Therapy For Health Anxiety near Marietta, Roswell & Atlanta
We offer evidence-based treatment for Health Related Anxiety to help you experience more peace with less effort.
Do You Worry Excessively About Your Health?
- Does your preoccupation with becoming ill negatively impact your life?
- Do you convince yourself that something relatively benign, like a small lump on your skin, indicates something far more serious or potentially fatal?
- Are you spending your free time making appointments, running tests, and seeing specialists instead of enjoying yourself?
Perhaps you are fixated on the idea of experiencing a catastrophic medical event—such as getting cancer, having a stroke, or contracting a debilitating disease—to the point where it consumes your thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. Even though doctors have reassured you that nothing is wrong, you may be experiencing intrusive thoughts you can't control, which cause you to fear the worst.
Health Anxiety May Preoccupy Your Thoughts Day And Night
Maybe you notice that you:
- Spend more time checking your body, researching symptoms online, or scheduling appointments than doing what you enjoy;
- Worry excessively about your health after hearing about someone who has contracted a disease;
- Go to the doctor regularly to receive reassurance that you are okay, or conversely, avoid checkups altogether for fear of receiving bad news;
- Lose sleep ruminating about perceived illnesses;
Even though there may not be anything physically wrong, health anxiety can convince you otherwise, causing your quality of life to suffer. Like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), you may feel stuck in an endless loop of anxious thoughts that can only be soothed with constant reassurance.
The good news is that therapy for health anxiety is treatable. By utilizing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) skills, mindfulness, and exposure therapy for health anxiety, you can learn how to dismiss fear-provoking thoughts and accept uncertainty more easily.
Contact Us
Have a question? Feel free to reach out to us using our contact form.
Health Anxiety Was Exacerbated By The COVID-19 Pandemic
Although it isn’t discussed as much as other anxiety disorders, health anxiety—also referred to as somatic symptom disorder, illness anxiety disorder, or hypochondriasis—affects millions of Americans. “According to the latest research, at least 6 percent of people will experience health anxiety during their lifetime.” [1] In addition to a 25 percent global increase in general anxiety and depression symptoms as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us also became more hyper-focused on our health. [2]
Our current cultural climate has greatly impacted health anxiety. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified our anxiety by increasing health fears, spreading misinformation, and amplifying distrust in our healthcare systems. In many ways, living with COVID-19 rewired our brains, forcing us to constantly catastrophize about the worst-case scenario of contracting a potentially fatal disease and possibly spreading it to others. This change in mindset has set the stage for increased anxiety related to other illnesses, too.
Access To Misinformation Online Can Fuel Health Anxiety
Information overload from the internet and social media, especially alarmist and conflicting health data, has further fueled our anxiety. Although online searching can sometimes be useful, relying on “Dr. Google” to self-diagnose ourselves can perpetuate our worst fears, causing us to go down rabbit holes looking for answers needlessly.
Therapy for hypochondria allows you to contextualize your fears and challenge irrational thoughts so they no longer fuel anxiety. With support, you can calm your mind and restore peace.
Therapy For Health Anxiety Can Help Ease Your Fears
Health anxiety can be all-consuming. Trying to overcome it on your own is difficult because the intense fear and worry you experience can be overwhelming. Without a sounding board to help you recognize when you are catastrophizing, it's easy to get stuck in your thoughts, where uncertainties become amplified. Additionally, self-reinforcing behaviors, like internet searches or excessive doctor visits, can perpetuate the anxiety cycle, making it difficult to break free without external help.
In therapy for health anxiety, our goal is to help you better tolerate living with uncertainty. You will realize the positive benefits of spending less time seeking answers to questions that may be unanswerable and learn skills to help you challenge irrational thoughts.
What To Expect In Sessions
Therapy will be a safe space to acknowledge the negative impacts of health anxiety, including how fixating on potential health issues may have cost you significant time and money. We will also identify your triggers, obsessions, and compulsions related to health issues and trace back their origin. Perhaps previous misdiagnoses or medical trauma may contribute to your heightened anxiety. We will also determine if any behaviors or practices you believe may be harming your health and help you gain perspective about them so they no longer keep you stuck.
We aim to normalize your experience and provide a holistic perspective by examining all factors contributing to your anxiety and offering tangible solutions to alleviate it. In addition, assessing whether you are dedicating time to meaningful activities, engaging with people or activities that help keep you grounded, and living in alignment with your values and beliefs will be key to recovery.
The Modalities We Use In Health Anxiety Treatment
In therapy for health anxiety, you will practice CBT strategies that challenge your intrusive thoughts and utilize exposure techniques to mitigate health-related fears more effectively. We will also incorporate mindfulness skills to help you stay grounded and in the present moment rather than ruminating over “what if” scenarios. Once these coping skills are mastered, you will realize that you can lean into anxiety instead of running away from it.
Imagine if you could…
- Restore a sense of confidence in your health;
- Stop calling the doctor every time a health-related worry enters your mind;
- Accept the uncertainty associated with illness so you no longer worry and fret;
- Realize that constantly googling and going to appointments won’t give you the certainty you crave;
- Challenge yourself to move forward in the face of uncertainty.
Therapy provides a path forward where you can live a more fulfilling and peaceful life without constantly obsessing over health-related problems. You can learn to accept the fear, separate yourself from it, and direct your attention to the things that matter.
But Maybe You’re Not Sure If Therapy For Health Anxiety Is Right For You…
When you suffer from health anxiety, seek the right kind of treatment matters. If therapy didn’t help you, it probably wasn’t addressing health anxiety specifically. Our counseling approach focuses on your unique needs, using tailored strategies to manage health anxiety effectively. Incorporating specialized modalities into therapy, such as CBT and mindfulness, can yield better results for treating health anxiety.
There’s a notable difference between seeking information and seeking reassurance. Seeking information is a healthy process when legitimate symptoms should be checked out. However, if those symptoms have been ruled out but you continue to question or pursue more answers, you may be seeking reassurance, which fuels anxiety. Unfortunately, once one health-related issue gets resolved, you will likely move on to another one.
Because there is always a chance you may have a real health issue at some point, we focus on skills that can help you cope with real health issues while dismissing perceived health issues
Working with a health anxiety therapist will be a collaborative experience. Although our goal is to help alleviate health anxiety as much as we can, we will never tell you what to do in therapy sessions. While we will suggest treatments and lifestyle modifications that will challenge you, the ultimate decision is yours.
You Can Discover A More Peaceful Way To Live Free Of Health Concerns
Learning how to manage health anxiety will free up space to enjoy the life that’s going on around you. If you want to learn more about health anxiety therapy with Awaken Counseling, you can click here to schedule a free 15-minute call.
Sources:
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220215-why-even-just-testing-for-diseases-can-make-us-feel-ill
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10088605/
