Health Anxiety

By far the biggest issue I deal with every week is health anxiety. If you think you have it check out my post.

Steve Norton

10/19/2023

Health anxiety and OCD

Health Anxiety is from the OCD family and how it starts as when that person has some sort of illness or discomfort, some sort of sensation in the body, rather than just passing it off as that sensation or not feeling very well. That person then starts to dig. They start digging online, they go into Google, and before they know it. This then start believing that they’ve got cancer, or some other serious illness like that.

And what then happens this is the spiral into decline. When that person then starts to worry to the point where the symptoms get even worse, then they end up going to see the doctor. The doctor gives them a thorough examination, and generally comes back and says “Look, you’ve got nothing wrong with you”, and that that person goes home feeling a little bit of relief from that.

But only temporarily, because they then start going online and start looking at medical misdiagnosis. They find stories whereby people who have been told by doctors that they’re fit and healthy and they turned out they haven’t been fine. They they start thinking “Maybe the doctor got it wrong”.

Doctor Google!

And they’ll start digging even further on Google. That becomes an absolute obsession where the person actually makes themselves ill and exacerbates any symptom. While the very fact that that they are focusing so much on that symptom. They can almost create new symptoms and new sensations, because what they’re really doing is asking their mind to almost produce, how a more serious symptom might feel.

So that person then spirals into even worse, anxiety levels, because then start research even further.

Typical character traits of people with Health Anxiety

Disbelieving their own doctor and going for private checks can follow. Nothing ever satisfies the obsession. It doesn’t matter who tells them, I’ve had clients who have literally spent 1000s of pounds going to see different doctors. Doctors from Harley Street, you name it all over the all over the world, getting checked out and whenever a doctor says to them and says, you’re perfectly fine. It only ever seems to have like a very short lived effect on that person.

And then the very next day, they start going back into Google, again, going on forums, almost convincing themselves that there really is something wrong with them. At this point it becomes really difficult for anyone that’s with these people living with them partners. It just gets a little bit out of control. So no amount of evidence will ever help the anxiety sufferer, if they believe they’ve got some sort of health ailment.

No amount of professionals telling them that they’re all fine, and I’ve actually seen people who’ve genuinely made themselves ill with health anxiety. I’ve actually read symptoms appear, probably due to the fact that they’ve got that much adrenaline and cortisol flying on their bodies so they end up getting real genuine stomach problems acid problems and palpitations of the heart.

Thought Retraining

So that’s pretty much what health anxiety is, it is an obsession. It is an obsessional behaviour, used to be called hypochondria years ago. But the question you might be wondering is, is there anything I can do about it? Well, absolutely, yes there is. The first thing you need to do is understand that you’ve got this obsession that it is not an illness, what you’ve got, you’ve actually got an obsession an OCD style obsession.

Now the only way we can break this is by first of all, stop going on Google. Stop googling symptoms, and you will start changing your focus away from your health, because the more you start to focus on it, the more you’re asking your body to create sensations and refocus yourself on something else. Now, it can be quite stubborn to remove.

So my probably best advice for you would be to actually get some professional help from someone like myself who can, who specialises in removing health anxiety, and yes it does, it takes some effort to do it it’s it’s quite a stupid little pocket to get rid of health anxiety, but you can do it. And one of the reasons people cheap space because they use a technique called Thought retraining.

To summarise

And what thought retraining does, it is a technique of help stop and block the thoughts that cause the health anxiety in the first place. And if you practice the health anxiety protocol which is what I teach to my clients, you can generally get rid of health anxiety pretty quick. But like everything in life, it does have to be worked out, it needs to be practised.

So it isn’t something that has to be with you all the time. It is something that you can reverse, reverse the obsession with the right help, so if you’d like to know any more about that, you can either get in touch with me, or you can actually help with health anxiety or my new Rapid anxiety elimination programme, and that will give you the full step by step guide of how to remove health anxiety. So I hope that helps and I hope that gives you a little bit of hope that it doesn’t have to be a permanent thing.

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