Health Anxiety: How Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Can Help
It’s 2 am and you are up again in the middle of the night, googling symptoms, after noticing some heart palpitations that you’ve never experienced before. You’re used to researching symptoms as they arise on the internet, trying to rule out anything dangerous. The more you read on Google, however, the more your anxiety rises. You feel scared by what you are reading about worst case scenarios and become convinced you have a serious heart problem. You lie sleepless for the next several hours, unable to calm down and fall asleep, watching the clock until you can ring the GP surgery in the morning. It’s a vicious cycle and you’ve become a “professional patient” of sorts where you feel like the GP no longer takes you seriously, leaving you feel more anxious and unreassured than ever. If this sounds like you, keep reading.
Do You Have Health Anxiety?
Anxiety that tends to revolve around your health (or perceived ill health) is often referred to commonly as “health anxiety”. With internet and social media, health anxiety is on the rise due to people turning to these platforms for health information.
Without getting overally technical, the types of algorithms used in social media tend to favour showing people more of the type of content they appear to click on or spend time watching. So if for example, you clicked on one cancer video on Youtube, the next time you log in, your feed will show more cancer videos. When you are bombarded by cancer videos on all your social media feeds as soon as you log in, it’s tempting to keep consuming this type of content, and this in turn can fuel your anxiety because it becomes all you see online!
While some degree of health anxiety is normal, particularly if you or a close friend or family member have had a health scare, it becomes problematic when it starts to cause you a high amount of anxiety and distress, or makes you change your day to day behaviour. Some ways that health anxiety can impact on your behaviour are:
- Spending a lot of time “researching” symptoms on Google
- Booking frequent GP appointments to check out possible symptoms
- Having or insisting on a lot of medical investigations such as tests or scans that your GP believes are unnecessary
- Worrying that your doctor or test results may have missed something
- Body checking- regularly scanning or feeling your body for lumps, tingling, or pain
- Asking others for reassurance that you are not seriously ill
- Experiencing various physical symptoms that are medically unexplained
How Therapies like CBT Can Help with Health Anxiety
If you found yourself agreeing with many of the above symptoms of health anxiety, you are not alone. Many people struggle with this, but health anxiety doesn't have to take over your life! Talking therapies such as CBT can be very effective in helping you manage your health anxiety.
CBT is a type of therapy used by many clinical psychologists and therapists because it is the gold standard treatment approach for many mental health issues. By using CBT, your therapist can work collaboratively with you to identify what your specific health related fears are, and help you to fully explore your worries in an objective way.
Over the course of 8 to 12 sessions, your therapist will teach you evidence based thinking strategies to challenge these worries effectively. Your therapist will also challenge you to step away from unhelpful behaviours such as body checking, frequent GP appointments, and researching symptoms, as these only make anxiety worse in the long term.
By the time you finish CBT, you will hopefully have reduced or even eliminated your health anxiety. Imagine how freeing it would feel to not be consumed with worry about your health, to resume your usual routine, and not lose sleep or precious time worrying about your health. With the right highly trained anxiety specialist, this is achievable for many clients.
If you’re ready to tackle your health anxiety, I’d love to help you. As an anxiety specialist and experienced CBT therapist, I am passionate about helping people with health anxiety. If you’re ready to take the first step, please complete the contact form on the website to set up your free 15 minute initial consultation today!
