Health anxiety

Health anxiety, also known as illness anxiety disorder, is a persistent and distressing preoccupation with the idea of having or developing a serious illness, despite little or no medical evidence to support it. It can involve repeated body checking, reassurance seeking or avoidance of health information, and it often causes as much disruption as a physical illness would.

What is health anxiety?

Most people worry about their health from time to time, particularly after a scare or a diagnosis somewhere in the family. Health anxiety is different in degree and duration. The worry becomes fixed, returns even when a doctor has ruled out a serious cause, and starts to organise daily life around checking, researching or avoiding anything that might trigger it. A headache becomes a possible tumour. A racing heart becomes a possible heart attack. The relief that follows reassurance, whether from a GP, a scan or a search engine, tends to be short lived, and the cycle starts again.

Health anxiety can develop after a genuine illness, a frightening diagnosis that turned out to be benign, or the illness or death of someone close. It can also build gradually, with no single starting point. It is a recognised anxiety-related difficulty, not a character flaw or an exaggeration, and it responds to structured psychological treatment.

Health anxiety sits on a spectrum. For some people it appears briefly around a specific event and settles again on its own. For others it becomes a long-running pattern that shapes daily decisions, from which symptoms get mentioned to a doctor to which activities feel too risky to attempt. The difficulty is real at any point on that spectrum, and it is worth taking seriously.

Symptoms of health anxiety

Health anxiety shows up differently from person to person, but common patterns include:

• Checking the body repeatedly for lumps, changes in skin, heart rate or other signs
• Searching symptoms online, sometimes for hours, and finding the search makes the worry worse
• Asking family, friends or health professionals for reassurance, often more than once about the same concern
• Avoiding medical programmes, health news, hospitals or appointments because they trigger anxiety
• Misreading normal bodily sensations, such as a fluttering heartbeat or muscle twitch, as signs of serious illness
• Physical symptoms of anxiety itself, including a racing heart, sweating, nausea or dizziness, which can then be mistaken for the illness being feared
• Difficulty concentrating on work or daily tasks because health worries keep intruding
• Low mood, irritability or exhaustion from the effort of managing the anxiety

Not everyone experiences all of these, and the balance between checking and avoiding often shifts over time.

How health anxiety can vary

For some people, health anxiety centres on one specific illness, often something that affected a relative or appeared in the news. For others, the target shifts from one health concern to the next. Some people manage the anxiety mainly through checking and reassurance seeking, while others cope by avoiding anything medical altogether, including appointments they actually need. Health anxiety can also sit alongside other difficulties, including generalised anxiety, panic or obsessive-compulsive patterns of thinking, and a psychologist will usually explore this as part of assessment rather than assuming a single, fixed picture.

How therapy can help

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a recommended approach for health anxiety, and it works directly on the patterns that keep the anxiety going. Therapy focuses on the checking, searching and reassurance seeking that feel protective in the moment but keep the worry alive over time. Sessions typically explore how bodily sensations get interpreted, what happens after a check or a reassurance-seeking search, and how avoidance narrows daily life. Complete certainty about health is not something anyone can have. Therapy works towards a different relationship with that uncertainty, so it can be held without taking over daily life.

Alongside cognitive behavioural approaches, some people find acceptance and commitment therapy techniques helpful for building that different relationship with uncertainty, particularly where health worries have become bound up with wider anxiety about control or safety. The specific mix of techniques used depends on what emerges during assessment, and the pace is agreed between therapist and client throughout.

Our approach

We are clinical psychologists for Maidstone and Kent, working online with adults. Sessions take place by secure video call, so support is accessible from anywhere in Kent, including Bearsted, Allington, Barming, Loose, Penenden Heath and Tovil as well as central Maidstone. Each piece of work starts with time to understand how the anxiety developed, what keeps it going day to day, and what the person wants to be different. From there, therapy is structured but responsive, using established techniques while adapting the pace to what feels manageable. We will update this site as the practice develops.

What does therapy for health anxiety involve?

An initial assessment covers the history of the health worries, current patterns of checking and avoidance, and any physical health context that is relevant to understand, though this service does not diagnose or treat physical illness. From there, therapy usually involves identifying specific triggers, looking closely at the role of checking and reassurance seeking, and gradually testing out different ways of responding to worry, often starting with smaller, more manageable steps. Between sessions, there is often a small amount of practice to try, such as noticing patterns or trying a different response to a specific trigger, reviewed together at the next session. Progress is not usually a straight line, and setbacks are treated as useful information to work with.

When to seek help

It is worth seeking support if health worries are frequent, difficult to shift once they start, or taking up a significant amount of time and energy each day. The same applies if checking or reassurance seeking has become hard to stop, or if avoidance of medical appointments, information or situations is starting to cause its own problems. Health anxiety can also affect relationships, work and sleep, and these wider effects are often what prompt someone to look for support in the first place. Any new or changing physical symptom should always be discussed with a GP first, since psychological support for health anxiety works alongside medical care.