Are you often hyperaware of what your heart is doing, and are you anxious about it? Do you spend a lot of time worrying about a suffering a heart attack? You may be suffering from cardiophobia – a recurrent and disruptive fear of having a heart attack or other heart problems.
If so, you’re not alone, and fortunately you don’t have to suffer. Read on to learn more about this condition and how it can be treated successfully.
What Is Cardiophobia?
Cardiophobia is an irrational fear of having a heart attack or another heart problem. The fear is considered irrational because the intensity of the fear is out of proportion to one’s actual medical risk.
It’s easy to understand why people from all walks of life fear having heart attacks or suffering from cardiac disease. These conditions can be lethal, or can take a major toll on your health and your quality of life. In fact, heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, and over 800,000 Americans have a heart attack each year. Just about everyone hopes to never experience a heart attack or other cardiac illness.
However, despite these facts, most people will not develop a persistent fear of heart attacks. Cardiophobia is a mental health condition, not a physical one. It is one type of specific phobia. In this way it’s similar to other specific phobias of animals, heights, blood, thunderstorms, elevators, and others. Specific phobias cause intense fear or anxiety that is out of proportion to the real risks involved in the situation. In other words, these aren’t just everyday fears – they are persistent fears so powerful that they significantly impact and disrupt your quality of life.
Do You Have Cardiophobia?
The number one symptom of cardiophobia is significant fear related to having a heart attack or another heart problem. Other symptoms include:
- Preoccupation with suffering a heart attack or other heart problem despite medical tests showing you do not have cardiac disease
- Avoiding activities that you fear might put strain on your heart
- For example: exercise, caffeine, sexual activity, frightening/startling situations
- Worry and anxiety related to heart attacks and heart health in general
- Panic attacks
- Seeking medical visits or tests regarding cardiac health when doctors say they’re unnecessary
- Heightened awareness of (or sensitivity to) normal bodily sensations related to your heart
- For example: elevated heart rate, heart racing, palpitations, chest pain or tightness
To this last point, normal heart-related sensations can trigger a lot of fear and anxiety for people with cardiophobia. This is because cardiophobia leads you to misinterpret these sensations as signs of danger. These sensations are part of normal everyday human experience, but as it happens, these same sensations are also part of the natural human fear response – normal heart functions and fear can cause the exact same sensations.
If you’re fearful of having a heart attack, you will naturally pay more attention to physical sensations related to your heart. Paying close attention in this way makes you more sensitive to changes in your bodily sensations. This means there will be even more opportunities for bodily sensations to trigger fear. Additionally, fear itself makes sensations like elevated heart rate and palpitations more likely.
It’s also worth noting that being afraid of a heart attack isn’t unique to cardiophobia.
Other Causes of Cardiophobia
Medical history
For instance, people who have already suffered a heart attack may readily fear this happening again. This fear isn’t necessarily a phobia – it’s possible that the fear is proportional to each individual’s risk level as communicated to them by physicians. Still, people who have had a prior heart attack may be at a risk of developing cardiophobia later on because of paying close attention to sensations that could suggest changes in heart functioning.
Similarly, witnessing someone have a heart attack may also increase your risk for cardiophobia.
Prior personal experiences
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can explain a fear of heart attacks if you saw someone die from, or become severely injured due to having a heart attack, such as getting in a car accident after having a heart attack while driving.
Other anxiety disorders
A fear of heart attacks can also be a sign of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) if worry about cardiac illness is one of several other worries about non-heart-related things.
Panic attacks, or panic disorder, grow from anxiety around the bodily sensations that come from the fight-or-flight response – the body’s natural response to threats and things that make you fearful or anxious. These include changes in the cardiovascular system, including a racing heartbeat, palpitations, and chest tightness. Because of this, a fear of heart attack is something commonly experienced by those with a history of panic attacks or who are suffering from panic disorder.
Treatment for Cardiophobia
Fortunately, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been proven effective at treating many anxiety conditions, including specific phobias like cardiophobia. In CBT, there are various techniques used to reduce anxiety and treat phobias. Some of these include:
Exposure therapy
Exposure therapy is used to treat many types of anxiety. In exposure therapy, your therapist works with you to design a series of exercises called exposures that are tailored to you. Exposure therapy helps you overcome your fear by teaching you how to approach and tolerate the things you fear, rather than avoid them. This happens with support and close guidance from your therapist.
In CBT for cardiophobia, you and your therapist would likely build a hierarchy of heart attack-related fears, and then use this to gradually work your way from the least anxiety provoking to most anxiety provoking situations. For example, you might watch scenes from movies where people suffer heart attacks, or read first-hand accounts written by people who have had heart attacks. Exposure therapy also teaches you to not rely on avoidance to manage your fear, so exposures would include gradually resuming activities you have avoided for fear of putting strain on your heart.
In cardiophobia, a significant source of fear is the bodily sensations described above, which can be treated using exposure to uncomfortable bodily sensations. This type of exposure helps you learn to interpret these sensations not as a sign of something dangerous happening inside your body, but as uncomfortable sensations associated with the fear response or normal bodily functions.
Changing your thinking
Cognitive restructuring is a technique in which your CBT therapist helps you practice thinking differently to lower your anxiety. You accomplish this by changing unhelpful patterns in your thinking that keep you anxious. You learn to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts, while learning to implement more helpful thoughts (and likely blend these with exposure therapy techniques described above).
For those suffering from cardiophobia, negative beliefs about heart attacks are often inaccurate. Also, the more you think and worry about the scary consequences of cardiac disease, the more likely you are to feel anxious. Unhelpful thinking patterns like these can be understandable, but also contribute to cardiophobia.
Conclusion
Heart attacks are deadly serious. But if excessive fear of heart problems keeps you from enjoying your life, then consider seeing a mental health professional. Cognitive-behavioral therapy can help you get rid of this anxiety and reclaim your life.
