Health Anxiety – What makes people SO afraid of ill-health, diseases and dying?
I haven’t talked much about health anxiety in a while. Not because it isn’t important or it’s uncommon (it isn’t!) but because almost every highly anxious, worried and stressed client I see in my clinic usually has some form of health anxiety tied up in their other issues, so I haven’t written anything specific on it - until NOW! So what is it, and what’s really going on for sufferers?
Health anxiety is an ongoing state of worry, stress, and panic over your own health and sometimes others’ too. From small moles, sore throats and slight coughs, to cancer, infectious diseases and even death, sufferers are seemingly plagued by recurring anxious thoughts about health and illness. They can often Google their symptoms, and read so many articles about worse case scenarios that they turn a seemingly minor symptom into something incredibly serious. They may visit doctors often and become increasingly convinced that their concerns are not being taken seriously and that a rare, terminal, or life-threatening condition is going undiagnosed.
A key element of health anxiety is extreme hyper vigilance. By this, we mean that the sufferer is incredibly self-aware about any and every physical sensation in their body (and may dismiss thinking problems such as stress or worry as contributing to these sudden-onset symptoms). They are constantly self-monitoring for bodily changes or new/strange internal sensations and looking for signs of becoming unwell, believing that by doing so they are extra-prepared to deal with it. They also display numerous and sometimes highly debilitating obsessive behaviours and control mechanisms to try and avoid illness, and are on the look-out for any and all kinds of ‘health threats’ on a daily basis. Many sufferers feel so powerless over illness that they rely heavily on medical treatments and pills themselves, even when they are not especially unwell, believing that these are the only way to tackle any kind of health problem. As a society, despite improvements to healthcare, we are now actually taking more pills and tablets for illness than ever before.
“Health anxiety is an ongoing state of worry, stress, and panic over your own health and sometimes others’ too”
Health anxiety sufferers also live in a state of constant worry, feeling powerless over their own health and their own ability to cope with any kind of health scare or diagnosis, and usually feel incredibly helpless in this regard. They can find it difficult to ever ‘switch off’, believing that doing so might lead them to ‘miss’ vital symptoms of a chronic condition, and can often sleep badly or restlessly. They are also very external, in that they tend to disregard their own role in over-monitoring or catastrophising symptoms or sensations, convinced that their health issues are all ‘happening to them’ and that they have no control or influence over it. This high level of anxiety and worry is not just unhelpful but can be exhausting too!
Their worries and anxieties are for the most part hugely disproportionate to both the risk, and the treatment outcome statistics, of the illnesses they most fear. So despite many conditions they fear having relatively good outcomes, sufferers can still often feel like they are staring down the barrel of a gun, just waiting for chronic illnesses, conditions, and brushes with death to strike them at any time, and are on the defensive ready for it to happen, expecting ‘their turn’ any day now. In relation to other people, they can often hugely overreact to health issues and diagnoses in others, taking any and every problem or scare very seriously, becoming very frightened and anxious, and (sometimes without even realising it) focusing on and preparing for the negatives/worst outcomes of a diagnosis.
It’s easy to think that everyone is like this, that everyone cares that deeply and obsessively about their health and that everyone is self-monitoring on a similar level. Yet, like any kind of anxiety or obsessive issue, it is not. In fact, health anxiety is something that is not just learned from the behaviours, attitudes and reactions of those around us, but is also formed by our own beliefs and thinking styles, rather than by health itself. Think about it: if poor health or diseases were truly terrifying and an absolute catastrophe, everybody would react the same. And yet, how is it that some people can be so calm, so relaxed, and so un-phased by the ups and downs of their physical health, bouncing back into work even as they shake off a nasty cold, and facing serious diagnoses with a positive attitude and a healthy perspective on their situation?
In people with health anxiety, much of their anxiety and reactions that they CREATE (emotions don’t happen to us, you see, we create them) in relation to illness comes from feeling incredibly ‘external’. This may include believing in luck, fate, chance, including ‘lucky things’ such as crossing fingers and touching wood, and avoiding ‘bad’ things by saluting magpies, throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder, and not walking under ladders. Another contributing factor is feeling powerless over elements of their own life, including their health and wellbeing. There is also huge negativity and pessimism about their ability to cope with unexpected or challenging situations, something that their low self-esteem (again, something you create and something you can also change) only fuels. Of course, if you believed that getting ill, and getting well, was purely to do with luck and that your own attitude, actions and reactions had no bearing on that, naturally you wouldn’t be bothering to examine the importance of your own coping skills (which research actually now tells us is vital in our ability to recover faster and better)! So, coupled with highly obsessive and hyper-vigilant ‘over-checking’ thinking styles, all of the above thinking styles are a recipe for a very anxious and fearful health anxiety sufferer!
“Health anxiety is something that is not just learned from the behaviours, attitudes and reactions of those around us, but is also formed by our own beliefs and thinking styles, rather than by health itself”
What’s really important about all these beliefs is that they aren’t REAL. They’re just your BELIEFS, and we can CHANGE beliefs. The language used in the media, of course, doesn’t help. There never seems to be any reporting of a ‘small, isolated, and mild’ outbreak of anything. There’s very few descriptions of any health-related topics that aren’t hugely catastrophic, either. ‘Killer’ virus, flu ‘outbreak’, the ‘Big C’ (cancer) - all of these hugely exaggerated descriptions are hyped-up to sell papers (frightening the life out of many people in the meantime) because that’s what sells. Look at how the papers reported the recent ‘Beast from The East’ weather - it was a bit of heavy snow, not a global war!!
Whilst we can’t control what they print though, we CAN try to maintain perspective about reports (is a ‘killer’ virus really proportionate if only one elderly person died of it due to other complications?) and we CAN also control our reactions to it. We do this by looking at NEW evidence and using that to building NEW beliefs. Remembering that we live in a first world Western European country, with a free National Health Service accessible day or night, top doctors and treatments, and ever increasing research into new, highly effective treatments for many diseases, is really important. If anything did happen, you would be given access to treatment, regardless of your income, which would give you the best chance of surviving and recovering completely. And for the day to day coughs and colds, tummy upsets, allergies and hayfever, is the level of anxiety you’re creating proportional to the severity of the problem? If not, try to change your thinking about it all. ‘It’s just a cold, people don’t really die of them, in a few days I’ll feel much better', for example, takes some of the power out of the illness and makes you feel more powerful instead!
The other question to ask is, what can I do to improve my health and wellbeing, build my coping skills, and feel more confident about my ability to deal with, and bounce back from, anything that life can throw at me? If your current weight makes you more susceptible to diabetes, strokes or other complications, why not resolve this year to take control of your wellbeing, start exercising and dieting, and lose some weight? If you’re a regular smoker (one of the biggest proven causes of lung cancer, and a big cause of heart attacks) or regular heavy drinker (related to liver failure and kidney difficulties), why not tackle these unhealthy habits and improve your body’s long-term health? Aches and pains all the time? Stop taking ibuprofen or codeine, and go and see a chiropractor or physical trainer/specialist instead to find out what’s causing the pain. These might seem like longer, less ‘immediate results’ treatments. But they’re far more effective, and much more likely to protect your health long-term. So if this sounds like you, and you’re ready to take action to be trained out of health anxiety once and for all, get in touch with me!