link to in the description.

Finally, avoidance, which is often accompanied by safety behaviors, actions taken to feel safer or to prevent feared outcomes. For example, we might frequently wash our hands, avoid touching door knobs, or carry medical supplies or instruments like a thermometer or blood pressure monitor at all times. We can reduce avoidance and safety behaviors through exposure, which involves intentionally placing ourselves in situations that make us anxious in order to learn that our feared outcomes are less likely than we predict, that we can handle these situations even if things don’t go the way we want, and that the anxiety we experience is manageable even if it’s uncomfortable. As a result, these situations start causing us less anxiety, we’re less compelled to avoid them, and we can resist engaging in safety behaviors. I have videos that describe how to practice exposure and exposure and response prevention, which is designed for OCD but can be helpful with managing safety behaviors and excessive checking in the context of health anxiety.

By changing the way we interpret our symptoms, reducing our symptom monitoring, checking, and reassurance seeking, and no longer practicing avoidance, we can start to relieve our health anxiety while also weakening or even breaking the connections that keep the cycle of health anxiety going.

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