Health Anxiety – Get Help in NYC
Health anxiety therapy can help reduce excessive fears about serious illness, repeated symptom checking, reassurance seeking, and fears triggered by normal bodily sensations. At Manhattan Center for CBT, we provide cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for health anxiety and illness anxiety disorder in NYC and throughout New York via teletherapy.
What Is Health Anxiety? Is It Different Than Hypochondria?
Health anxiety (also called illness anxiety) centers around excessive worry about being — or becoming — seriously ill, even when you’re not experiencing any physical symptoms. This type of anxiety can be very disruptive to daily life. It’s also relatively common, affecting approximately 3-6% of people (according to the DSM-5-TR). Health anxiety used to be called hypochondria or hypochondriasis, but these terms are now outdated.
The most common fears in health anxiety focus on severe illnesses or conditions. Many people with health anxiety worry about developing cancer, multiple sclerosis (MS), ALS, HIV, or dementia.
In contrast, few people with health anxiety are anxious about developing mild or common conditions such as the common cold, dry skin, or heartburn. (The fear of exposure to germs is often part of a different condition).
Health anxiety also often causes you to misinterpret sensations in your body as signs of something dangerous. For example, you may worry that the sensations from normal bodily functions, like digestion or sweating, are actually signs of an undiagnosed or developing serious illness. The same can happen with common but uncomfortable ailments, such as a headache.
How Do I Know If I Have Health Anxiety?
- Feeling highly anxious about and preoccupied with your health in general
- Excessive preoccupation with having or developing a serious illness or condition
- Worrying that you have a disease after learning or hearing about it
- Repeatedly taking your blood pressure or temperature, or other means of “monitoring” your bodily functions (either visually or by feeling)
- Repeatedly researching diseases and symptoms on the Internet
- Avoiding medical care for fear of being diagnosed with a serious illness
- Getting frequent testing or medical imaging
- Frequently discussing your fears with loved ones and asking for reassurance
- Difficulty functioning in other areas of your life due to health anxiety
How CBT Helps Health Anxiety
Health anxiety can exist alongside medical conditions that require treatment. So, it’s important to get an appropriate medical evaluation for any concerning symptoms you have. However, if a medical evaluation doesn’t identify any illnesses or conditions you need to treat, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is likely and appropriate and effective treatment for health anxiety.
CBT offers many techniques that are effective at reducing health-related anxiety. These include:
Learning about health anxiety and increasing your awareness
Having a better understanding of the condition makes it easier to see when and how it’s impacting you. This increased awareness makes it easier to put the helpful techniques described below into practice.
Identifying and changing unhelpful patterns of thinking
A CBT therapist will help you identify and change unhelpful patterns in your thinking that keep you anxious. For example, overestimating the likelihood of having a severe illness is a common problem for people with health anxiety. If this is a problem for you, a CBT therapist can teach you how to practice thinking differently about the odds that you have (or will have) a particular illness.
Reducing reassurance-seeking and other safety behaviors
Reducing and eliminating safety behaviors helps break the cycle of health anxiety. For example, a CBT therapist will teach you how to reduce the time you spend researching diseases and symptoms on the Internet as well as scanning and checking your body for signs of illness.
Improving your ability to tolerate uncertainty around your health
People with health anxiety often feel a strong need to know for sure that they do not have a serious illness. Unfortunately, complete certainty is rarely possible. A CBT therapist can help you become more comfortable with uncertainty and resist the urge to seek reassurance, research symptoms, or repeatedly check your body for signs of illness. Over time, these changes reduce anxiety and make health concerns less intrusive in daily life.
Reducing avoidance and resuming avoided activities
Avoidance is a natural reaction to anything that causes anxiety. CBT teaches you how to tolerate feelings of anxiety without avoiding the situations that cause them. This can help you get important medical care you’ve been avoiding, or get back to other healthy activities you stopped doing for fear of how they may negatively impact your health.
Medication Treatment
Medication can also be helpful in treating anxiety, and can be almost or even equally as helpful as CBT. One commonly prescribed type of medication for anxiety is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Lexapro, Zoloft and others. Benzodiazepines are another type of medication prescribed for anxiety, which are fast acting but can be habit-forming. These include medications like Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. Because they potentially addictive, they are not good for managing anxiety in the long term.
While medication treatment can be helpful, the benefits of these medications are lost when you stop taking them. The skills you learn in CBT, however, will stay with you and help for a long time.
Finding CBT for Health Anxiety
If you’re interested in CBT for health anxiety or illness anxiety disorder, here in New York City please contact us. We also offer teletherapy to people throughout New York State, as well as New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia, Vermont, North Carolina, and Florida.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cognitive-behavioral therapy for health anxiety is typically a short-term treatment, meaning it is generally 10-20 sessions long. These sessions are typically done on a weekly basis. There will be homework exercises the therapist will give you; the better job you do on them, the shorter your treatment is likely to be.
Yes, certainly. Treatment for health anxiety in this case would focus on reducing the anxious thought patterns and behavior that lead to elevated anxiety. This is generally helpful regardless of the severity of the medical condition.
Essentially, yes. Hypochondria is a term that is still in popular use, but is no longer used clinically. They refer to the same problem.
Yes — in fact, CBT is the primary treatment for health anxiety. Medications can be helpful as well. CBT is especially useful in the treatment of health anxiety because it helps people lessen the mental and behavioral habits that sustain the problem.