When Health Anxiety Becomes Harmful To You

It’s perfectly normal to worry about your health from time to time, especially in today’s world, where there’s constant exposure to diseases, viruses, and medical scares. However, your worry can turn into a continuous, overwhelming fear telling you that something is seriously wrong with you, even when doctors say you’re fine. Read on to learn more about when health anxiety becomes harmful to your health.

What is Health Anxiety?

There are instances where you move beyond everyday health concerns towards health anxiety, also known as illness anxiety disorder or hypochondria. For most people, it starts as a simple Google search about their symptoms until it spirals into a mental health challenge that can impact every part of your life. It can lead to chronic stress about your physical health and make you spend more time and money self-medicating to the point where you inaccurately diagnose yourself.

What Causes Health Anxiety?

Research suggests that health anxiety often starts after a triggering event, like a serious illness in the family, a medical scare, or exposure to repeated trauma (such as growing up with a sick parent). In some cases, it develops as part of generalised anxiety disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If you include stressful global events like pandemics, rising medical costs, and inconsistent access to care, then you have more people silently battling this condition than ever before.

How Do You Know When You Have Health Anxiety?

1. You’re Constantly Checking for Symptoms

Checking for symptoms can start innocently, as you may find out what’s wrong when you have a sore throat, a racing heart, or an unusual mole. However, before you know it, you find yourself checking your body multiple times a day, feeling for lumps, googling symptoms at midnight, and inspecting your skin in the mirror every time you pass by. You don’t trust that you’re in perfect condition, and you obsess over everyday symptoms.

This hyper-awareness of bodily changes is one of the main signs of health anxiety. Your brain changes and becomes wired to look for signs of illness, even when nothing’s wrong. The problem is that the more you check, the more your brain starts seeing normal body sensations and fluctuations, such as twitching, aches, or even breakouts, as potentially harmful.

2. You Don’t Trust Medical Reassurance

You may consult your GP and undergo blood tests and scans to determine if your concerns are justified. When the results return and are normal, you may feel some relief. But then, after a few days, you start feeling doubtful about the accuracy of the tests and think the doctors may have missed something.

You are not alone if you find yourself in this loop of needing reassurance. In some cases, other people with health anxiety refuse to seek medical assistance for fear of getting bad news. However, in extreme cases, others find themselves visiting multiple doctors and requesting repeated tests and treatment.

3. You Avoid Things That Might Trigger Your Fears

Health anxiety comes with a combination of obsessive behaviour and avoidance. You might find yourself steering clear of hospitals and even loved ones who are ill because they trigger your fear of infection. Some people even avoid exercise in case it raises their heart rate and mimics a panic attack.

4. It’s Affecting Your Daily Life

Living with health anxiety can be challenging. There are cases where it becomes chronic and starts affecting every area of your life. These are things you might start noticing:

• Struggling to focus at work because your thoughts keep circling back to your health.
• Cancel social plans because you’re feeling “unwell” or afraid of germs.
• Spend money on vitamins, consultations, or self-testing kits you don’t need.
• Feel constantly drained, panicked, or irritable.

5. You Keep Researching Symptoms

One of the worst things about health anxiety is how the internet makes it easy to find what you think you are looking for. For instance, you could be looking up a mild symptom, and within three clicks, you’ve convinced yourself you have a chronic illness that you’ve never been diagnosed with. It makes access to inaccurate health information without clarity easy to find.

The anxiety-driven habit of compulsively searching for health information online is called cyberchondria. The rising costs of accessing affordable and quality medical advice make it common for people to rely on the internet for guidance. Unfortunately, this habit often worsens the fear instead without providing accurate information.

When to Seek Help

Health anxiety is a real and treatable condition. If you think you might have it, you should consider speaking to a mental health professional. Treatment options include:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT): Helps you challenge and reframe fearful thoughts.
• Medication: Antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds may be helpful if anxiety is severe.
• Mindfulness techniques: Practices like meditation, journaling, and breathwork can help ease anxious thoughts.
• Support groups: Talking to others who experience the same fears can be deeply validating.

Your mind and body are connected, and that’s why when your mind is in a state of fear, it impacts how your body feels; your body, in turn, can reinforce the fear. Health anxiety is a cycle which can be broken with appropriate awareness, support, and proper care. So if your health concerns are starting to take over your life, don’t dismiss them, sign up for Affinity Health insurance, where you have 24/7 access to a mental health professional, unlimited GP visits and much more.