Health anxiety

Health anxiety is a persistent, distressing fear of having or developing a serious illness, often despite reassurance from doctors or clear test results. It can involve frequent body checking, repeated searches for symptoms online, or avoiding health-related information altogether. A clinical psychologist can help you understand what keeps this fear going and build a different relationship with bodily sensations.

What health anxiety is and how it shows up

Health anxiety centres on the fear that ordinary physical sensations, a headache, a mole, a racing heart, a twinge of pain, mean something seriously wrong is happening in the body. Unlike passing worry after reading a health story, health anxiety persists even after medical reassurance, and that reassurance tends to wear off quickly, sometimes within hours, prompting further checking or another appointment.

Common patterns include repeatedly checking the body for changes, searching symptoms online in a way that tends to escalate worry rather than settle it, seeking frequent reassurance from GPs, family or friends, and avoiding health-related news, hospitals or even exercise for fear of what physical exertion might reveal. Some people swing the other way and avoid medical care altogether, out of fear that a check-up will confirm their worst fears. Both patterns, checking and avoidance, keep the underlying anxiety in place rather than resolving it.

Health anxiety often develops after a specific trigger: a health scare of your own, an illness or death of someone close to you, or a period of general stress that lowered your tolerance for uncertainty. Once established, the pattern can become self-sustaining. A normal bodily sensation, most of which have entirely benign explanations, gets noticed, interpreted as dangerous, and then checked or searched, which tends to increase attention to bodily sensations generally and makes the next one more likely to be noticed too.

When to seek help

If worry about illness is frequent, hard to switch off, and taking up significant time or emotional energy, whether through checking, searching or seeking reassurance, it is worth speaking to a psychologist. This is particularly relevant if repeated medical reassurance has not brought lasting relief, or if the worry is affecting work, relationships or your ability to enjoy daily life. It’s also worth reaching out if you notice yourself avoiding medical care altogether, since this pattern can leave genuine health issues unaddressed alongside the anxiety.

How a clinical psychologist assesses and treats health anxiety

Assessment looks at what triggers your worry, what checking or reassurance-seeking behaviours have developed, and what beliefs you hold about your body and illness more broadly. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), adapted specifically for health anxiety, is the psychological treatment with the strongest evidence base and is the approach most commonly recommended for this presentation.

Treatment typically works by helping you understand how checking and reassurance-seeking, while feeling protective, actually maintain the anxiety by preventing you from learning that the feared catastrophe does not happen. Your psychologist will help you gradually reduce these behaviours while building tolerance for uncertainty about your health, since complete certainty about not being ill is not something anyone, anxious or not, can ever fully have. Where health anxiety is bound up with wider patterns of worry, approaches used for generalised anxiety may also be relevant.

Part of the work also looks at attention. Health anxiety tends to narrow focus onto the body in a way that makes ordinary sensations more noticeable and more alarming than they would otherwise be. Learning to redirect attention outward, alongside reducing checking, is a practical skill that most people can build with practice, even if it feels unnatural at first. Your psychologist will also help you understand the difference between genuine medical vigilance, which is sensible, and the anxiety-driven checking that this treatment specifically targets.

What online sessions look like

Sessions run over secure video call, usually fifty minutes. Between sessions, your psychologist will typically ask you to track checking and reassurance-seeking behaviours and gradually reduce them in a structured way, alongside noticing and testing the specific thoughts that drive the worry. Because much of the pattern of health anxiety plays out in daily life, at home, on your phone, in the moments after a strange sensation, working from your own environment can make this tracking more accurate and the practice more directly relevant.

You will need a private space and a stable internet connection, nothing more specialist than that. Many people find it useful to keep a simple log between sessions, noting when worry spiked, what triggered it and how you responded, which gives your psychologist concrete material to work with each week rather than a general impression of how the week went.

Living with uncertainty

A central part of recovering from health anxiety is not eliminating uncertainty about your health, since that isn’t realistic for anyone, but changing how much space that uncertainty is allowed to take up in daily life. Most people find that as checking and reassurance-seeking reduce, the intensity of the worry reduces alongside them, even though the underlying uncertainty about the future hasn’t actually changed. This is one of the more counterintuitive parts of treatment, and your psychologist will talk you through why it works before asking you to try it.

Health anxiety and life in Islington and north London

Islington’s N1 postcodes take in Upper Street, Angel, Highbury, Canonbury and Barnsbury, with the Victoria and Northern lines running through the area. For people balancing a full working week in this part of north London, health anxiety can eat into time that would otherwise go towards work or rest, an unplanned GP visit fitted around a Northern line commute, or an evening lost to searching symptoms after a long day on Upper Street. Online sessions mean you can address the pattern without adding another appointment to travel to.

Getting started

Sessions are online, so there is nothing to wait for before starting. Our get started page is the quickest way in, and we will match you with a psychologist suited to your needs.