Therapy for Health Anxiety

When someone has health anxiety, they will notice symptoms and jump to the worst-case scenario about what these symptoms are. For example, if they have a stomach pain, they worry it could be bowel cancer. If they have a chest pain, they think they are a heart problem. Sometimes health anxiety can expand and as well as worry about your own health, you worry about the health of those around you. We begin to see potential harmful physical conditions in all our symptoms, symptoms that perhaps in the past, you would not have even noticed.

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This can lead to us seeking reassurance about what the symptoms are; googling, visiting the GP, wearing a watch to monitor our heart rate or using other equipment such as blood pressure machines. This constant checking of what are symptoms are feels useful, as it provides us a sense of control however, we soon become reliant on it and feel we cant cope without constantly doing these things. This leads us to being in a heightened state of anxiety a lot of the time.

 

Therapy for health anxiety will focus on behaviours such as the above, which you might have developed to give a sense of safety. We will think about if any of these behaviours might be triggering your symptoms. We will also look at other ways to interpret the symptoms you notice.