Health Anxiety: Why You Worry About Being Ill, Google Symptoms and Fear the Worst
Have you ever noticed a change in your body - a twinge, pain or strange sensation - and immediately thought:
'What if it's something serious?'
Perhaps you notice a headache and start worrying that it's a brain tumour?
A tight sensation in your chest and suddenly it could be a heart attack?
Or a pain in your back or legs, which could be an indicator of a serious underlying condition?
You feel under the weather and your brain starts listing every medical condition it could be, with the most frightening one conveniently landing at the top.
And then, because you want to reassure yourself and, knowing how overwhelmed the NHS is already, you do what seems like the obvious thing to do...
You Google it. (Or in 2026, hit up ChatGPT.)
Twenty minutes later, you've fallen down a rabbit hole. Having gone from a slight 'twinge' or 'pang' to reading about a rare neurological condition you've never heard of before.
Sound familiar?
If so, you may be experiencing health anxiety.
Health anxiety is far more common than people realise. Estimates vary depending on how it's measured, but research by Weck et al suggests that clinically health anxiety affects somewhere between 2 and 13% of adults in the general population. (The wide range is partly because researchers use different definitions and measure of health anxiety. Rates are also higher in medical settings.)
And yet anxiety has a sneaky way of making us feel like we're the only person whose brain does this.
You might look around at everyone else getting on with their day and wonder how people are fine when you're worrying about that headache and going down the Google rabbit hole for the third time that evening because of a slightly unusual body sensation.
First of all, I want you to know:
You're not weird. You're not 'going mad.' And you're certainly not the only person whose brain has got very good at looking for signs that something might be wrong.
So why can a small bodily sensation trigger such a huge amount of fear? And why does checking, Googling or even getting all the tests done for reassurance and getting the all clear, give relief for a moment... only for the worry to come back again?
The answer starts with understanding your brain.
And I hope that, if you recognise yourself in any of this, you can find a little more clarity and compassion for yourself as you read this. Because when we understand why our brain is responding the way it is, it can become easier to start changing the patterns that keep health anxiety going.
What is Health Anxiety?
Health anxiety is an excessive or persistent worry about having, developing or becoming seriously ill.
You don't necessarily have to have lots of physical symptoms either.
Some people experience health anxiety because they notice a genuine physical sensation and become frightened about what it might mean.
Others experience very few physical symptoms but become preoccupied with the possibility of becoming ill.
The term illness anxiety disorder is sometimes used when health anxiety becomes particularly persistent and impairing. (Older terminology such as 'hypochondria' or 'hypochondriasis' is still a commonly searched for online, although these terms are now largely outdated.)
Health anxiety, like many forms of anxiety, exists on a spectrum. You don't have to have had a formal diagnosis for health worries for it to have a significant impact on your life.
You might recognise some of these health anxiety symptoms:
Constantly worrying that something is seriously wrong with you
Checking your body for signs of illness
Repeatedly Googling symptoms
Comparing your symptoms with other people's experiences online
Frequently checking your heart rate, pulse, temperature or blood pressure
Asking family or friends for reassurance
Repeatedly visiting your GP or seeking medical tests
Experiencing a moment of reassurance after an appointment or positive test results but then the anxiety returning
Worrying that the doctors or tests may have missed something
Monitoring physical sensations such as your heartbeat, breathing or digestion
Avoiding medical appointments because you're frightened of what might be discovered
Avoiding activities because you're worried they could make you ill or your symptoms worse
Interpreting normal body sensations as evidence of serious illness
Finding it difficult to concentrate or feeling exhausted because you're constantly monitoring how you feel
And here's the frustrating bit:
The more you monitor your body, the more you tend to notice.
Which brings us to the brain...
Your Brain is Constantly Scanning for Danger
I'm sorry to break it to you, but your brain's primary job isn't to make you happy =(
It's to keep you safe and alive.
This is very helpful when there's an actual threat. But not so good when the 'threat' is a slightly unusual sensation in your stomach, a niggle or pain in your body.
When your brain perceives danger, your threat system kicks in.
The amygdala and other areas of the brain involved in detecting danger help prepare your body to respond. This can cause your heart rate to increase, your breathing to change, muscles to tense and your attention becomes more focused on anything that might help you stay safe.
This is your fight, flight or freeze response.
The problem isn't that this system is faulty. It's that an anxious brain can become VERY good at spotting potential threats.
And when your health becomes the thing your brain has decided it needs to protect you from, your attention can become intensely focused on your body.
If you've read my blog about the stress bucket, you'll know that our stress response is designed to help us deal with short-term threats. The problem comes when the bucket starts filling up and your brain is spending more and more time in 'something might be wrong' mode. (You can learn more about the stress bucket in my blog here.)
And sometimes, there's a very understandable reason why your brain has become too alert to your health.
When Someone You Love Becomes Seriously Ill
Research suggests that experiences such as watching someone you love become seriously ill, going through a major period of stress and facing a serious health scare yourself can sometimes contribute to health anxiety.
This is something I've seen in my practice: health anxiety developing after someone close to them has experienced a serious illness.
Sometimes it's a parent, a partner, friend or another family member.
And it makes sense that this can have an impact on you.
If you've watched someone you love become seriously unwell, not only is it stressful and perhaps anxiety-riddled, but it also teaches your brain a very powerful lesson:
Illness can happen. Bad things can happen. We need to be alert.
Perhaps you've spent months worrying about them caring for them, going to hospital appointments, waiting for test results or watching for changes in their health.
Your stress response may have been switched on for a long time and even when the immediate situation is over, your brain doesn't necessarily just go: 'Right we're done here. Let's go back to normal.' Ah, if only! That would be so convenient!
Instead, that particular part of the brain loves to repeat the same patterns of behaviour as it did before. It has learned to pay much closer attention to anything health-related and so it continues to do so.
Suddenly your brain becomes much more alert to anything that could be a sign of illness in you too.
Why Health Anxiety Can Make You Notice Every Little Sensation
Your brain receives an enormous amount of information from your body every second.
Thankfully, you aren't consciously aware of all of it. Imagine if you had to consciously think about your heartbeat, digestion, breathing, muscle tension and every tiny sensation in your body all day.
It would be exhausting and you would never get anything done.
Instead, your brain filters out much of this information.
But when you become anxious about your health, your attention can become much more focused on internal sensations.
This is known as interoception. Your ability to detect and interpret signals coming from inside your body.
Research suggests that people experiencing health anxiety can become particularly focused on bodily sensations and may be more likely to interpret ambiguous sensations as threatening.
This means that it's not necessarily that you're imagining sensations; you may genuinely be noticing them. The problem is what you brain does with that information.
What was a normal bodily sensation becomes:
You being aware of a sensation...
You wonder what it is...
Then thoughts of 'could it be something serious?'
This creates anxiety, which causes more monitoring and awareness...
And suddenly you're caught in a loop.
Anxiety Can Create Physical Symptoms Too
Here's where health anxiety can become particularly confusing.
Anxiety itself can cause very real physical symptoms.
When your nervous system is activated, you might experience:
A racing or pounding heart
Tight chest
Shortness of breath
Dizziness
Tingling or numbness
Headaches or muscle tension
Sweating
Nausea
Stomach issues
Changes in bowel moments
Difficulty sleeping
(There's more about how anxiety can affect the body in my blog post here.)
And if you already worry about your health, these symptoms can feel incredibly threatening as it reinforces the 'I knew there was something wrong' thoughts.
And now you have a body sensation which feels like evidence that your original fear was right.
Except now the anxiety itself may be contributing to the physical sensations you're experiencing.
(This doesn't mean symptoms should automatically be dismissed as anxiety. New, persistent, severe or concerning physical symptoms should always be discussed with an appropriate healthcare professional.)
Health anxiety isn't about convincing yourself that nothing can ever be wrong with your body. It's about learning not to treat every sensation as evidence that something must be wrong.
Why Googling Your Symptoms Can Make Health Anxiety Worse
This is one of the biggest traps and I'm sure many of us that have fallen down the Google rabbit hole at some point.
It looks like this:
You notice something unusual.
You Google it because you're looking for reassurance.
You find a list of possible causes.
Some are harmless. Some are moderately concerning. And there's at least one that is absolutely terrifying.
Guess which one your anxious brain focuses on?
Your brain is biased towards information that might help you detect danger. So rather than believing the logical, rational explanation that there are lots of possible explanations and most are harmless, your anxious brain latches onto the one that confirms your fear.
Research into what has been called cyberchondria has found a clear relationship between health anxiety and online symptoms searching. A study by Muse et al found that people with higher health anxiety experiencing greater anxiety after searching for health information online.
A separate review and meta-analysis involving 7373 participants across 20 studies found a positive relationship between health anxiety and online health-information seeking, as well as an even stronger relationship between health anxiety and cyberchondria.
So that search you do, which feels like it's helping you get certainty may actually be reinforcing the anxiety by creating a habit to carry out the compulsion to search.
And the more you repeat that behaviour, the stronger the habit becomes.
'I just want reassurance.'
Of course you do. When you're frightened that something could be seriously wrong, reassurance feels like exactly what you need.
You ask your partner, 'Does this look normal to you?'
You book another GP appointment.
You check your pulse.
You pay for another private test.
You Google that symptoms again, just in case you missed something the first time.
You might feel better for a short period of time. But then the doubt creeps back in.
This is because reassurance can reduce anxiety in the short term without necessarily changing the underlying fear.
In fact, reassurance and checking can become part of the cycle that keeps health anxiety going.
This is because the brain learns from what we repeatedly do. If every uncomfortable sensation leads to checking, Googling or reassurance, the brain learns that the sensation must have been something dangerous because we had to do something about it.
This means that the next sensation gets your attention even more quickly.
And we hop on that merry go round again.
Why Your Brain Keeps Thinking 'What if The Doctor Missed Something?'
This is another common health anxiety thought.
You might have had the tests, spoken to your GP and told everything looks fine. Yet your brain thinks, 'But what if they've missed something?"
This is partly because anxiety doesn't like uncertainty.
It wants 100% certainty.
Unfortunately, medicine can't always provide that. Neither can life.
There is always a small degree of uncertainty.
For someone with health anxiety that uncertainty can feel unbearable. So the brain tries to eliminate it through more checking, more research, more appointments and more reassurance.
But the more you try to achieve absolute certainty, the more you can become aware of the fact that absolute certainty isn't possible. And that can keep the anxiety going.
Sometimes the problem isn't that you haven't got enough information. It's that your anxious brain is asking for a level of certainty that nobody can realistically give it.
Health Anxiety Isn't Just Something Women Experience
This is something I think is important to talk about because I have worked with a large number of men experiencing health anxiety too.
There can still be a stereotype that anxiety is something women talk about more, while men are expected to just get on with things.
But here's the thing: anxiety doesn't care whether you're male or female.
Your nervous system doesn't check your gender before deciding whether something feels threatening.
And health anxiety isn't necessarily going to look exactly the same in everyone either.
Some people will talk openly about their worries. Others might spend a lot of time researching symptoms, checking their body or repeatedly seeking medical reassurance without necessarily thinking of themselves as ‘anxious’.
Research suggests that health anxiety occurs across genders, although some studies have found differences in the specific ways men and women experience or respond to it.
So if you're a man (or a woman) who spends a lot of time worrying about your health, checking symptoms, monitoring your body or imagining worst-case scenarios, you're not being ridiculous. And you don't have to wait until it is completely taking over your life before you ask for help.
Health Anxiety Isn't You Being Dramatic
This is really important. It's not attention seeking and it's not something you can simply switch off by telling yourself to stop worrying (because if it were, let's be honest, you would have done that by now, I'm sure!)
Your fear feels real because your brain's threat system is responding as though there is something that needs your immediate attention RIGHT NOW.
You may know logically that the symptom is probably nothing serious, but your emotional brain hasn't necessarily got the memo.
And this is why telling yourself, ‘There's nothing wrong with me, stop being stupid’ rarely works.
So rather than beating yourself up for worrying, it can be much more helpful to understand the pattern your brain has learned.
Because the good news is what the brain learns, it can also unlearn.
How Can You Break the Cycle Of Health Anxiety?
The aim isn't to become completely unaware of your body (because there will be times that your body is giving you useful information). Instead, it's to change the relationship you have with those sensations.
Instead of 'I felt something' which then becomes 'It must mean something is wrong.'
You can gradually moved towards:
'I noticed a sensation' ----> 'I don't automatically have to interpret it as danger'
That might involve reducing repeated symptom checking, becoming more aware of reassurance-seeking behaviours, limiting unhelpful online searches and learning ways to response differently when health worries appear.
It can also mean learning to tolerate a little more uncertainty.
How Can Solution Focused Hypnotherapy Help With Health Anxiety?
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help you understand what is happening in your brain and, importantly, start changing the patterns that keep anxiety going.
Rather than repeatedly analysing everything that could be wrong, we focus on where you want to get to and what being less controlled by health anxiety would allow you to do.
The hypnosis element provides an opportunity to practise relaxation and calm, while the solution focused work helps you build different responses to anxious thoughts and situations.
This isn't about convincing yourself that your symptoms aren't real or telling yourself to 'just think positively.' It's about helping your brain become less reactive to perceived threats, reducing the amount of attention and energy that health worries take up and to gradually build confidence in your ability to cope with uncertainty.
Looking for Help with Health Anxiety in Essex or Online?
If you've recognised yourself in this blog, you don't have to keep letting health worries, checking, Googling and reassurance-seeking take up so much of your time and energy.
I'm a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Psychotherapist based in Hatfield Peverel, Essex, and I specialise in helping people with anxiety, which includes health anxiety, overthinking, catastrophising and overwhelm, using Solution Focused Hypnotherapy.
I work with clients from Chelmsford, Maldon, Witham, Brentwood, Colchester and the surrounding areas, as well as online across the UK and worldwide.
The first step is simply arranging a free, no-obligation 20-minute telephone consultation. It's an opportunity to tell me a little about what's been happening, ask any questions you have and find out whether Solution Focused Hypnotherapy could be a good fit for you.
There's no pressure to book sessions afterwards. It's simply a chance for us to talk, understand what's going on and see whether I'm the right person to support you.
A note about your physical health
Health anxiety can cause very real physical sensations, but it is important that you do not use the information in this blog to self-diagnose or dismiss new or concerning symptoms. If you have a new, persistent, severe or worrying physical symptom, speak to your GP or another appropriate healthcare professional.
The aim of working on health anxiety isn't to stop you from looking after your health. It's to help you look after your health without fear running the show.
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