Is health anxiety taking over your life?

Do you find yourself constantly thinking and obsessing about your health - checking your body for signs of there being something wrong? Maybe you find yourself booking frequent medical appointments and tests, googling each symptom you experience. You may find that you are convincing yourself there is something very serious going on, even when doctors and health professionals have reassured you otherwise. 

It is completely natural to worry about our health from time to time, and we all sometimes worry and overthink, especially when you have had a health issue in the past, you have been diagnosed with a condition, have witnessed illness, or if your symptoms feel intense. 

But is obsessing, constantly talking about your health, over thinking and hyper focusing on symptoms helpful? Or does it make you feel worse and getting in the way of you living your life? 

What exactly causes health anxiety to start?

Health anxiety can begin after a trigger such as:

• A past or ongoing illness or medical scare that can make us fall into an anxiety trap, making our health and symptoms worse.
• Witnessing someone else become ill and/or a traumatic event involving illness. 
• Reading distressing health news or potentially working in a health-focused environment. 
• Having an anxious or sensitive personality making you overthink and become hyper anxious. 

From there, you may become stuck in a pattern of scanning, worrying, and seeking certainty from others. 

Typical symptoms we may experience:

• racing heart or heart palpitations
• breathlessness
• sweating and temperature changes
• muscle tension and aches
• brain fog and dizziness
• chest discomfort
• digestive or bowel issues
• headaches and jaw tension
• lump-in-throat sensation (Globus)

The health anxiety cycle:

• Trigger – You notice a physical symptom or sensation such as chest pain, breathlessness, aches and pains on which you may start hyper-fixating on.
• Body scanning – You check for more signs and become hyper-aware of sensations in your body.
• Thinking errors and catastrophic thinking – You may ask yourself things like “What if it’s serious?” “What if the doctor has missed something or they are wrong?” “I might have serious health problems”, or you may experience triggering worst-case scenario images in your mind.
• Seeking reassurance – Googling our symptoms, booking appointments at the doctors, asking others for reassurance and constantly talking about our health and illness in general. We essentially teach our brain that the fear is real and valid, and you need to check to feel safe, creating long-term dependence. So next time a worry shows up, your now has a connection there, that you have created that stores information in the brain, that this helps and wants to reassure you, reinforcing the belief that you can’t cope without. 
• You then get some relief, which is temporary – You feel better, for a while but this actually traps you in the cycle, since you don’t give this reassurance to yourself and over time you may stop trusting yourself and your own body, reducing resilience and confidence to interpret bodily sensations calmly. 
• Doubt returns – You start checking again, the more you focus on sensations and symptoms, the worse and more real they start to feel, causing more negative thoughts due to how powerful the mind and body connection is. Doubt returns because health anxiety isn’t really about the symptoms – it’s about being afraid of uncertainty and needing to feel completely sure you’re OK. Anxiety thrives on “what if” thinking, and because there’s no such thing as 100% certainty with health (or anything in life), the mind stays stuck looking for it.
• Cycle repeats – Anxiety strengthens and further traps you in a loop, causing more worrisome thoughts, affecting beliefs and intensifying physical symptoms. You may convince yourself and truly believe that something is wrong – the cycle continues. 

Beliefs and thoughts that fuel the cycle:

Common beliefs you may have if you experience health anxiety:

• “If I feel something, something must be wrong.”
• “I have to catch serious illness early.”
• “Doctors can miss things – I need to be 100% sure.”
• “If I don’t worry, I won’t be prepared.”

These thoughts increase anxiety and make uncertainty feel intolerable, and we may end up convincing ourselves that we are ill. This further traps you in the cycle of anxiety, causing feelings of overwhelm and being out of control. 

Why is anxiety so physical? 

The key to understanding this is in our bodies built-in survival system – the fight and flight, which you may already be aware of. This has helped us survive over time and all animals have this built-in system. 

When we feel anxious, our brain, especially a part called the amygdala, detects possible threats, whether real or imagined, and this triggers an alarm to help you survive and stop or resolve the problem. 

A section of our brain called the hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, releasing stress hormones like adrenaline, which increases heart rate, changes breathing and causes alertness, as well as cortisol, which keeps us on high alert and regulates energy. This prepares us to either fight or run away from a threat – even if there is none. 

Due to these changes, we get physical sensations like a racing heart, shortness of breath, tension and tightness, sweating, digestion issues, headaches and dizziness – imagine if you were being chased by a lion. You wouldn’t be able to eat, relax and stay calm, since your system is focused on survival. 

Your body is doing what it should do in the case of a threat – but in anxiety, danger is imagined and perceived, not real. The physical symptoms can be very scary, so our brains misunderstand them and see them as evidence that something is wrong, keeping the alarm system switched on and creating more symptoms, causing a loop. 

How focus increases sensations and negative self-hypnosis 

Our brains don’t know the difference between what is real and what isn’t, so when you are imagining having health issues, constantly focusing on them and over-analysing your body, your body will respond accordingly. Think of it like a form of hypnosis and self-suggestion – we focus our attention, which is what defines hypnosis, unknowingly suggesting to ourselves that something is wrong, and our body follows.

In hypnosis, we often see how powerful the mind-body link is, and traditional talking therapies can sometimes fail to help people make this link. For example, if someone is guided to imagine a balloon lifting their arm with their eyes closed, their body often responds, even without conscious movement. By the time you open your eyes, your arm may be raised from resting on your knee to shoulder height, without you being aware of it happening. 

The same principle applies with anxiety – thoughts trigger physical reactions.

If you visualise being unwell instead of imagining yourself being OK, or trusting that you’ll be able to cope if something does come up, it can trigger fear in the body. This fear then fuels physical sensations and catastrophic thoughts, keeping the anxiety cycle going.

So, can you imagine how you would feel if you learned to trust your body, feel more positive and think more flexibly? 

Example of how attention intensifies sensations: 

You notice a small cut or bruise that you didn’t even know was there before until you felt a mild sensation or looked at it, but the moment you notice it, you start feeling it more. It’s not that it suddenly got worse; it’s just that your attention has now made it more noticeable.

So it’s the same with health anxiety symptoms...

You notice a feeling in your chest, for instance, and because you are already worried about your health, the feeling of it intensifies. You tell yourself that it may be something more serious and your body responds to this as you then activate your fight and flight mode, signalling danger to your body.

Our thoughts and beliefs have a lot of power – and in hypnosis, as well as through self-hypnosis training and targeted exercises, you start to see just how strong the mind-body connection really is. You might not even realise how often these thought patterns are running in the background, but once you start building awareness of what you’re thinking, when it happens, and how you’re interpreting symptoms, you can begin to take back a sense of control and better understand the influence your mind has over how you feel.

How integrative hypnotherapy (CBT plus hypnosis) can help you 

Integrative hypnotherapy that combines tools from evidence-based therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy, hypnosis, and mindfulness can help you understand anxiety better from a scientific perspective and help build tools and coping strategies that reduce anxiety symptoms over time.  

Additionally, it can also support you in developing more positive and flexible thinking, help change beliefs, thought processes and actions, allowing you to break the vicious cycle.

Key features:

• Teaching how anxiety works and identifying personal triggers.
• Identifying and challenging unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs.
• Reframing negative thought patterns and changing unhelpful coping actions.
• Using hypnosis to reinforce new thinking in a calm, focused state and helping make the connection between thought, feelings, actions and also sensations, which traditional CBT can sometimes miss, despite this being its goal.
• Engaging the nervous system to promote relaxation, reducing anxiety over time and building more understanding and trust in your body, supporting the mind-body connection, which can be overlooked in traditional talking therapies.

Self-help – Practical CBH techniques for health anxiety 

Here are a few tools commonly used in CBH to manage health anxiety:

1. Breathing techniques

Try the 4-7-8 method: Inhale for 4 counts, hold for 7, and exhale for 8 to calm the nervous system. You can find lots of resources on YouTube that talk you through breathwork tools. A therapist can also teach you a range of exercises that help reduce and turn off the fear response.

2. Try visualisation – A common tool used in hypnotherapy

One way to start shifting focus away from fear relating to health is visualisation. You can do this on your own or get help from a hypnotherapist to help counteract images of having an illness.

A very common technique used in hypnosis is the healing white light technique, in which you imagine a light soothing each part of you, focusing on all body parts, starting from your head, ending at the feet.

With each breath, visualise breathing in calm and wellness; with each breath out, imagine letting go of tension and anxiety. Picture yourself going about your day, feeling well instead of being unwell, your body working in harmony, and your mind accepting sensations without panic.

It helps to write down some self-suggestions or affirmations you can use such as “ My body knows how to heal”, “ Not every sensation means danger”, “ I am OK “ – doing this can help retrain your mind and body to respond to worry, creating new neural connections in the brain, and creates an internal pattern of safety and trust.

3. Practice relaxation daily 

Try breath work, meditation and somatic work like yoga. This reduces anxiety in the body over time. You have two systems in the body, the threat system and then the system that turns this switch off, called the parasympathetic system. Practices that regulate you help you come back down to a calm, restful and peaceful state. But this doesn’t happen overnight and requires practice. 

4. Distraction and engagement

Do something absorbing – read, paint, cook, walk – to take your mind off symptoms to see if this helps. Writing down a list of things you can absorb into can be useful.

5. Limit health-related triggers and reassurance seeking

Reduce how often you check symptoms or read health-related news. Avoid Googling symptoms and seeking reassurance from others or through the doctor, especially if you have had health checks and these come back fine. If you are exposed to a trigger, remind yourself of how anxiety works. Write down grounding statements such as - “This is just anxiety. I’ve felt this before, and I was OK.”

6. Challenge and reframe your thoughts

Ask yourself:

• “Do I have real evidence that this is serious?”
• “Have I had this before and been fine?”
• “Could anxiety be making this feel worse?”

Then reframe:

• “I’ve experienced this before – it passed.”
• “I’ve had tests and been told I’m OK.”
• “It’s likely anxiety, not something dangerous.”

Writing down helpful statements to keep nearby can be reassuring in difficult moments. Also, journaling triggers, sensations, and thoughts can be helpful in spotting patterns, helping you make sense of your anxiety, when it comes up and what you do as a result. Also, whether or not what you currently do is helpful or makes it worse.

But what if there is something wrong?

This is the hardest part of health anxiety – because yes, sometimes people do get sick. But health anxiety and trying therapy isn’t about ignoring your body and symptoms. Sometimes our bodies can signal to us when something is actually wrong; other times it is just anxiety – it’s about learning to think flexibly, not to jump to the worst-case scenario every time you feel “off”.

If something truly concerns you, seek medical advice. But once you’ve had reassurance and no problem is found, learning to tolerate uncertainty and trust your body is key.

Health anxiety can feel very real and extremely overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to stay this way, and we can learn to reduce it through understanding how the mind and body works. With practice, you can learn to think more flexibly and build more trust in yourself and your body that you may have lost or maybe never had. Taking things one step at a time, using scientifically backed-up practices and tools.

If your health anxiety is getting in the way of you living your life and has become very chronic and you end up spiralling, reaching out to a therapist that understands anxiety can be life changing, help you feel more in control of your thoughts and body, while also helping build up an effective tool box of strategies that reduce it over time.