Health Anxiety (also known as "Illness Anxiety")

Sometimes people become intensely worried about their health. In some cases, this worrying is justified, because health problems do indeed happen to many people. Indeed, sometimes doctors reassure people that they have no medical problem, but later it is discovered that, in fact, they do have a serious medical problem.

But sometimes the worry is excessive, and a person notices that he or she has a pattern of getting worried and distressed about things that do not turn out to be serious medical problems.

Signs and Symptoms:

  • A pattern of frequent and disruptive worrying about one's health

  • Going to the doctor often, or to various different doctors, trying to find the medical problem—but no medical problem is found

  • Seeking repeated reassurances from doctors, family, friends that one is not dangerously ill...yet still not feeling reassured

  • Doubting the doctors' conclusions that nothing is wrong.

  • Diagnosing oneself with serious conditions

  • This preoccupation with one's health negatively affects one's work or personal life

Sometimes people with health anxiety go to the other extreme, and avoid medical issues more than most. They tend to avoid getting medical checkups, avoid seeing things on television related to medical issues, and so on, out of the fear of medical problems.

One of the stressful aspects of health anxiety is that the body is a complicated organism that even when in good health often has some ache or pain or unusual sensation or sound or other phenomenon that can be interpreted by an anxious person as a sign of a serious illness. And in our age of the Internet, it's easy to look up one's symptoms and feel convinced that one is seriously ill with a dread disease.

Another contributing factor is that anxiety (or stress) itself can both magnify various symptoms and even cause physical symptoms of its own. So a vicious cycle can develop: The more a person is anxious about health matters, the more symptoms seem to appear and get worse; and the more and worse symptoms get, the more anxious a person becomes.

If you think you may be suffering from health anxiety and want to begin the process of regaining your peace of mind, please call Michael Posner, MSW, LCSW at (918) 809-4777.