Health Anxiety Treatment

Health anxiety involves persistent worry about having or developing a serious illness. You may find yourself paying close attention to physical sensations, researching symptoms online, asking others for reassurance, or repeatedly checking your body for signs that something is wrong.

For some people, health anxiety begins after a real medical problem or frightening health experience. For others, it develops around ordinary physical sensations that become difficult to interpret without worry. In either case, the concern can become difficult to control and can begin to interfere with daily life.

At Northart Counseling, I use Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to treat health anxiety. Treatment focuses on reducing the checking, reassurance seeking, avoidance, and other behaviors that keep health anxiety going.

Health anxiety can look different from person to person. 

Common symptoms include:

• Worry About Serious Illness: Persistent concern that a physical symptom or sensation is a sign of a serious medical condition.

• Checking Your Body: Frequently checking your skin, heart rate, lymph nodes, breathing, temperature, or other parts of your body for signs of illness.

• Searching for Symptoms Online: Repeatedly researching symptoms or medical conditions in an attempt to determine what is wrong.

• Seeking Reassurance: Asking family members, friends, or medical professionals whether a symptom is serious or whether you are healthy.

• Repeated Medical Appointments or Testing: Seeking repeated evaluations or tests because you remain concerned despite previous reassurance.

• Monitoring Physical Sensations: Paying close attention to normal bodily sensations and wondering what they might mean.

• Avoidance: Avoiding exercise, travel, activities, medical information, or other situations because you are afraid they could cause or reveal a health problem.

• Difficulty Accepting Reassurance: Feeling temporarily relieved after receiving reassurance but soon finding another symptom or possibility to worry about.

Health anxiety can become a cycle. A physical sensation leads to worry, which leads to checking or reassurance seeking. Those behaviors may provide relief for a short time, but the concern often returns, leading to more checking and reassurance.

Treatment for health anxiety focuses on changing the behaviors that keep the worry going. We will look at how you respond when you notice a physical sensation or have a thought about your health and identify the behaviors you use to try to feel certain or safe.

Treatment may involve:

• Reducing Checking: Learning to reduce repeated checking of your body and other behaviors used to determine whether something is wrong.

• Reducing Reassurance Seeking: Recognizing when you are asking for reassurance from other people, doctors, or the internet and learning to respond differently to uncertainty.

• Exposure and Response Prevention: ERP involves gradually facing situations that trigger health anxiety while resisting the checking, researching, reassurance seeking, and avoidance that normally follow.

• Addressing Avoidance: Health anxiety can lead you to avoid activities because of concerns about your health. Treatment can help you gradually return to activities that have become restricted by anxiety.

• Learning to Tolerate Uncertainty: You may never be able to know with complete certainty that a particular sensation is harmless. Therapy can help you become more comfortable with that uncertainty without continually trying to resolve it.

• Using Your Values: ACT can help you focus less on controlling anxiety and more on participating in the parts of your life that are important to you.