People with health anxiety tend to overfocus on their body sensations.
Key points
- People with health anxiety tend to be overly focused on their body sensations.
- Excessive awareness of body symptoms usually makes health anxiety worse.
- People can experience an improvement in health anxiety by reducing their attention on their body symptoms.
People with health anxiety tend to pay a lot of attention to their body symptoms. Sound familiar? It makes sense that if you are worried about your health, you would focus a lot on your symptoms.
Perhaps you think that you need to catch a health issue early or that to be a responsible person, you must be alert for symptoms.
Maybe you monitor your body with devices like a watch or do many internet searches on symptoms. People with health anxiety also tend to have a lot of mental focus on various areas of their bodies that just don’t feel right.
There are at least three significant issues with this hyperfocus on body symptoms when you are susceptible to health anxiety:
- When you hyperfocus on your body sensations, it reinforces your health anxiety and makes it worse. It is almost as if you feel like you are in danger and must pay attention to keep yourself safe.
- When you pay a lot of attention to your body symptoms, you will likely feel more sensations than if you weren’t paying so much attention. In addition, the anxiety associated with health concerns can cause symptoms. It then becomes difficult to differentiate between what is anxiety and what is an actual concerning health symptom.
- Health anxiety can hold you back. Spending a lot of time focusing on body sensations can keep you from doing more meaningful things in your life.
What to Do Instead
People often say to me, that sounds great, but how do I stop doing this? Here are some steps you can take:
- Assess the urgency of the symptoms. Make a pact with yourself that if a symptom seems urgent, you will seek medical attention. If it doesn’t seem urgent, you can tell yourself that you don’t need to focus so much on it but that you can revisit the symptom in a certain period of time to determine if you should contact a doctor. You can even set an alert on your phone to remind yourself to check back in with yourself about the symptom. That way, you will know that it won’t go unattended.
- Eliminate reliance on all technology involved in symptom monitoring. If you are worried about your heart and keep checking your heart rate with your watch, consider taking it off. If you are checking your oxygen levels and your doctor did not tell you to do it, put away the pulse oximeter so it isn’t in sight. If you aren’t sure if you should stop, check with your doctor.
- Reduce reassurance-seeking behaviors. Asking others for reassurance or doing internet research about symptoms keeps the focus on your symptoms and feeds into health anxiety. It’s best to work on resisting urges to seek reassurance or do internet searches. Even if you can only delay initially for a minute or two, that’s a good start.
- Become more mindful of your physical environment. When you notice that you are focusing on your symptoms, you can practice shifting attention away from your body to something in your environment. It could be the texture of the fabric on the couch you are sitting on, the sounds around you, a picture on the wall, or the breeze if you are outside. You want to practice shifting your focus to something outside of yourself. It might be hard to do at first, but with practice, it can get easier.
- Focus on doing things that are meaningful for you. Rather than stressing out about physical symptoms, is there something else you could be doing? Consider connecting with a friend or family member, delving back into a work project, exercising, reading a book, cooking a meal, or anything important to you. The more attention you give to doing things that fit into your value system, the less you will focus on symptoms; ideally, health anxiety symptoms will then decrease.
Assess if You Need More Help
For some, health anxiety can be very debilitating, and some can benefit from working with a therapist who specializes in anxiety. Recovery from health anxiety is definitely possible.
References
Scarella, T. M., Boland, R. J., Barsky, A. J. (2019). Illness anxiety disorder: Psychopathology, epidemiology, clinical characteristics, and treatment. Psychosomatic Medicine 81(5), 398–407. doi: 10.1097/PSY.0000000000000691
Tyrer, P., & Tyrer, H. (2018). Health anxiety: detection and treatment. BJ Psych Advances, 24(1), 66–72. doi:10.1192/bja.2017.5