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Health anxiety

You may have health anxiety if you worry you have a health problem that health professionals such as your GP haven’t found. You may regularly check your body for signs of illness and find that, the more you check, the more you seem to notice strange feelings or lumps in your body and imagine the worst. You may also seek reassurance about your health from others, including family members, friends, your GP, or online, and even have medical tests that don’t find any problems. Or you may avoid anything to do with the illness you fear you have, such as newspaper articles, TV programmes, GP appointments, and anything else that might set off the anxiety.

While worries can include a number of health related issues, some of the more common fears are having cancer or dementia, or fearing that you may have a heart attack. Not everyone worries about specific illnesses though - your fears could be more general and you may simply think that something is ‘not quite right’. Worrying about your health in this way, despite medical advice that you don’t have a serious illness, can impact on how you lead your life.

Do you think you may have health anxiety? To refer yourself to Talk Liverpool, click HERE.