Health Anxiety is a state of hyper focus and hyper awareness about your own body.
This is really distressing and can lead to excessive and compulsive checking. The sufferer becomes almost convinced they have an underlying serious disease. This can lead to break down in their lives and relationships.
Health anxiety can manifest after an accident or illness in the family, watching or reading about illnesses or Googling their symptoms.
Ice Bucket Challenge
Health Anxiety about a muscle wasting terminal disease called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS skyrocketed after the ice bucket challenge in 2014. Sufferers were fixated on their muscle twitches, dropping things and weakness/heaviness in their arms and legs which are common symptoms of anxiety. As they get more anxious, these symptoms increase, causing a vicious circle and fuels their fears.
One of the worst things a health anxiety sufferer can do is Google their symptoms. These bring up the most serious causes of your symptoms first mainly because of sensationalist news headlines.
Examples of headlines could be “X dies after complaining of a headache.”
Usually, dying after a small complaint, like a headache, is exceedingly rare.
Headaches are extremely common and usually have no serious causes other than tension or postural imbalances.
Worrying About the Worst Possible Outcome
A person with health anxiety will always jump to the worst possible conclusion when they next have a headache after seeing that headline. In severe cases, not even negative tests or advice from experts can ease their worries.
What Can Help
Talk to someone, ideally a healthcare professional. Find a healthcare practitioner or chiropractor you trust and share with them your concerns. Don’t go Doctor shopping though.
To help alleviate symptoms of health anxiety, cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT is effective.
This is a talking therapy which helps people find the negative thoughts causing them anxiety and try to break the cycle. The process involves talking to a counsellor or psychologist and weighing up the chances of it happening to put things in perspective.
The counsellor works with them to breakdown that thought into the thought, feelings, emotions, behaviours and consequences of that behaviour. This breaks down even further to weighing up the for and against the thought and coming up with a more rational one, say for instance a young man talks to his counsellor worrying about his heart stopping or a heart attack.
The counsellor may work through a table, similar to the one below:
| Situation | Trigger (feelings, thoughts) | Intensity – Percentage (0-100%) | Unhelpful thoughts (How convinced? Percentage? (0-100%) | Behaviours – What you did/didn’t do? | Alternative responses (rational and balanced- fact or opinion?) | Outcome re-rate anxiety (0-100%) What was helpful? |
| e.g. Sitting down | e.g. Reading articles, palpitations | e.g. 80% | e.g. Worried about dying from a heart attack (90%) | e.g. Hide away Called a doctor Notice more palpitations | e.g. I am young, healthy. These are normal and common symptoms. I am unlikely to suddenly die | e.g. 50% Thinking about how common and harmless symptoms are really helped |
Try and do one of your own with the same structure next time a thought comes into your head and see how you feel afterwards.
The best thing to do is keep busy and distracted and keep away from the news, media, medical programs and do not Google your symptoms.
You could join a forum about anxiety to let you know you are not alone. Nomorepanic.co.uk and its community have been amazing and supportive.