Health anxiety (sometimes called illness anxiety or hypochondriasis) can be incredibly distressing. It can feel as though your mind is constantly scanning for signs that something is wrong. A new ache, a headache, a mole or a sensation you’ve never noticed before can suddenly capture your attention and leave you wondering, “What if this is something serious?” Even after appropriate medical reassurance, the doubt can quickly return.

In many ways, health anxiety shares similarities with OCD. Both can involve intrusive thoughts and doubts, difficulty living with uncertainty, and repeated attempts to find reassurance or certainty. In health anxiety, these fears are focused particularly on health and illness.

Normal bodily sensations can begin to feel significant, symptoms can be interpreted as possible signs of serious illness, and attention becomes increasingly focused on the body. You may find yourself checking for lumps or other changes, monitoring sensations, researching symptoms online, asking others for reassurance, comparing symptoms, or seeking repeated medical reassurance.

These responses are completely understandable. The problem is that they can also keep health anxiety going. Checking or reassurance may provide relief temporarily, but another sensation, symptom or doubt soon appears and the search for certainty begins again.

One of the cruel ironies of health anxiety is that it can take away the very thing you are trying to protect. Instead of enjoying life in the present, more and more time becomes consumed by the possibility of illness. Many people find themselves trapped in a cycle of fear, checking or reassurance, temporary relief, and then renewed doubt.

Recovery comes from changing this cycle.

Tom works with clients to understand exactly how health anxiety is operating in their lives and identify the patterns that may be maintaining it. Treatment then involves gradually changing these patterns, whether that means reducing unnecessary checking, stepping away from repeated symptom research and reassurance, reducing body monitoring, or approaching activities that have been avoided because of fears about health.

Importantly, treatment is not about proving that you are healthy or achieving complete certainty that nothing bad will happen. None of us can have that certainty. Instead, therapy helps people become more able to live with reasonable uncertainty about their health without repeatedly checking, monitoring or seeking reassurance.

Like OCD, health anxiety is rarely overcome through logic alone. A person may recognise intellectually that their fears could be excessive while still feeling that something is seriously wrong. More reassurance or another search for evidence can therefore become part of the problem rather than the solution.

Recovery involves learning through experience. By gradually responding differently to symptoms, thoughts and uncertainty, the brain can learn that these experiences do not always require action. Attention can move away from constant monitoring, the urge to seek certainty can weaken, and health worries can begin to occupy less space in everyday life.

Tom’s approach is grounded in CBT, an evidence-based treatment for health anxiety. Therapy is collaborative, practical and goal-focused, with treatment tailored to the individual and the particular patterns keeping their anxiety going.

Health anxiety can consume an enormous amount of time, attention and energy. Treatment is about helping people reclaim those things and return their attention to living their lives.

If health worries are getting in the way of the life you want to live, you are welcome to get in touch to arrange a free initial consultation with Tom.