Health anxiety

What is health anxiety?

Health anxiety is a persistent and distressing preoccupation with having or developing a serious illness, often despite reassurance from doctors or normal test results. It is a recognised and treatable form of anxiety, not a character flaw, and it can affect anyone regardless of their actual physical health.

Clinically, it is sometimes called illness anxiety disorder. Most people worry about their health from time to time, particularly after a scare, a bereavement, or a period of illness in the family, and that kind of worry usually settles once reassurance arrives. Health anxiety is different in degree rather than kind. The worry becomes frequent, hard to switch off, and starts to shape daily decisions, such as which symptoms are checked, which websites are searched, or which appointments are booked and then cancelled.

Symptoms of health anxiety

Health anxiety tends to show up across thinking, behaviour and body together. On the thinking side, people often describe a tendency to interpret ordinary bodily sensations, a headache, a mole, a racing heart, as evidence of serious illness, and to find it difficult to accept reassurance for more than a short time before the doubt creeps back in.

Behaviourally, this often shows up as repeated body checking, searching symptoms online or asking friends and family for reassurance. Some people show the opposite pattern instead, avoiding medical appointments, health news or anything that might trigger the worry, and some move between both depending on how anxious they feel that day.

Physically, health anxiety often brings the same symptoms as other forms of anxiety: a racing heart, tight chest, churning stomach, poor sleep and fatigue. These sensations can then be misread as further evidence of illness, which keeps the cycle going, since the anxiety itself produces the very symptoms that feel alarming.

Types of health anxiety

Health anxiety can focus on a specific condition, such as a fear of cancer or heart disease, or move between different worries over time as one concern fades and another takes its place. For some people it follows a particular event, a diagnosis in the family, a frightening symptom, or a period of ill health of their own. For others it builds gradually, with no single clear trigger, developing slowly out of a general tendency to worry.

Health anxiety commonly sits alongside other difficulties, including generalised anxiety, panic, obsessive compulsive patterns of checking, or low mood. Working out what else is present matters, because it shapes what therapy focuses on first and in what order.

How therapy can help

Cognitive behavioural therapy is the approach most widely researched for anxiety more broadly, and it also has the strongest evidence base for treating health anxiety specifically. It works by looking at the specific thoughts, checking behaviours and avoidance patterns that keep the worry going, rather than trying to convince you that nothing is ever wrong or that you should simply stop worrying.

Therapy works on loosening the grip that constant checking and reassurance-seeking have on your day, so that health concerns can be noticed without taking over your time and attention. Caring about your health is reasonable, and the difficulty usually comes when checking and reassurance-seeking start to dominate rather than settle the worry. Many people also find it useful to understand why the mind can get stuck in this pattern in the first place, often as a way of trying to manage uncertainty or a sense of risk that feels intolerable.

Our approach

Sessions are structured around what is actually happening for you: which situations trigger the worry, what you do in response, and what keeps the cycle repeating. From there, therapy is paced collaboratively, building on what works and adjusting what does not, rather than following a fixed script regardless of your circumstances or history.

What does therapy for health anxiety involve?

An initial session usually focuses on understanding your history with health worry, what has helped or not helped before, and what you want to be different. From there, sessions typically look at the specific patterns maintaining the anxiety, including checking, reassurance-seeking, avoidance and the beliefs underneath them about illness, risk and uncertainty, such as the assumption that any unexplained symptom must mean the worst.

Some sessions may involve gradually reducing checking or reassurance-seeking behaviours, since these tend to feed the worry rather than settle it, even though they feel protective in the moment. This is done step by step and always at a pace agreed with you. Between sessions, you might be asked to notice patterns, try out a different response to a trigger, or reflect on specific thoughts as they arise during the week.

Because sessions are online, they take place by secure video call, which many people find fits more easily around work and family life in and around Greenwich, Blackheath, Charlton, Deptford, Lewisham, New Cross and Maze Hill, without the need to travel or take extended time out of the day.

When to seek help

It is worth speaking to your GP first if you have physical symptoms that have not been medically assessed, since therapy for health anxiety works alongside medical care rather than replacing it. Once physical causes have been reasonably ruled out or are being managed, therapy becomes appropriate if worry about your health is frequent, hard to control, or affecting your work, relationships or daily routine.

Signs that support can help include spending significant time each day checking your body or searching symptoms, repeatedly seeking reassurance that is only briefly comforting, and avoiding medical care out of fear of what might be found or noticing that health worries are narrowing your life. If you are in crisis or thinking of harming yourself, contact your GP, NHS 111, the Samaritans on 116 123 or attend A&E.

This site will be updated as the practice develops.