Health Anxiety

Our health is something that can cause us the most anxiety of all. While some people drift through life ignoring health concerns such as obesity, smoking and alcoholism, people with anxiety tend to move to the other extreme by worrying too much.

Let’s look at an example. You discover one day that you have a mouth ulcer, not a particularly painful one, but none the less an annoying one. You have had mouth ulcers before but this one persists, let’s say for more than a month. Perhaps, building up in the back of your mind is an anxious thought maybe it is something more serious than a mouth ulcer…maybe it’s cancer!

Of course then the first stop is Google. And if you enter mouth cancer you get a very general list of symptoms, including persistent mouth ulcers! Then, straight away black and white thinking kicks in. Suddenly you have got a deadly disease, your anxiety levels rise, the adrenalin flows and the thoughts spiral out of control. You start to Google treatment only to find that it includes painful radiotherapy and surgery that might leave you so disfigured you need reconstructive surgery to put you back together again afterwards! Then you can’t get it off your mind. It is always invading your thoughts and hampering your mood until the symptoms disappear. But because it is on your mind you keep poking it and prodding it, and the ulcer gets worse or starts to bleed. More symptoms of cancer.

If those process goes unchecked, health worries can develop into full blown hypochondria or have other negative effects on your life, such as sleep loss.

As is so often the case with anxiety, it is a feeling of a loss of control which is at or near the root of the problem. The answer to this lack of control is painfully simple. Go and see the doctor or visit a nurse (depending on your medical problem). This is often what the anxiety sufferer wants to do least – because it’s better not to know, or because a trip to the doctor has inherent fears. But Google can not diagnose problems, all it can do is list, in very simple terms, symptoms which could be caused by a multitude of factors and provide photos of those signs and symptoms. A medical professional can normally quickly tell one of three things:

• 1 anxiety over, it’s nothing to worry about.
• 2 Don’t know need a second opinion.
• 3 This is a problem and we need to start treatment.

Number one is the most common. Like many things that cause us anxiety, health concerns are often baseless. Number two is also positive, because a specialist will know more and can really put your mind at rest. If it’s number three, and you need treatment then thank god you went to a doctor, there is not a disease on this earth that is not treated more efficiently and with a greater chance of recovery for being caught early. Let’s not mince our words, the cancer sufferers with the best chance of survival are the ones that are caught early.

So take control and seek help! And if you are worried that your health anxiety equals hypochondria don’t! Your doctor can be the one to judge that!