So, last week was Mental Health Awareness Week. In light of this, I thought I’d talk about something that I knew very little about until I started suffering with it a couple of years ago – Health Anxiety. Health Anxiety is often called hypochondria and can be misunderstood as someone being dramatic. So, hopefully this post helps to create some awareness of Health Anxiety.
Health Anxiety is an anxiety condition which causes the affected person to constantly think that they are ill or getting ill. It can manifest itself in a few ways:
- Checking your body for symptoms like lumps, pains or tingling
- Seeking reassurance from friends, family and doctors
- Not believing doctors when they tell you that you’re fine, or worrying that they have missed something
- Googling symptoms or reading articles about illness
- Avoiding media about health, like TV shows, films and books
- Avoiding activities because you think that they may make your ‘illness’ worse
So why does this happen? It’s basically a misinterpretation. What someone without Health Anxiety may not even notice, someone with Health Anxiety identifies as dangerous. Bodies make lots of weird noises and have little aches and pains that aren’t dangerous. For example, heavy breathing, muscle aches and heart rate changes are very common and not often dangerous. Once panic sets in, these symptoms can feel worse. For example, if someone with Health Anxiety gets stressed about a symptom, they may feel their chest get tighter, leading them to think that they are having a heart attack. Basically the symptoms are real, but the thoughts are incorrect. Fixating on a symptom can also amplify it. Fixation on one illness can be because it is common, they know someone who is affected by it or it is something that spreads easily.
This is how Health Anxiety affects me:
I am mainly preoccupied about having breast cancer or broadly any type of cancer. I also worry often about blood clots. None of these things are common in my family and I have no logical reason to think that they affect me, and yet, my brain tells me to worry about them. For me, this means that I check my body for lumps daily and I worry about whether the food I eat or the exercise I do can make these things worse. I also avoid TV and films about illness. I google my symptoms quite consistently, and I have been to the doctors more times than I care to admit thinking that I have something wrong with me. When they tell me everything is fine, I feel reassured for a little while, but then the same cycle begins again – checking for symptoms, worrying about symptoms, going to the doctors.
So yes, this does affect my daily life. I cancel seeing people because I’m too preoccupied with potentially having a serious disease. When I’m stressed about other things like exams, my silly, anxious brain tells me to instead worry about dying. I’ll have a normal day and feel fine, but when I lie down to go to sleep, my brain finds a reason to keep me awake, like a slight headache or a pain in my leg.
All this to say, I am getting better. I don’t check my body for lumps as much as I used to, and I write down any time I feel any symptoms to keep a record of how I’m feeling. But, it still affects me every single day, and I have to actively push myself past the doubt that my Health Anxiety causes. For me, that is the hardest thing – not being able to trust my gut. So, my advice if you’re suffering with this is to get help as soon as you can. It can be really hard not to feel dismissed with Health Anxiety, because although the symptoms are real, they are displaced. I’ve linked some helpful websites down below. The key thing for me was to learn that I’m not mad – the symptoms are real, they just aren’t dangerous in the way that I thought.
I really hope that this was informative and that you know more about Health Anxiety now than you did before. Regular sustainable programming will resume next week. All my love ❤
Links:
Waste Makes Waste 
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