Health Anxiety Disorder Risks – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
Health anxiety disorder is one of the common forms of anxiety and can have a massive detrimental impact upon your life. You struggle with your persistent preoccupation that there is something seriously wrong with you. You pay close attention to bodily signs and symptoms and you become convinced that something catastrophic is occurring with you.
You can overthink and ceaseless worry that there is something seriously wrong with you. The fear of how awful that would be continues to drive your imagination as you think of how your life will catastrophically unfold before you into the future. And those health anxiety thoughts drive your anxious feelings. You feel tense, restless, low, agitated and doomed.
Sometimes when I work with health anxiety clients, their anxiety has taken hold to such an extent that they struggle to concentrate upon anything else for any period of time. All that consumes them is their health and the feeling that there is something wrong. The tendency then can be to start looking things up online, and that only leads to more fuel being added to the never ending cycle of anxiety.
Some people find that any mention of an illness by others or in the media starts them on a frenzy of checking and seeing whether how they feel matches that illness. You can easily convince yourself your symptoms match and that you have an undiagnosed serious health condition.
And so after endless checking of your symptoms and how your body feels, you may go and see your doctor. For some with health anxiety disorder the reassurance from a medical professional puts their mind at ease for a time. Yet for others, even after all the tests have been comprehensively done, that feeling of dread and of something being wrong lurks on. You start to think that clearly they’ve missed something and that your serious health issue just hasn’t been found yet.
With all the media channels, campaigns and adverts these days it’s almost impossible to avoid health related content. And each time, you can start to notice how the symptoms described seem similar to those that you are experiencing (especially online where symptoms are described in such vague terms).
You may find yourself fixating on one specific part of your body. You feel anxious, fearful and full of fear and dread. You catastrophise, think the worst and become convinced there is something unknown and bad happening to you. Even if you are able to reassure yourself that you don’t have one thing, any period of calm can easily become unsettled as the focus of your anxiety just moves onto something else health related.
