Tag: health anxiety relief

How To Deal With Health Anxiety and Hypochondria

This video is long, but it’s packed full of information. Here is a breakdown. I answer the following questions: What does hypochondria/health anxiety look like? What’s the difference between hypochondria and generalized anxiety disorder? How do you get hypochondria? Why don’t pills work for hypochondria? What does CBT for hypochondria-health anxiety look like? What is a self-help version of CBT for hypochondria?With hypochondriasis, you misinterpret body sensations and assume you have a serious disease, even after you’ve been told you don’t. You may believe that the doctor missed something. You may even believe the anxiety you have will turn into something more serious like dying in your sleep or having a heart attack.In 2013, the new edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual 5th edition changed the name from hypochondriasis to somatic symptom disorder. Somatic means body. Therefore, it’s a disorder of being over focused on body symptoms and having an illness. People who have this problem, know they have it because they are in a lot of distress.Self-talk script to use when you are triggered by a body sensation. I have been checked out by my doctor, my new body symptoms does not mean I really have a medical illness. I have anxiety and this is what I tend to think,. Anxiety makes me believe I have something I don’t. I am not more of a medical expert than the people who have seen and examined lots of sick people. I don’t know what sick people look like, I only know what I look like. I don’t have a point of comparison to know what the illness I’m concerned about really looks like. The internet will not give me a complete picture of what it really looks like to have [fill in the blank with the illness you’re worried about.Disclaimer: All of the information on this channel is for educational purposes and not intended to be specific/personal medical advice from me to you. Watching the videos or getting answers to comments/question, does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. If you have your own doctor, perhaps these videos can help prepare you for your discussion with your doctor.I upload every Wednesday at 9am, and sometimes have extra videos in between. Subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss a video https://goo.gl/DFfT33

Two Tips for Health Anxiety

The clinical term for health anxiety used to be hypochondriasis, but now it’s been split into two disorders, somatic symptom disorder and illness anxiety disorder.With health anxiety you are oversensitive to body sensations and fear you have a serious illness. The fear of having that illness overwhelms you and leads to you engaging in behaviors that keep the anxiety going. Many people realize their fears are irrational to some degree, but it’s like you can’t break out of the cycle of fear about it.The key to getting past the health anxiety is being able to focus on the problems as being anxiety out of control rather than on getting proof or reassurance that you don’t have an illness. That reassurance is always short-lived. It’s like taking short cuts to avoid work. You may feel better in the short-term when you hear you don’t have the illness, but your distress eventually comes back because the real problem is your anxiety, not whether or not you have an illness.Some researchers out of Sweden did a clinical trial testing CBT delivered by the internet. The results were that the internet therapy was equally effective as therapy delivered by face to face with a therapist. With the internet therapy, the participants worked with a therapist through brief email communications. But the bulk of the work was done by doing exercises.Two strategies that are included in the CBT program are1. Practice mindfulness for 10 minutes a day. 2. Practice response prevention Two sources of mindfulness meditations are the UCLA Mindfulness podcast and my website were you can download a Body Scan meditation here http://markspsychiatry.com/two-tips-for-health-anxietyWith response prevention, you want to restrict how much you engage in the behavior that reinforce your anxiety. So an example may be that you will only check your pulse three times a day instead of the usual 20. Or you when you start to feel worried, you will wait at least 1 hour before you talk to your partner about your concerns. By waiting, you may find that you don’t have as strong of a need to talk to them.Practice this each day. You can set aside a certain time of day to review your list of behaviors and track your progress. If you’ve spent the day holding back on your behaviors, you may be tense. And this may be when you do a mindfulness exercise.Other parts of the therapy involved gradually exposing yourself to anxiety provoking situations while you resist engaging in your usual behaviors. This is really where you make the progress in reducing your anxiety and breaking the connection between physical sensations and anxiety. The exercises expose you to actual situations as well as imagined situations to purposely trigger your anxiety while you suppress your response.Through these gradual exposure’s you become desensitized to the trigger. We call it habituation. The exposure exercises are best done under the supervision of the therapist but even with this Internet model the therapist intervention is minimal compared to what would be required if you were seeing a therapist in person for a full psychotherapy session. So it’s good to know that the cognitive behavior therapy can be modified to be a hybrid of self-help with some therapist intervention.Reference Axelsson E, Andersson E, Ljótsson B, Björkander D, Hedman-Lagerlöf M, Hedman-Lagerlöf E. Effect of Internet vs Face-to-Face Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Health Anxiety: A Randomized Noninferiority Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online May 13, 2020.Want to know more about mental health and self-improvement? On this channel I discuss topics such as bipolar disorder, major depression, anxiety disorders, attention deficit disorder (ADHD), relationships and personal development/self-improvement. I upload weekly. If you don’t want to miss a video, click here to subscribe. https://goo.gl/DFfT33Disclaimer: All of the information on this channel is for educational purposes and not intended to be specific/personal medical advice from me to you. Watching the videos or getting answers to comments/question, does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. If you have your own doctor, perhaps these videos can help prepare you for your discussion with your doctor.