Health anxiety (hypochondria)

What is health anxiety (hypochondria)?

A person suffering from health anxiety has a severe fear of being or becoming affected by some serious illness. Symptoms in the body lead to a conviction that something is wrong. A large part of everyday life is spent trying to understand the symptoms. Information is sought on the Internet, friends are questioned and people often go to the doctor. Medical examinations usually provide temporary reassurance, but after a while the anxiety returns. People may start to question the doctor's competence or ability to understand.

Aftonbladet interviewed Sveapsykologerna about how to know what type of anxiety you suffer from and what you can do about it. Read the whole article in our blog via the link: https://sveapsykologerna.se/blog/2021/9/13/aftonbladet-stress-eller-ngest-s-vet-du-vad-du-lider-av

Persistent or new symptoms become a source of constant worry. For a person with health anxiety, it can mean always looking for things on the body that could be dangerous diseases. For example, a spot leads to catastrophic thoughts that it could be a serious illness. The person then spends a lot of time trying to get external reassurances from their surroundings that it is not so dangerous, which provides short-term calm. Even Googling provides a short-term gain, a sense of control, but this perpetuates the problem and sometimes the person can find even more information online that exacerbates the anxiety. It is about finding a reasonable behavior. There is nothing wrong with checking suspicious symptoms with a doctor to rule something out. But as I said, a person with health anxiety is usually not satisfied or calm in the long term despite a doctor's visit because the anxiety finds new symptoms to focus on. Therefore, you have to decide on a target behavior that you then relate to. The person may try to mimic the behavior of a person who does not have health anxiety. That is, a behavior that is not a surplus behavior that occupies too much thought or contains too many non-productive actions. At the same time, the person may increase other functional behaviors that are in deficit in order to fill their days in a constructive way based on their life compass: relationships, work/study, health and leisure.