Health Anxiety
Worrying about your health can be a horrible experience, especially when you’ve been back and fore the doctor trying to find out what’s wrong with you, to no avail. Eventually your doctor gets fed up, and unfortunately you can end up with the horrible label of hypochondriac, which means you are excessively worried that you have a serious illness, even though you’ve had multiple doctors visits and tests that show nothing is wrong . You can feel friends and family becoming irritable with you when you keep asking for reassurance that your symptoms aren’t serious. Other sufferers, are too frightened to go to their doctor incase their worst fears are confirmed ,that they do indeed have a serious illness. Everyone has worries about their health, but with hypochondria, which is now known as Health Anxiety, the worries become so overwhelming, that some sufferers ( and it is suffering ) are unable to enjoy their lives.
The Lived Experience of health anxiety
This is a description of the lived experience of someone with health anxiety, as told to me.
“Many years ago, when I was around 27, at the time of the first Gulf war there was a campaign asking for blood donations to make sure there was enough for the wounded. My work colleagues and I decided we’d donate blood. On the day we had planned to go, one of my colleagues mentioned that our blood would be tested for diseases . The thought that I might have something wrong with me suddenly hit me for the first time in my life and I could feel anxiety and panic building up inside me. I’d never experienced anything so frightening in my life. I started to feel sick, dizzy and as if I wanted to run.
I mumbled something about not feeling well, left work and went home. I didn’t realise at the time that these were symptoms of anxiety, or that these feelings were going to plague me for sometime to come.
I tried desperately to shake the anxiety off and to convince myself there was nothing wrong with me, but nothing worked. Friends and family couldn’t understand what I was going through, and told me to stop spoiling my life and why couldn’t I see that life was a wonderful thing. Of course I knew these things and would have done anything to get rid of the absolute terror I felt. My thoughts had become intrusive and I didn't know how to stop them. I felt so alone and didn’t know what I could do. I didn’t want to see my doctor, incase they suggested blood tests which I was sure would turn up some fatal disease. I also felt tremendous guilt and shame that I felt like this, when there were people I knew who were dying of cancer.
I didn’t want to get up in the mornings because I felt so sick and frightened. I avoided anything to do with illness. I couldn’t watch any TV where there was a medical storyline. Eventually over the months the fear started to wane and I started to forget my dreadful fears. I couldn’t believe how I could have been so caught up in this fear. I thought that was the end of it; but it wasn’t. Ten years later towards the end of my 30s the intrusive thoughts started to rear up again. I realised I wasn’t far off 40 and that I was probably half way through my life if not more. I started to think about how the possibility of serious illness was becoming more likely, and once again I was in the spiral of health anxiety.
This continued off and on for several years, with me googling my symptoms, then reading things that sometimes relieved my anxiety but sometimes made it a lot worse. Then having to go back and check that what I’d read was right. I did this multiple times which severely impacted my life. I could go on about all the things I experienced, but I’d need to write a book to tell the whole story of my health anxiety.
At some point I realised this couldn’t go on and I started to read information on how to deal with my anxieties. I also sought counselling. Counselling wasn’t easy, in-fact, it was hard work, but it helped me to face my fears and to start dealing with them in a different way. I started to understand how the cycle of anxiety was driving my fears and keeping me stuck. Counselling also help me to realise that I wasn’t being selfish or a bad person for feeling this way when there were people around me who were genuinely ill. I’d been told by others that I needed to ‘get a grip’ and that I was weak to be thinking like this. They couldn’t understand that I did not want to feel this way. Health anxiety will always be a part of my life, but I have so much more understanding about it, it doesn’t hang around for too long.”
This might sound like an overly dramatic description of this condition, but sadly it isn’t.
One of the things I’m told by people is the overwhelming feeling of shame and feeling so alone; the judgement of others and the feeling that there is no way out. Health anxiety and other anxieties are often caused by our inability to live with uncertainty. We need to know for sure that there is nothing wrong with us, but we can never have 100% certainty about anything in our lives. We take lots of risks every day without thinking about it too much. We step outside the front door without too much concern about what might happen to us on the way to work.
What causes Health Anxiety?
Health anxiety can seemingly appear out of nowhere, but there is usually a trigger that starts it off. It can be the grief and bereavement of losing someone you love, even years after the event. Significant life events such as getting married, 'big' birthdays like 30, 40 etc. can cause you to reflect on your life, which may bring about feelings of anxiety.
Counselling can help
There is a way out, counselling can help you with this. I know it’s not easy to ask for help and the first step is the hardest, but take that step, or maybe it’s a giant leap; begin the journey to feeling better.
If you’d like to book an initial session, please contact me via the details on this website.