You notice a headache that’s been there a bit too long, a mole that looks slightly different, a heartbeat that felt off for a second…
And before you’ve even consciously decided to, you’ve typed it into Google.
40 minutes later you have a shortlist of conditions, at least 2 of which are serious, and you feel significantly worse than you did before you started. The reassurance you went looking for is nowhere to be found. Instead there’s a new question, a new symptom to monitor, and a hum of dread that follows you into the rest of your day.
If this is familiar, you’re not being dramatic. What you’re dealing with has a name, a mechanism, and importantly: a way through.
Health anxiety is a pattern of excessive worry about having or developing a serious illness, in the absence of medical evidence to support it, or disproportionate to any evidence that does exist.
It exists on a spectrum. At the milder end, it shows up as periodic googling, occasional reassurance-seeking from doctors or loved ones, and a tendency to notice and monitor physical sensations more than most people do. At the more significant end, it can organise entire days with monitoring symptoms, seeking repeated reassurance, avoiding anything that might trigger health-related thoughts, or conversely, compulsively checking the body for signs of illness.
What sits underneath it, in almost every case, is anxiety. The health content is where it’s landed, but the engine running it is the same threat-detection system that drives every other form of anxiety. Google lists everything, the rare and frightening alongside the common and boring. An anxious brain zooms in on the worst.
Anxiety also produces real physical symptoms: tension, palpitations, dizziness, headaches. With health anxiety, those become “evidence”, and the loop tightens.
The response is normal, your brain is trying to protect you, so you basically have to show your brain through experience that it’s safe.
Delay the google. Notice the urge, wait ten minutes, then wait again. Urges peak and drop on their own.
Start cutting back the body checks. Follow your doctor’s advice, then let the lump go untoured for a day.
Make room for “maybe”. You can’t be 100% sure you’re healthy. Nobody can. Practise living anyway.
You’ll never be 100% certain you’re healthy. You can still do the checks you need to do (in moderation where genuinely necessary), and then spend your time and energy on what you value.
Information alone, this post included, won’t resolve health anxiety. The shift comes from doing things differently, repeatedly to show your brain through evidence that you are safe.
Interoceptive exposures (deliberately bringing on the sensations in small doses until your brain stops treating them as an emergency) works well for anxiety, combined with other types of exposures and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) for learning how to build psychological flexibility (the ability to move towards what matters to you even when difficult feelings are there, without getting overwhelmed by them). For other difficulties you experience alongside anxiety, an integrative approach might be useful.
If you’re still stuck, get in touch and let’s work together to help you get your life back.
Anxiety Therapist working with fear, and the life built around it
A 3-step free guide to understanding and interrupting repetitive patterns in your relationships, behaviour and emotional responses.
