Things that are making your health anxiety worse

From scanning the body to searching the Internet for symptoms, here are a few things that can make health anxiety worse.

The constant worry and hypervigilance of the physical symptoms of the body can have a deep impact on our emotional and mental health. Health anxiety is the persistent anxiety of the sensations, and the symptoms shown by the body. Being worried that we are constantly sick and that we have a difficult illness somewhere lurking in the body can make us have the fear and stress. Explaining health anxiety, Therapist Rebekah Ballagh wrote, "Health anxiety is far more common than you think. It's also potentially all-consuming and makes your life far more restricted and anxiety ridden than you would like. Health anxiety is when you find yourself anxious, worrying, fixating on and hypervigilant to your own health and physical symptoms and sensations. Often this traps you in a vicious cycle of fearing and worrying about your health and then making yourself and your health suffer because of the constant anxiety."

Things that are making your health anxiety worse(Unsplash)

Constantly scanning the body for symptoms and sensations, going to the health practitioner frequently and doing tests, scanning Google to check the symptoms and what they may refer to are some of the signs of health anxiety. However, sometimes, the things that we do can make our health anxiety worse. Here are a few things:

The scan: When we are looking and scanning the body for pain, symptoms and sensations, we are bound to find it even it there is nothing. That happens because all the other times we found something when we scanned the body – this signals the brain that scanning means danger. This danger signal creates pain and sensations in the body.

The search: In health anxiety, one of the worse ways to deal with it is by searching about the symptoms on Google. Google or the Internet is not our friend when we have health anxiety. Often, we try to reassure ourselves by searching the symptoms on the Internet – this further creates a circle of worrying and constantly seeking reassurance that we are fine.

The worry game: This throws us into a game of worrying and stressing. While rational thoughts and trying to reason with worries can help for some people, more often than not, it can blow out of proportion and make us have anxiety.