Health Anxiety: What is it?
Health anxiety (hypochondria) is often a disorder that is overlooked. Heath anxiety is an excessive preoccupation with illness and persistent exaggeration of physical symptoms (e.g aches and pains). People with health anxiety may undergo numerous medical tests and search widely on the internet for answers to their medical complaints.
The tendency to catastrophize their symptoms means that people with hypochondria’s often present to the GP or hospital in search of reassurance. Conversely, other people with health anxiety will avoid anything “medically related” due to fear of triggering a panic attack. There are a number of similarities between people with OCD and health anxiety.
Confronting health anxiety: Breaking the cycle
For some, it starts with a sudden heart palpitation. For others, it might be an unexpected ache, or perhaps a strange mole or bruise. “What is it? Where did it come from? What does it mean? Am I sick?” Everyone has worried moments like these — but for some, those worries are ongoing, maybe even at times unrelenting.
Health anxiety (which in the past has sometimes been referred to as hypochondriasis in clinical diagnosis) may be more common than you think: population studies have found that anywhere between 1 and 10 per cent of people may suffer from it. New research from Dal student Chantal Gautreau offers insight into the cycles that perpetuate it.
“People worry about their health on a regular basis, and that’s quite normal, but health anxiety is a disproportionate worry; it’s worry when there’s not the cause to be as worried as you are.”
A Vicious Cycle
Published in the Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, Gautreau’s study looks at the relationship between health anxiety and what’s known as the “catastrophizing” of body sensations. In other words: Gautreau’s work explores how an individual’s exaggerated thoughts about minor changes or occurrences with their health (the catastrophizing) connect with and affect how they feel (the anxiety).
“We were trying to show that it is a cycle: that someone who is anxious about their health will think about their health in an extreme, catastrophic, and this then makes the anxiety worse.”. The results supported the relationship between catastrophizing of body sensations and health anxiety.
Source: Dalhousie University News: Confronting health anxiety, breaking the cycle.
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