Is your mind filled with worries? Do you feel like your wellbeing is at stake? Do you tend to devote a lot of time to researching your symptoms? It’s normal to worry about health from time to time. Still, if you do it excessively, it might indicate you’re dealing with health anxiety.
Soon you might even start worrying that it will never go away, and you wonder whether it’s possible to break the cycle of health anxiety. The short answer is yes. In this blog, you’ll find out more about health anxiety, what keeps it going and how to manage it.
How do you break the cycle of health anxiety?
Health anxiety is excessive worry about physical health, often kept going by a loop: noticing a symptom, fearing the worst, checking or seeking reassurance, feeling briefly calmer, then worrying again. Breaking the cycle means spotting this pattern, reducing reassurance-seeking, and learning to tolerate uncertainty, often through CBT-based strategies.
What Is Health Anxiety?
Health anxiety is a mental health issue that involves excessive worry about your health. While it’s normal to be concerned about your wellbeing occasionally, if you have health anxiety, it’s likely that you frequently misinterpret body sensations. [2] You might see every signal from your body as a potential threat and may regularly seek reassurance from health professionals. If this sounds like you, you may often wonder whether anxiety will ever go away, in other words, whether it’s possible to break the cycle of health anxiety. Keep reading as we give an answer to this very question!
The Vicious Cycle of Health Anxiety
When you constantly worry about your health, you start engaging in behaviours that you believe have the potential to bring instant relief from anxiety. For example, researching your symptoms online or contacting a doctor for reassurance. While this can sometimes be a short-term solution, when a new symptom or sign from your body arises, it will make you anxious again, reactivating the cycle. This is called the vicious cycle of health anxiety. The vicious cycle of anxiety is maintained by negative interpretations of bodily sensations.
Imagine that you wake up with pain in your back. You might jump to conclusions such as; ‘I probably have a slipped disc’ or ‘I must have arthritis’. You might also catastrophise the information given to you by the doctors. For example, suppose you’re told it’s probably just a strain and advised to rest your back for a few days. In that case, you might start believing there must be something seriously wrong with your back if even doctors can’t find the exact cause. When a new symptom appears in the future, it might trigger these unhelpful thoughts and, in turn, activate anxiety that can further fuel your health concerns. The vicious cycle affects your life and the people around you too. You might stop participating in certain activities for fear of making your symptoms worse. You might isolate yourself from your loved ones, who will struggle to understand your concerns.
Developing new coping strategies can help learn how to break the cycle of health anxiety. This happens via challenging and replacing unhelpful thoughts and contributing to setting in a virtuous cycle, where repeating healthy behaviours will increase your mental wellbeing. Every time you practice a coping skill, you decrease the anxiety and unlearn unhealthy strategies and teach yourself to respond in new ways. For example, you might learn to replace worst-case scenarios with more realistic beliefs. Suppose you replace a catastrophic thought such as: “My back is going to be injured forever”, with a more balanced belief like: “My symptom is most likely a result of stress or sleeping in an awkward position”. In that case, you will lessen the distress and train your brain to notice and tackle unhelpful thoughts across other situations. Engaging in helpful, sustainable behaviours generates positive results such as gaining a more realistic perspective and strengthening the virtuous cycle. You can find out more about managing health anxiety below.
Is It Possible To Break The Cycle of Health Anxiety?
Breaking the cycle of health anxiety is possible. The first step is recognising what keeps the health anxiety going and addressing unhelpful thoughts and behaviours, which can be done with the help of a trained therapist. The next step is targeting these thoughts and replacing them with more realistic assumptions that will decrease unhealthy behaviours. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to say goodbye to the anxious you and regain a sense of agency over your life. Keep on reading to find out more.
Keep in Check your Self-Checking
Whenever you experience new symptoms, it might be tempting to make an appointment with a doctor or reach out for advice on a forum to put your mind at ease. At the same time, you might try to reduce the distress by engaging in self-checking. You might frequently examine your body for signs of rashes, check urine for signs of blood, measure your temperature etc. While seeking reassurance can temporarily alleviate the distress, it only makes the cycle of health anxiety stronger in the long term. Feeding your worries will only make them stronger.
To reduce self-monitoring, it’s first essential to understand that checking for signs that there’s something wrong with your body will make your mind focused on all negative possibilities and only add to the problem. It might even act as a self-fulling prophecy. Excessively paying attention to your symptoms and believing they’re linked to a severe health problem might worsen your situation, keeping your health anxiety cycle going. For example, if you’re experiencing back pain and imagine worst-case scenarios, your distress might increase and lead to muscle tension that will, in turn, result in more pain. One study looking at the relationship between catastrophising thoughts, bodily sensations and physical symptoms suggested that when people are very focused on signals from their body, those sensations can actually become more distressing. [1]
An excellent way to minimise self-checking is to critically evaluate your behaviour instead of focusing on the negatives. [3] Ask yourself, what are the advantages and disadvantages of self-checking? Consider this example: if you check for signs of a rash because everyone in your family has eczema, you might believe noticing the symptoms early will give you an advantage and allow you to access the best treatment options. However, one of the causes of eczema is stress and checking for its signs might be what triggers it in the first place because of the increased stress. Similarly, constantly checking your body for signs of diseases is time-consuming and can cost you a lot of money. If you excessively worry about your health, you might struggle to focus on work and underperform, which might even cost you your job. This might also have an impact on your relationships. You might feel misunderstood and prioritise researching your symptoms instead of prioritising your partner, which can lead to a lot of tension and possibly a breakup.
Challenge Your Worrying Thoughts
One of the ways the cycle of health anxiety is maintained is by experiencing unhelpful thoughts. People with health anxiety interpret physical symptoms as threatening and come up with worst-case scenarios. Imagine that you experience a new pain. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Do you tend to jump to conclusions and worry that the symptom might indicate a serious, even incurable disease? These kinds of assumptions reinforce the anxiety and increase the obsessive self-checking mentioned above. You essentially teach your brain that discomfort or unusual bodily signals equal serious illness when you let yourself worry.
Worrying about your health might also trigger your body’s fight or flight response that comes with its own physical symptoms. For example, muscular tension, increased heart and breathing rates, lightheadedness, and stomachache. These symptoms can further increase your anxiety. To challenge your thoughts, write down a health problem you’re worried about and try to come up with what’s most likely causing it. For example, if you experience stomachache, remind yourself it’s a common symptom of stress, and it’s unlikely to be a sign of cancer or another severe disease. Attributing your symptoms to serious illnesses is known as somatosensory catastrophising. Catastrophising is a cognitive distortion that generates negative feelings such as anxiety, low mood, and fear. Dealing with such negative emotions might encourage you to engage in behaviours meant to lessen them but which only fuel the vicious cycle of anxiety. We’re written another article on cognitive distortions (or thinking errors), which you might find helpful!
Finding Treatment for Health Anxiety
Health anxiety can start taking up more and more space in everyday life. You might check a symptom, feel reassured for a short while, and then find the doubt returning with even more force. Treatment helps you understand this loop: the bodily sensation, the catastrophic thought, the checking or reassurance-seeking, and the brief relief that keeps the fear going. From there, you can begin practising different responses, like reducing symptom searches, delaying reassurance-seeking, and learning to tolerate uncertainty about your health.
Health Anxiety Therapy often uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you map the links between thoughts, feelings, body sensations and safety behaviours. [4] For example, you might begin to see how the thought “what if this is serious?” leads to checking your body, searching online, or asking for reassurance, and how these behaviours can make anxiety stronger in the long run. The work is not about ignoring your health, but learning when anxiety has taken over the decision-making. If you are also noticing physical sensations that make you worry, our article on the physical symptoms of health anxiety may help you understand that link more clearly.
Tips To Manage the Everyday Challenges of your Health Anxiety Cycle
Once you recognise the health anxiety cycle, the next question is what to do when it shows up in everyday life. Of course, the aim is not to stop caring about your health, but to respond in a way that does not keep feeding the fear. The tips below focus on getting the right kind of support, planning for situations that usually trigger anxiety, using healthy distractions, and easing the physical tension that can keep the cycle going.
Educate your loved ones
Having a good support network can be crucial in dealing with mental health problems, but it’s important to know what’s helpful and what isn’t. When your loved ones understand the nature and implications of health anxiety, they can discourage your worry and self-monitoring behaviours. You can start by describing your health anxiety symptoms and how they affect your day-to-day life. Once your loved ones understand how it affects you, you can explain how the vicious cycle of anxiety works and why it’s so challenging to break away from its grip. You can also share a first-person account of living with health anxiety to help them understand how isolating and convincing the fear can feel from the inside. Anxiety UK also has guidance on how to support someone with anxiety, so loved ones can support you without constantly reinforcing reassurance-seeking.
Make sure you prepare for stressful events in advance
Events such as holidays, business parties or family gatherings can be extremely stressful even for someone who isn’t dealing with health anxiety. You might think that a holiday or seeing your loved ones is just what you need to have a break from your symptoms, but it can trigger a lot of your worries. The extra stress might make it difficult not to relapse and rely on your safety behaviours. It doesn’t mean you have to give up on your plans but try to prepare for them in advance. For example, if you’re planning a holiday, make sure you have the right health insurance and avoid reading the news before and during the trip. If you have to attend an important work meeting, practise relaxation techniques beforehand, which you can rely on if your anxiety is triggered.
Prepare a list of healthy distractions
These can be used to interrupt the cycle of anxiety whether you’re at home or at work. For example, you could aim to go for a walk or write your worries down when you feel distressed. Do something relaxing if you experience mild distress to make relying on it a habit.
Use the Worry-Time Technique
A suitable method to help you break the cycle of health anxiety is also setting aside some time for worrying. When you feel like analysing your health, tell yourself you’ll be allowed to do this later, but now you have to focus on the task at hand. It might seem counterproductive, but this technique is meant to reduce the association between worry and its triggers. For example, if you overthink every time a new symptom appears, each new trigger will also result in worry. Postponing the time spent worrying to a reserved 5-10 minutes space during the day can help you lessen the anxiety in the long run.
Stay active
Checking for symptoms and consulting doctors isn’t the only way to look out for your health. Make positive changes to your lifestyle and include exercise at least a few times a week. As exercising can clear your mind and decreases muscle tension, it will help you keep your anxiety at bay and increase your overall health.
Get help Breaking the Cycle of Health Anxiety Therapy in London and Online
Health anxiety can severely impact your wellbeing and prevent you from achieving your goals. If you leave it untreated, the problem will only increase and affect more and more areas of your life.
At Therapy Central, we have qualified therapists that specialise in health anxiety therapy, aimed at helping you break away from its vicious cycle and live a more fulfilling life. Contact us for a free 15-min consultation to see if our help would fit your needs.
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FAQ
How do you stop health anxiety?
Stopping health anxiety usually starts with breaking the loop that keeps it going: noticing a sensation, fearing the worst, checking, then feeling briefly reassured before the worry returns. Helpful steps include delaying symptom searches, reducing body-checking, and asking what else could explain the sensation. CBT can help you practise these changes more consistently.
Can health anxiety be cured?
Health anxiety can improve a great deal, and some people recover fully. It is usually more helpful to think in terms of changing your response to symptoms and uncertainty, rather than trying to remove every anxious thought. With CBT and regular practice, checking behaviours and catastrophic interpretations can lose much of their power.
How do I calm health anxiety quickly?
To calm health anxiety quickly, try to slow the spiral rather than solve the symptom immediately. Put both feet on the floor, breathe out slowly, and delay checking or searching online for a few minutes. The aim is not to prove you are safe straight away, but to give the anxious urge time to pass.
Does health anxiety ever go away?
Health anxiety can go away, or become mild enough that it no longer interferes with daily life. If the cycle does not change, it may persist, especially during stress or real illness. Recovery usually means learning to respond differently to bodily sensations, uncertainty, and the urge to seek reassurance, so the anxiety gradually weakens.
When should I see a therapist for health anxiety?
It may be time to see a therapist when health worries take up significant time, affect work or relationships, or lead to repeated checking, symptom research, or medical appointments where reassurance only lasts briefly. Therapy can help you understand the health anxiety cycle and practise reducing the behaviours that keep it going.
