161. The psychology of health anxiety

down the Psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that I don't think is spoken about nearly enough, particularly amongst those in our twenties or really at any age, despite it being so much more common than I think we recognize, and that is health anxiety, the fear or preoccupation with the belief that we are currently or our risk of developing a serious illness, that our death or some kind of serious harm is either

inevitable or currently occurring somewhere in our bodies, even if we don't have symptoms. We misinterpret normal bodily sensations as dangerous, and it's that very fear that we may secretly have a condition like cancer, or that we're having a heart attack or something else that can actually produce feelings that are similar to those conditions that we expect that we have because it activates our anxiety and a fear response such that we no longer really feel in touch with

our bodies. This cycle can mean that we need constant reassurance from doctors. We're always scheduling appointments, searching for answers on the internet, and we are constantly coming up with this new explanation for a sensation or feeling that is either not that serious or may need you know, may not even exist. The thing is, though, is that it's our anxiety that triggers our imagination to go to the worst possible outcome, and that is where we land, and

that is where we stay. On a personal note, health anxiety is something I've dealt with on and off for the greater part of my twenties, I would say even my teen years as well before that, and I want to really speak about that experience today for others who might be able to relate, but also just kind of sharing what I've learned and how I have come to manage the times real chronic anxiety that something in my body is not quite right, but also where this unique

type of anxiety or set of fears comes from whether it is hypervigilant parents, catastrophic thinking, our intolerance for uncertainty, fear mongering. There is so much to be said for the origins of this kind of unique type of anxiety. There is actually a term for the fact that a lot of us believe that we have certain conditions because of our exposure to the Internet. It's called cyberchondria, where we repeatedly google our symptoms and look for examples that

kind of justify our own explanations to ourselves. Honestly, I think talking about this in the aftermath of a global pandemic is also so important because I think COVID and the changes that brought to the world around us have been such a huge catalyst for so many people when it comes to health fears and health worries. I think when we are in our twenties, we're expected to feel

very invincible because we are young. This is normally when we are our healthiest, our fittest, our immune system is strong. We think we're going to live forever. But we also have this very instinctual urge to want to stay alive for as long as possible, and that means worrying about our health, especially if you're an especially anxious person. Our minds like to find anything in our environment, external or internal, to be hyper vigilant towards, so that we are aware

of any threats. I remember vividly when the embola virus was making like international headlines back in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, and I was so scared. I was terrified that my entire family was going to be infected with this rare disease and die. I would google survival rates and symptoms. I'm pretty sure I ordered one of those like protective suits on Amazon using my mum's credit card. Anytime I had a cough, the smallest pain, even the hiccups, I

would go into a state of panic. And I didn't really have a term for what that feeling was. The constant googling, the anxiety, the endless doctor's appointments for symptoms that would disappear as soon as they told me I was fine. But it was when I was in my twenties that someone finally said to me, like, hey, look, it it's unlikely that you are suffering from every rare disease on the planet and that you're still alive. I

think the underlying condition here is really health anxiety. This was after I had been experiencing headaches for a few weeks and I had my friend Kate, God bless her, an actual angel, but she drove me to get an emergency MRI because I was convinced, convinced to the point of thinking I would need to write my will that I had a serious brain clot or terminal cancer. Spoiler alert,

it was neither. I had just become so hyper vigilant towards any abnormalities and how I was feeling so alert to my body, so consumed with my worry and my stress that I was experiencing these phantom symptoms, or I was applying unreasonable, irrational explanations to things that are just normal to experience as a human being that is going through life. That explanation actually brought me a lot of peace, even if at times I still feel a lot of

my anxiety spike. I understand it now, I can apply logic and understanding to my need to go searching for answers. And you know what it really all comes down to. It feels terrible to not be in control of your body. It is scary to feel like you are out of touch, which with what's going on inside of you, and to realize and recognize your vulnerability as a human. That is the origin of the fear. Understanding that although illness and sickness is a part of life, we want to be

prepared for whatever is possible. We want to be able to avoid anything that might happen, so we experience a lot of false alarms. I would always rationalize it that it was better safe than sorry, but I think I actually wasn't being safe. I was just creating more stress for myself. So what are some of the roots, the root causes of our health anxiety, because I think being aware of those first allows us to actually gain the

control that we feel or sense that we lack. To understand health anxiety, we firstly have to really consider our evolutionary history and the fact that we all are, at the end of the day, just animals, just another species whose primary goal is survival. Anxiety is a protective mechanism that serves that purpose, and it allows us to scan the body for an illness that we might need to

protect ourselves from. Our ancestors really relied on that keen sense of hypervigilance to survive in a hostile environment, one that they couldn't always predict, So those of us who are more cautious about potential threats were more likely to survive, more likely to pass in our genes. Normally, we would interpret that as being threats in our environment, like a massive tiger coming to eat us or predators, and in many ways that is true. That is what ancient hypervigilance

was normally directed towards outside threats. But as we've evolved as a species, this hypervigilance has now turned inward. We are now on hilt for science of illness because that illness is just as dangerous as something external or in our environment, and we now have the knowledge to treat and eliminate the threat. Therefore, if we catch something early enough, maybe we'll be okay. So we start looking for signs that what we are experiencing is a larger problem to

get that diagnostic care. Another part of our programming or I guess, our basic instincts as humans that has made us more aware of potential sickness or conditions is the innate and automatic prioritization of negative information. This is known as a negativity bias. So basically, we are more likely to attend to learn from focus on negative information more than positive information, and that bias, that tendency has been

with us since infancy. It's something that is so important to our survival that even as children we do it because you have to know that if you have a beautiful rainbow on one side and a terrible storm on the other, prioritizing the storm, thinking about how you're going to escape or protect yourself was more likely to mean that you would survive. So we focus on that negative information when we think about that. In the context of health anxiety, this means that we are hardwired to excessively

focus on the worst possible outcome. We magnify and amplify the perceived threat or small minor symptoms into a catastrophic illness. That small pain on your side, that's a heart attack, that headache, it's a brain tumor. And that catastrophic thinking has obviously emerged to help us, but in a modern context it actually does more harm than good because we can't help but think of an explanation first before there is actually a reason to think that, so it reinforces

our cycle of anxiety. The next thing we need to appreciate is that when we are struggling with our health anxiety. What we really are struggling with at the end of the day is our intolerance of uncertainty. A lot of this, if you haven't realized, is once again coming down to our innate human nature and our fear of the unknown. We don't like it as humans when we don't know what's going to happen next, when we don't feel a sense of control, when we are just uncertain, that leaves

room for danger. Uncertainty is obviously a really normal part of life. We can never be one hundred percent sure about what the future holds, not even fifty percent twenty percent good and bad. However, if you already have a high baseline or high levels of anxiety, you are more likely to want to plan and prepare for everything as a way of eliminating ambigunit or uncertainty because we are

so fearful of it. It's why we like going to the same restaurants, where we like watching the same comfort TV shows or movies, or only going to parties or social events where we know people. It minimizes the things that will be out of our control. However, our health is not something we can always control and realizing that

creates further worry. We can become infected with something from a thoughtless cough or for pure chance, some genetic mutation that has just happened, so we overthink every small thing in order to mitigate our sense of stress. At that realization, it's where a lot of those symptoms are coming from, the fear of uncertainty. There's a lot of reasons why we do that, but it normally comes down to two main sources. Firstly is our upbringing and past experiences, and

second is the Internet. We are going to discuss how these two things contribute to our health anxiety, but also how we can begin to manage these feelings in a very healthy, sustainable, helpful way after this show of break. When I was a child, I used to get these really, really terrible stomach pains, like the worst pain that you have ever experienced. It felt like someone was ripping out my organs, and I would complain about this to my

parents all the time. It would come on randomly when I was at school, when I was with my friends, when I was playing basketball, and my parents would always dismiss it. They'd be like, no, you're just overreacting. It took over a year for them to realize that something was actually wrong, and when we went to the doctor, they found out that I had this really random condition,

especially for people like under the age of forty. I'm not going to go into what it is, but basically this condition is super super rare unless you're like over and you're suffering from obesity and like high blood pressure and a poor diet. And it's also really really painful.

And you know, my parents never could have known that this is what was going on, because who is going to think that their twelve year old daughter has a condition that mostly impacts sedentary, pregnant adult women with high cholesterol. That memory, though, of knowing for a while I that something was wrong, trying to communicate that not being believed

that really stuck with me. We think that those memories, those childhood experiences aren't important, and we think that we don't subliminally learn from them, But those are teachable moments, and our brain takes those times when we were in pain or experiencing hurt or something damaging and holds onto those memories really tightly because they might be useful in

the future. So I look at that experience as being a big origin point for me, because whilst my rational brain can see that this was really rare, this was really out of the blue, it wasn't life threatening, it was managed. All that that situation taught me was just how little control that we have, how little we know about what our bodies are doing. And I'm not trying

to use that example to like fearmonger. I'm just more so using it to illustrate my point that childhood experiences and moments from our upbringing play a really pivotal role in the development of health anxiety. Individuals who maybe experienced frequent illness when they were children or had a significant loss in childhood, grow up associating health related issues with deep emotional pain. These unresolved emotions can resurface in the form of this health anxiety, where the fear of illness

becomes intertwined with this unresolved trauma. Further to that, some of us have also been raised with parents or family mene members who themselves are hypochondriacs, and they project their fears onto us as a way of coping with their own personal anxiety. It might have been a mother who was always sanitizing things, taking you to the doctor, keeping you home from school. These experiences imprint on us. They

stay with us. We begin to mimic it through observation or learning, and then when we become adults who have been raised in this way, where those behaviors we thought kept us safe and provided a sense of false sense of security, we begin to take those on ourselves. It may also be that someone in your family has unfortunately suffered from a really terrible disease or condition, and so you know firsthand what that looks like and you want

to avoid it at all costs. A family member with a condition also creates a predisposition, which may give you more reason and justification for your excess of worry, because now you feel more at risk, you feel more in danger. It also creates what we call a frequency illusion or a frequency bias, where we tend to notice something more after we notice it for the first time, leading to the belief that it is more common than it is.

An example is that if your family member has Parkinson's, the more you're going to start seeing Parkinson's in the news in the media overhearing it on the street in conversations, leading to the belief that you should actually be more afraid when really It's just an illusion created by where your brain is deciding to direct attention. This is really only aided by the fact that most of us belong to the first ever generation that grew up on the Internet,

and we know that the Internet loves fear mongering. It loves clickbait novel stories that capture our attention, that get more likes, that get more views, because people are naturally drawn to information that is more emotionally charged. So those stories of cancer, patience and rare diseases and infections, they become more salient, especially once again in the minds of anxious people who are already on high alert for this information. The Internet is very quick to give you the worst

possible answer to any question that you ask it. I think this is a common experience to be like googling your minors stomach pains at two am, and the first response is that you have some uncurable infection and you'll be like dead in three weeks. That is what we

were talking about before hypochondria. Even if we are googling our symptoms in the first place as a way to seek reassurance, suddenly you're given this like unexpected answer and you're thinking, oh yeah, I fit the profile for all of these things because you have this bias, right, you want to meet this profile. You've been told the answer, so you want to make sure that you are part of the answer because doctor Google has told you so,

and you trust that information. So how do we counteract that if we know we have this tendency, if it is creating concern for us, meaning that we are in that constant state of panic. What are our strategies here? Because I think the most important thing to remember is that when you have anxiety of any sort, your thoughts are still within your control. They originate from you, Your anxieties, your worries, they come from you. They can be controlled by you, even if it seems hard. So there's three

main strategies here that I want to talk about. Firstly, get comfortable with uncomfortable feelings. A lot of our health anxiety comes from feeling disconnected with our bodies and experiencing phantom symptoms which we know are actually the result of our anxiety. These feelings make us very aware of our bodies and also very aware of the stress response that we're going through. And so if we're not comfortable with that discomfort and cannot identify the true origin, which is

a false alarm or a fear response. We're going to read further into that, and the next thing you know, we're in the doctor's office. If you think about it, a lot of the symptoms of anxiety also mimic a lot of the symptoms of more serious illnesses, so we can't tell the difference, and we're not we don't feel safe in those feelings. A lot of these sensations we can actually bring back into our control using methods associated

with this idea called biofeedback. So biofeedback is this idea in psychology that we can actually train our minds to influence what we typically see is automatic bodily functions as a way to restore a sense of mental stability. There's the things like using like breathing patterns to control heart

rate or meditation to control racing thoughts. The easiest way to tell whether your racing heartbeat is a heart attack or just anxiety is to stop for a second, take eight really deep breaths, let your arms float, lie down flat, continue to breathe, and I want you to think of your anxiety as a bubble slowly flowing past you, or like a shell in the waves that are slowly getting swept out. Picture the most beautiful place you've ever been.

Focus on that anxiety floating away, moving out of your line of sight, and start focusing on the environment that you're imagining around you. Identify five things you can see in that place. What are you smelling, what are you hearing, what are you feeling? And has your heart rate dropped? Is your breathing more in your control? That is a sign that this is a symptom of anxiety, not a

real illness. I also do this thing where, when I'm like getting those racing thoughts that we all are so so so familiar with, I visualize all of my anxiety resting in the palm of my hand, and I concentrate all of my worries onto that area. They're just in my hand. They're not anywhere else in my body. I hold onto them tightly and then slowly I let them go, but only when I'm ready to, And until that point they stay right there in the palm of my hand.

They're not in my mind, They're not anywhere else in my body. I can see them. I know where they're going to go, and they're not going to hurt me, and I slowly release them. That is a really important tactic for me because it stops me from feeling like my anxiety is this thing that has control over me, and I actually have control of it. Yet I also would say begin to notice when you experience it's these phantom symptoms as a way to rationalize them and better

understand your triggers. Is it that you often start to feel like you have a sickness or an illness or a condition during periods of really high stress, after you've had a really tough conversation with your partner, when you've had a really busy day. Often there is an environmental catalyst, and our health. Anxiety is really just us projecting a sense of uncertainty in our lives onto uncertainty around our health because that feels more serious and valid to worry about.

That's okay. Sometimes our mind does what it needs to do to compartmentalize our stress, but it is about being aware of that. Secondly, invest in your health as a way to build your confidence instead of googling or instead of searching for answers. At the end of the day, our health is really precious. Health is wealth. It's so important That is why we are so pritive of it and so hyper vigilant towards things that might be going wrong.

But we have to remember that our health anxiety is really just us unconsciously trying to do what's right by ourselves. By being overly cautious, our brain just doesn't realize when it's maybe gone too far. Flip the narrative. Instead of looking for illness, look for ways to promote wellness. Let

me explain this a little bit more. If you feel healthy, if you feel well, if you know that you are fit, taking care of yourself, that entire bodily sensation is going to give you peace of mind and a much deeper sense of confidence that you are in fact totally fine.

You're okay. So instead of overthinking and googling, go for a walk instead, prioritize exercise, eat foods that make you feel good, Go and get your regular checkups, take your vitamins, get eight hours of sleep, Make that your focus instead of your worries. It's going to have two effects. Number one, you're just going to feel a lot better, and your anxiety will actually just be lessened because you're adopting these healthy habits and Secondly, it brings that sense of control

back into your life. You feel like the control that you're giving up when you worry about your health, you are reclaiming by prioritizing your health. If that doesn't work, you can always challenge these unhelpful thoughts. Anxiety is irrational. Helpful thoughts are logical. What are the actual prevalence rates of what you're worried about here? How common is it really? What are your chances of surviving? How would doctors treat you if this was to happen? Is there a more

rational explanation for your symptoms? You've got to realize that if something was really wrong, your body is going to tell you in ways that are very of you would not have any doubts, and worst case scenario, you would still be okay. I promise you you are going to be okay. Our medical system is so far advanced often we forget that. We feel like we have to do all the work to keep ourselves safe when there are people who have trained for years to do that for us.

Sometimes we think that our anxious thoughts are the only things protecting us, Like if I can I can outthink my anxiety, or if I overthink something enough, I'll jinx it and it can't possibly come true. But your anxiety is lying to you. Your nervous system has developed a fight or flight response, and sometimes it means it misfires our health. Anxiety is an instant of that. So my final tip when you can't escape this spiral or your thoughts are just really loud today, is to talk it

out with your friends. And I find this really helpful for two reasons. Firstly, when you verbalize something, you often realize how silly it sounds. And secondly, you'll be surprised how many other people out there have similar thoughts to you at some time or another. I remember so clearly sitting down with my friend Kate when she was about to take me to get that MRI, and just hearing from her how she felt the same way. Obviously, I knew how hard it was, so it wasn't like a

pleasure to hear. It wasn't like happy. But I believe that seeing our experiences reflected back on us is one of the most calming, reassuring things we can feel. It makes you realize that no one, no feeling that we experience is felt alone, No human experience is completely unique or experienced. In solitude, we operate in the same way as humans our quirks, our anxieties, our insecurities. That is

a good feeling, that is a comforting feeling. Talk about it openly, discuss it with your friends and your family, and they can kind of act as a voice of reason in those situations when your logic is failing you. They are kind of the rational voice that you need, because once again, in those moments, your brain is just looking for a source of fear. It is fear mongering.

It wants answers, it wants certainty, so it's gonna find whatever explanation is going to bring it comfort and peace, even if it's not the right one, even if it's totally off the mark. I really do have a lot of sympathy. I feel like, if you can't tell it, this is part of my reality, and sometimes it's really

really hard. I've been like traveling a lot recently, and I think that's a big trigger for me where I get really worried that I'll get sick when I'm oversee so I start becoming really hyper vigilant to like any small thing as like a reason not to go or as like a reason to go to the doctor. So it's definitely been on my mind, and I want you

to know that you are not alone. Obviously, as I was saying that about talking to friends and being reassured by other people's experiences, I hope you can hear my experience and realize that you are not the only one who was conscious of this, who was conscious of these worries and these anxieties. You are going to be completely fine. You are going to be so okay. I'm really rooting

for you. I know it can be hard to feel like you are not in control of your body because of whatever experience in the past, scared for your future, the future of your health and your well being. But I'm right there with you, and I really get it. So I hope this episode has been of some help. I hope these strategies have been helpful. They personally are amazing for me. I really do hope you enjoyed this

episode or at least got something out of it. As always, if there is someone who needs to hear this, please feel free to share it along to share the love, and make sure that you leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening. I read them all, I see them all. They make me feel so happy and I can't believe that we have this beautiful community of people who care about these things. So thank you

so much for coming along for the ride. If you have an episode suggestion, you can follow me at that Psychology podcast and send me a DM. I love hearing from you, I love hearing what you're going through and thinking about the psychology behind it. So once again, thank you, and we will be back next week with another episode.