Hypnotherapy For Health Anxiety

If you spend a lot of time worrying and getting anxious about your health or about getting ill, or struggle to believe the doc when they say there’s nothing wrong, you could be experiencing health anxiety. This condition is related to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and can be really distressing to live with.

We all worry about our health from time to time. That’s generally a good thing: after all, if we weren’t vigilant for symptoms and physical changes, we could become ill, or simply not bother to keep fit and healthy. However, as is so often the case with anxiety-related issues, what starts as a natural worry can become a compulsion. We’ll take a closer look at health anxiety and how hypnotherapy can help.

What Is Health Anxiety?

Health anxiety is sometimes called illness anxiety disorder or hypochondriasis. “Hypochondria” is a term often used pejoratively (and often incorrectly), and it’s become too easy to dismiss another’s health-related worries. Actually, health anxiety is extremely difficult to live with and can have a huge impact on everyday life.

A person experiencing health anxiety is scared that they are ill. The actual condition they fear is subjective, although cancer is a common example. They start to imagine symptoms or escalate perfectly normal physical sensations into signs of something more serious.

And here’s the really cruel thing about this disorder: anxiety itself causes physical symptoms. The tight chest, the headache, the nausea, the raised temperature, the shivering – these can all occur when someone is feeling anxious. Only of course, to someone with hypochondriasis, these are signs of severe illness. Anxiety increases, the symptoms increase and so on, until a vicious circle is well and truly established.

This excessive worry won’t be reduced by a visit to the GP or even tests. The internet is really no friend to anyone worrying about symptoms, as you can find proof of pretty much anything online.

How Do I Know If I Have Health Anxiety?

This is such a hard one to self-diagnose, and it can be even harder for loved ones to speak up (often through fear of potentially dismissing a genuine physical illness). If you notice that you or someone close to you is exhibiting these signs, it could be health anxiety.

Preoccupied with health in conversation
Constantly researching health issues online, or reading about them
Frequent self-examination and/or self-diagnosis
Often disbelieves medical professionals
Seeks constant reassurance about health issues (but rarely believes the reassurance)
The preoccupation negatively impacts on daily life, family life, work and social activities
Health worries are preventing sleep

If you believe health anxiety is the issue, the GP is the best starting place. Why not go straight to a therapist? Well, we therapists aren’t usually medical practioners, and we can’t diagnose physical illnesses. On the off-chance that there is an underlying physical cause, the GP is the right person to talk to initially. If it looks like it is health anxiety, the doctor can make a formal diagnosis.

Case Study: How Hypnotherapy Helped John

Hypnotherapy can be an effective way to help with health anxiety. Recently, I worked with John (not his real name), who had been struggling with anxiety about his health for over 20 years. He felt that his negative emotional state had an impact on his family life and he often had trouble sleeping.

John had tried cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in the past, which had helped him accept the problem. Now he needed support to overcome it and make positive changes. Solution focused hypnotherapy looks out for the outcomes rather than the problem, so this was the right step for John to take.

We started John’s programme with interactive psychoeducation to help him understand how the brain works. Our weekly sessions always began with asking John what had gone well in the previous week: this question engages our left pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of our brains that thinks rationally. Every week, I asked John where he was on a scale of 1-10 out of 10 (10 being the goal).

On his third session, John described himself as a 4: he was worried that a mild sensation of a toothache might be something more sinister. The next week, he was back up to a 6. He’d seen the dentist, all was well. He noticed that he had no health anxiety worries when he was immersed in hobbies or work, and he wanted to be able to focus more on being in the moment.

The next week, John was up to a fantastic 8. He’d managed to dismiss a headache as “just a headache that will just go” (a while ago, that would have represented a serious symptom). On reflection, he was surprised by how well he had managed this and found it “quite freeing”.

John is increasingly able to enjoy life more (and is scaling at a solid 9). His family and friends have noticed a difference in him. He is more engaged, happier. His self-talk technique now focuses on the rational and the positive, which helps him to manage any occasional intrusive negative thoughts.