I have met many patients with self- or officially diagnosed health anxiety. And it got me thinking I, and many others, probably have an element of this too.
Usually, there’s an underlying reason for it. A bad experience with healthcare, an ill family member, a late diagnosis or reading about horror stories online.
All of these things could be extrapolated to many other types of experiences in life. A car accident could make someone (understandably) very anxious about driving, or a nasty comment about your looks can make you very self-conscious.
As Inside Out 2 showed very well, anxiety is a normal human emotion that we experience from time to time. When it starts to impact your everyday life and you feel you can no longer function as you once did, it starts to become a medical disorder and something that likely requires professional help.
My own health anxiety originated from an incidental finding of aortic regurgitation (a leaky heart valve), which can happen to anyone really. It did trigger endless health and wellness research for me which led me to learn a lot of things about health, but also resulted in a lot of anxiety. I started waking up and not listening to how my body was feeling, but what my Whoop Score said. My health tracker became my boss that I was scared to disappoint. And that’s not the way it should be at all. It’s not healthy.
There’s a fine balance with these things, and I find once people have health anxiety, or any medical diagnosis, it becomes the boss of them too. They start blaming everything on it, rather than listening to how they feel, how their body feels, how their mind feels.
It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with my health, my sense of control over it, and controlling my thoughts around it to not let my health or other anxieties be the boss of me. We do have the power to be the boss over them. I like reminding people of that whenever I meet them.
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