Are you tired of constantly worrying about your health? Are you frequently scanning your body for any signs of pain lumps and other abnormalities?
Welcome to my website, my name is Klaudia and I am a CBT therapist.
I would like to share with you 2 small steps you can take to reduce your anxiety related to health.
We are all worried about our health from time to time and it can be a good thing. Spotting early signs of changes in our bodies means we go to the doctor, go through tests and scans which in turn can prevent serious medical problems and consequences. However, what can happen is after we go through all those tests and checks, a doctor may not give us an explanation for our physical symptoms. So we keep going to other doctors and we constantly worry that they might have missed something.
Health anxiety is characterised by constant worry about being ill and falling ill. It can have a significant impact on your life, because you may constantly look for reassurance from others, you can spend a lot of time researching medical information or avoiding going out due to fear of germs or avoiding physical activities. As mentioned before you may never be satisfied with the outcome of various doctors’ appointments.
The problem is that anxiety about your health can contribute to the development of physical symptoms such as increased heartbeat or headaches, which can give you further reasons to worry. Also, the more we seek reassurance and the more we keep scanning our bodies, the more convinced we become that something is not right.
Those sensations can become more intense when we are zooming into them or we simply become more aware of them. You can try it yourself. If I invite you to focus for 5 minutes on your fingertip, notice every line present and how it is structured, you may feel various sensations and notice things you were not aware of before.
One small thing you can do to worry less about your health is to gradually reduce the number of checks you complete every day and keep count of them. For example 62 checks on Monday, 55 checks on Tuesday and so on. You can also observe how this reduction in the number of times you check or scan impacts your anxiety as well as your perception of the physical sensations. You can use a scale from 1 to 10 to rate your anxiety for example 1 meaning no anxiety and 10 meaning the worst anxiety for each number of checks per day. Also, by being aware of how many times you check for symptoms you can start challenging yourself if checking something 50 times a day is more effective than doing it twice, or is it just maintaining your anxiety.
You can also keep a record of how many times a day you ask for reassurance from your friends and family and how it impacts your anxiety during the day the same way as in previous exercise. We would also like to see a reduction in this number every day so you can see the difference. Reassurance seeking can be one of the safety behaviours which can bring you relief from anxiety in the short term but can cause you more anxiety in the long run.
Therapy and self-help resources can help you understand the maintenance cycle of health anxiety and how to break it. It is highly probable that the improvement in your anxiety symptoms can also improve your physical symptoms.
Before you decide to go for therapy, I would recommend getting clearance from your doctor, just once, that indeed there is no physical problem present and asking as many questions regarding your symptoms as possible, so you can fully focus on anxiety when in therapy. Most people with health anxiety have been multiple times at the doctors, but this is just a reminder that a therapist will not be able to answer any medical questions or be able to examine you so obtaining this clearance can make sure you are doing things in the right order.