What is health anxiety?
You may be experiencing health anxiety if you worry about your health a lot of the time when there is no medical reason to do this, and how you lead your life is affected by this. You may often seek comfort or reassurance from other people that everything is alright. This may be from family, friends, or your doctor. You may find you are checking your body for symptoms, and that the more you check, the more you seem to notice strange feelings or lumps in your body. You may avoid certain activities as if you were ill, and you may avoid anything to do with illness e.g. information or medical programmes on the television. On the other hand some people with health anxieties find themselves drawn to any information about illnesses and can begin to notice the signs of such illness in themselves.
What causes health anxiety?
There can be many reasons why someone starts worrying too much about their health. If you are suffering from health anxiety: you may have had a period of ill health which has left you worry about your health; or you may have gone through a particularly stressful period of your life which has resulted in a lot of worrying symptoms; there may have been illness or death in your family, or another family member may have worried a lot about their or your health when you were young.
Signs and symptoms of health anxiety
If you are regularly suffering from some or all of these symptoms, then it is possible that you are suffering from health anxiety.