January 16, 2024 • 29 mins
In today's episode we are going to discuss the psychology behind our health anxiety, something we don't speak about enough in our 20s. Health anxiety leaves us feeling incredibly hypervigilant to symptoms or feelings in our body that could indicate a life threatening illness or impending death, even if they are just a projection or derived from stress. This comes from our need to feel in control of our bodies and a lot of primal, evolutionary origins. It can also leave us struggling with feeling connected with ourselves, unable to live out our daily lives or constantly anxious. We discuss all of this and more, as well as my 5 top tips for managing our health anxiety. Listen now!
Follow us on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast
Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg
For business enquiries: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we break
down the Psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to
talk about a topic that I don't think is spoken
about nearly enough, particularly amongst those in our twenties or
(00:48):
really at any age, despite it being so much more
common than I think we recognize, and that is health anxiety,
the fear or preoccupation with the belief that we are
currently or our risk of developing a serious illness, that
our death or some kind of serious harm is either
inevitable or currently occurring somewhere in our bodies, even if
(01:13):
we don't have symptoms. We misinterpret normal bodily sensations as dangerous,
and it's that very fear that we may secretly have
a condition like cancer, or that we're having a heart
attack or something else that can actually produce feelings that
are similar to those conditions that we expect that we
have because it activates our anxiety and a fear response
(01:37):
such that we no longer really feel in touch with
our bodies. This cycle can mean that we need constant
reassurance from doctors. We're always scheduling appointments, searching for answers
on the internet, and we are constantly coming up with
this new explanation for a sensation or feeling that is
either not that serious or may need you know, may
(02:00):
not even exist. The thing is, though, is that it's
our anxiety that triggers our imagination to go to the
worst possible outcome, and that is where we land, and
that is where we stay. On a personal note, health
anxiety is something I've dealt with on and off for
the greater part of my twenties, I would say even
(02:20):
my teen years as well before that, and I want
to really speak about that experience today for others who
might be able to relate, but also just kind of
sharing what I've learned and how I have come to
manage the times real chronic anxiety that something in my
body is not quite right, but also where this unique
(02:40):
type of anxiety or set of fears comes from whether
it is hypervigilant parents, catastrophic thinking, our intolerance for uncertainty,
fear mongering. There is so much to be said for
the origins of this kind of unique type of anxiety.
There is actually a term for the fact that a
lot of us believe that we have certain conditions because
(03:02):
of our exposure to the Internet. It's called cyberchondria, where
we repeatedly google our symptoms and look for examples that
kind of justify our own explanations to ourselves. Honestly, I
think talking about this in the aftermath of a global
pandemic is also so important because I think COVID and
(03:23):
the changes that brought to the world around us have
been such a huge catalyst for so many people when
it comes to health fears and health worries. I think
when we are in our twenties, we're expected to feel
very invincible because we are young. This is normally when
we are our healthiest, our fittest, our immune system is strong.
(03:44):
We think we're going to live forever. But we also
have this very instinctual urge to want to stay alive
for as long as possible, and that means worrying about
our health, especially if you're an especially anxious person. Our
minds like to find anything in our environment, external or internal,
to be hyper vigilant towards, so that we are aware
(04:06):
of any threats. I remember vividly when the embola virus
was making like international headlines back in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
and I was so scared. I was terrified that my
entire family was going to be infected with this rare
disease and die. I would google survival rates and symptoms.
(04:29):
I'm pretty sure I ordered one of those like protective
suits on Amazon using my mum's credit card. Anytime I
had a cough, the smallest pain, even the hiccups, I
would go into a state of panic. And I didn't
really have a term for what that feeling was. The
constant googling, the anxiety, the endless doctor's appointments for symptoms
(04:50):
that would disappear as soon as they told me I
was fine. But it was when I was in my
twenties that someone finally said to me, like, hey, look,
it it's unlikely that you are suffering from every rare
disease on the planet and that you're still alive. I
think the underlying condition here is really health anxiety. This
(05:11):
was after I had been experiencing headaches for a few
weeks and I had my friend Kate, God bless her,
an actual angel, but she drove me to get an
emergency MRI because I was convinced, convinced to the point
of thinking I would need to write my will that
I had a serious brain clot or terminal cancer. Spoiler alert,
(05:32):
it was neither. I had just become so hyper vigilant
towards any abnormalities and how I was feeling so alert
to my body, so consumed with my worry and my
stress that I was experiencing these phantom symptoms, or I
was applying unreasonable, irrational explanations to things that are just
normal to experience as a human being that is going
(05:53):
through life. That explanation actually brought me a lot of peace,
even if at times I still feel a lot of
my anxiety spike. I understand it now, I can apply
logic and understanding to my need to go searching for answers.
And you know what it really all comes down to.
It feels terrible to not be in control of your body.
(06:16):
It is scary to feel like you are out of touch,
which with what's going on inside of you, and to
realize and recognize your vulnerability as a human. That is
the origin of the fear. Understanding that although illness and
sickness is a part of life, we want to be
prepared for whatever is possible. We want to be able
(06:39):
to avoid anything that might happen, so we experience a
lot of false alarms. I would always rationalize it that
it was better safe than sorry, but I think I
actually wasn't being safe. I was just creating more stress
for myself. So what are some of the roots, the
root causes of our health anxiety, because I think being
aware of those first allows us to actually gain the
(07:01):
control that we feel or sense that we lack. To
understand health anxiety, we firstly have to really consider our
evolutionary history and the fact that we all are, at
the end of the day, just animals, just another species
whose primary goal is survival. Anxiety is a protective mechanism
(07:23):
that serves that purpose, and it allows us to scan
the body for an illness that we might need to
protect ourselves from. Our ancestors really relied on that keen
sense of hypervigilance to survive in a hostile environment, one
that they couldn't always predict, So those of us who
are more cautious about potential threats were more likely to survive,
(07:46):
more likely to pass in our genes. Normally, we would
interpret that as being threats in our environment, like a
massive tiger coming to eat us or predators, and in
many ways that is true. That is what ancient hypervigilance
was normally directed towards outside threats. But as we've evolved
as a species, this hypervigilance has now turned inward. We
(08:10):
are now on hilt for science of illness because that
illness is just as dangerous as something external or in
our environment, and we now have the knowledge to treat
and eliminate the threat. Therefore, if we catch something early enough,
maybe we'll be okay. So we start looking for signs
that what we are experiencing is a larger problem to
get that diagnostic care. Another part of our programming or
(08:34):
I guess, our basic instincts as humans that has made
us more aware of potential sickness or conditions is the
innate and automatic prioritization of negative information. This is known
as a negativity bias. So basically, we are more likely
to attend to learn from focus on negative information more
(08:57):
than positive information, and that bias, that tendency has been
with us since infancy. It's something that is so important
to our survival that even as children we do it
because you have to know that if you have a
beautiful rainbow on one side and a terrible storm on
the other, prioritizing the storm, thinking about how you're going
(09:18):
to escape or protect yourself was more likely to mean
that you would survive. So we focus on that negative
information when we think about that. In the context of
health anxiety, this means that we are hardwired to excessively
focus on the worst possible outcome. We magnify and amplify
the perceived threat or small minor symptoms into a catastrophic illness.
(09:42):
That small pain on your side, that's a heart attack,
that headache, it's a brain tumor. And that catastrophic thinking
has obviously emerged to help us, but in a modern
context it actually does more harm than good because we
can't help but think of an explanation first before there
is actually a reason to think that, so it reinforces
(10:05):
our cycle of anxiety. The next thing we need to
appreciate is that when we are struggling with our health anxiety.
What we really are struggling with at the end of
the day is our intolerance of uncertainty. A lot of this,
if you haven't realized, is once again coming down to
our innate human nature and our fear of the unknown.
(10:26):
We don't like it as humans when we don't know
what's going to happen next, when we don't feel a
sense of control, when we are just uncertain, that leaves
room for danger. Uncertainty is obviously a really normal part
of life. We can never be one hundred percent sure
about what the future holds, not even fifty percent twenty
percent good and bad. However, if you already have a
(10:50):
high baseline or high levels of anxiety, you are more
likely to want to plan and prepare for everything as
a way of eliminating ambigunit or uncertainty because we are
so fearful of it. It's why we like going to
the same restaurants, where we like watching the same comfort
TV shows or movies, or only going to parties or
(11:11):
social events where we know people. It minimizes the things
that will be out of our control. However, our health
is not something we can always control and realizing that
creates further worry. We can become infected with something from
a thoughtless cough or for pure chance, some genetic mutation
that has just happened, so we overthink every small thing
(11:34):
in order to mitigate our sense of stress. At that realization,
it's where a lot of those symptoms are coming from,
the fear of uncertainty. There's a lot of reasons why
we do that, but it normally comes down to two
main sources. Firstly is our upbringing and past experiences, and
second is the Internet. We are going to discuss how
(11:57):
these two things contribute to our health anxiety, but also
how we can begin to manage these feelings in a
very healthy, sustainable, helpful way after this show of break.
When I was a child, I used to get these really,
really terrible stomach pains, like the worst pain that you
(12:19):
have ever experienced. It felt like someone was ripping out
my organs, and I would complain about this to my
parents all the time. It would come on randomly when
I was at school, when I was with my friends,
when I was playing basketball, and my parents would always
dismiss it. They'd be like, no, you're just overreacting. It
took over a year for them to realize that something
(12:41):
was actually wrong, and when we went to the doctor,
they found out that I had this really random condition,
especially for people like under the age of forty. I'm
not going to go into what it is, but basically
this condition is super super rare unless you're like over
(13:01):
and you're suffering from obesity and like high blood pressure
and a poor diet. And it's also really really painful.
And you know, my parents never could have known that
this is what was going on, because who is going
to think that their twelve year old daughter has a
condition that mostly impacts sedentary, pregnant adult women with high cholesterol.
(13:23):
That memory, though, of knowing for a while I that
something was wrong, trying to communicate that not being believed
that really stuck with me. We think that those memories,
those childhood experiences aren't important, and we think that we
don't subliminally learn from them, But those are teachable moments,
(13:44):
and our brain takes those times when we were in
pain or experiencing hurt or something damaging and holds onto
those memories really tightly because they might be useful in
the future. So I look at that experience as being
a big origin point for me, because whilst my rational
brain can see that this was really rare, this was
really out of the blue, it wasn't life threatening, it
(14:07):
was managed. All that that situation taught me was just
how little control that we have, how little we know
about what our bodies are doing. And I'm not trying
to use that example to like fearmonger. I'm just more
so using it to illustrate my point that childhood experiences
(14:28):
and moments from our upbringing play a really pivotal role
in the development of health anxiety. Individuals who maybe experienced
frequent illness when they were children or had a significant
loss in childhood, grow up associating health related issues with
deep emotional pain. These unresolved emotions can resurface in the
(14:49):
form of this health anxiety, where the fear of illness
becomes intertwined with this unresolved trauma. Further to that, some
of us have also been raised with parents or family
mene members who themselves are hypochondriacs, and they project their
fears onto us as a way of coping with their
own personal anxiety. It might have been a mother who
was always sanitizing things, taking you to the doctor, keeping
(15:12):
you home from school. These experiences imprint on us. They
stay with us. We begin to mimic it through observation
or learning, and then when we become adults who have
been raised in this way, where those behaviors we thought
kept us safe and provided a sense of false sense
of security, we begin to take those on ourselves. It
(15:35):
may also be that someone in your family has unfortunately
suffered from a really terrible disease or condition, and so
you know firsthand what that looks like and you want
to avoid it at all costs. A family member with
a condition also creates a predisposition, which may give you
(15:56):
more reason and justification for your excess of worry, because
now you feel more at risk, you feel more in danger.
It also creates what we call a frequency illusion or
a frequency bias, where we tend to notice something more
after we notice it for the first time, leading to
(16:17):
the belief that it is more common than it is.
An example is that if your family member has Parkinson's,
the more you're going to start seeing Parkinson's in the
news in the media overhearing it on the street in conversations,
leading to the belief that you should actually be more
afraid when really It's just an illusion created by where
(16:39):
your brain is deciding to direct attention. This is really
only aided by the fact that most of us belong
to the first ever generation that grew up on the Internet,
and we know that the Internet loves fear mongering. It
loves clickbait novel stories that capture our attention, that get
(17:00):
more likes, that get more views, because people are naturally
drawn to information that is more emotionally charged. So those
stories of cancer, patience and rare diseases and infections, they
become more salient, especially once again in the minds of
anxious people who are already on high alert for this information.
(17:21):
The Internet is very quick to give you the worst
possible answer to any question that you ask it. I
think this is a common experience to be like googling
your minors stomach pains at two am, and the first
response is that you have some uncurable infection and you'll
be like dead in three weeks. That is what we
were talking about before hypochondria. Even if we are googling
(17:44):
our symptoms in the first place as a way to
seek reassurance, suddenly you're given this like unexpected answer and
you're thinking, oh yeah, I fit the profile for all
of these things because you have this bias, right, you
want to meet this profile. You've been told the answer,
so you want to make sure that you are part
of the answer because doctor Google has told you so,
(18:07):
and you trust that information. So how do we counteract
that if we know we have this tendency, if it
is creating concern for us, meaning that we are in
that constant state of panic. What are our strategies here?
Because I think the most important thing to remember is
(18:27):
that when you have anxiety of any sort, your thoughts
are still within your control. They originate from you, Your anxieties,
your worries, they come from you. They can be controlled
by you, even if it seems hard. So there's three
main strategies here that I want to talk about. Firstly,
(18:48):
get comfortable with uncomfortable feelings. A lot of our health
anxiety comes from feeling disconnected with our bodies and experiencing
phantom symptoms which we know are actually the result of
our anxiety. These feelings make us very aware of our
bodies and also very aware of the stress response that
(19:10):
we're going through. And so if we're not comfortable with
that discomfort and cannot identify the true origin, which is
a false alarm or a fear response. We're going to
read further into that, and the next thing you know,
we're in the doctor's office. If you think about it,
a lot of the symptoms of anxiety also mimic a
lot of the symptoms of more serious illnesses, so we
(19:32):
can't tell the difference, and we're not we don't feel
safe in those feelings. A lot of these sensations we
can actually bring back into our control using methods associated
with this idea called biofeedback. So biofeedback is this idea
in psychology that we can actually train our minds to
influence what we typically see is automatic bodily functions as
(19:55):
a way to restore a sense of mental stability. There's
the things like using like breathing patterns to control heart
rate or meditation to control racing thoughts. The easiest way
to tell whether your racing heartbeat is a heart attack
or just anxiety is to stop for a second, take
(20:16):
eight really deep breaths, let your arms float, lie down flat,
continue to breathe, and I want you to think of
your anxiety as a bubble slowly flowing past you, or
like a shell in the waves that are slowly getting
swept out. Picture the most beautiful place you've ever been.
(20:38):
Focus on that anxiety floating away, moving out of your
line of sight, and start focusing on the environment that
you're imagining around you. Identify five things you can see
in that place. What are you smelling, what are you hearing,
what are you feeling? And has your heart rate dropped?
(20:59):
Is your breathing more in your control? That is a
sign that this is a symptom of anxiety, not a
real illness. I also do this thing where, when I'm
like getting those racing thoughts that we all are so
so so familiar with, I visualize all of my anxiety
resting in the palm of my hand, and I concentrate
(21:20):
all of my worries onto that area. They're just in
my hand. They're not anywhere else in my body. I
hold onto them tightly and then slowly I let them go,
but only when I'm ready to, And until that point
they stay right there in the palm of my hand.
They're not in my mind, They're not anywhere else in
my body. I can see them. I know where they're
(21:41):
going to go, and they're not going to hurt me,
and I slowly release them. That is a really important
tactic for me because it stops me from feeling like
my anxiety is this thing that has control over me,
and I actually have control of it. Yet I also
would say begin to notice when you experience it's these
phantom symptoms as a way to rationalize them and better
(22:04):
understand your triggers. Is it that you often start to
feel like you have a sickness or an illness or
a condition during periods of really high stress, after you've
had a really tough conversation with your partner, when you've
had a really busy day. Often there is an environmental catalyst,
and our health. Anxiety is really just us projecting a
(22:27):
sense of uncertainty in our lives onto uncertainty around our
health because that feels more serious and valid to worry about.
That's okay. Sometimes our mind does what it needs to
do to compartmentalize our stress, but it is about being
aware of that. Secondly, invest in your health as a
(22:48):
way to build your confidence instead of googling or instead
of searching for answers. At the end of the day,
our health is really precious. Health is wealth. It's so
important That is why we are so pritive of it
and so hyper vigilant towards things that might be going wrong.
But we have to remember that our health anxiety is
really just us unconsciously trying to do what's right by ourselves.
(23:10):
By being overly cautious, our brain just doesn't realize when
it's maybe gone too far. Flip the narrative. Instead of
looking for illness, look for ways to promote wellness. Let
me explain this a little bit more. If you feel healthy,
if you feel well, if you know that you are fit,
taking care of yourself, that entire bodily sensation is going
(23:35):
to give you peace of mind and a much deeper
sense of confidence that you are in fact totally fine.
You're okay. So instead of overthinking and googling, go for
a walk instead, prioritize exercise, eat foods that make you
feel good, Go and get your regular checkups, take your vitamins,
get eight hours of sleep, Make that your focus instead
(23:58):
of your worries. It's going to have two effects. Number one,
you're just going to feel a lot better, and your
anxiety will actually just be lessened because you're adopting these
healthy habits and Secondly, it brings that sense of control
back into your life. You feel like the control that
(24:18):
you're giving up when you worry about your health, you
are reclaiming by prioritizing your health. If that doesn't work,
you can always challenge these unhelpful thoughts. Anxiety is irrational.
Helpful thoughts are logical. What are the actual prevalence rates
of what you're worried about here? How common is it really?
(24:41):
What are your chances of surviving? How would doctors treat
you if this was to happen? Is there a more
rational explanation for your symptoms? You've got to realize that
if something was really wrong, your body is going to
tell you in ways that are very of you would
not have any doubts, and worst case scenario, you would
(25:04):
still be okay. I promise you you are going to
be okay. Our medical system is so far advanced often
we forget that. We feel like we have to do
all the work to keep ourselves safe when there are
people who have trained for years to do that for us.
Sometimes we think that our anxious thoughts are the only
things protecting us, Like if I can I can outthink
(25:25):
my anxiety, or if I overthink something enough, I'll jinx
it and it can't possibly come true. But your anxiety
is lying to you. Your nervous system has developed a
fight or flight response, and sometimes it means it misfires
our health. Anxiety is an instant of that. So my
final tip when you can't escape this spiral or your
(25:48):
thoughts are just really loud today, is to talk it
out with your friends. And I find this really helpful
for two reasons. Firstly, when you verbalize something, you often
realize how silly it sounds. And secondly, you'll be surprised
how many other people out there have similar thoughts to
you at some time or another. I remember so clearly
sitting down with my friend Kate when she was about
(26:11):
to take me to get that MRI, and just hearing
from her how she felt the same way. Obviously, I
knew how hard it was, so it wasn't like a
pleasure to hear. It wasn't like happy. But I believe
that seeing our experiences reflected back on us is one
of the most calming, reassuring things we can feel. It
makes you realize that no one, no feeling that we
(26:33):
experience is felt alone, No human experience is completely unique
or experienced. In solitude, we operate in the same way
as humans our quirks, our anxieties, our insecurities. That is
a good feeling, that is a comforting feeling. Talk about
it openly, discuss it with your friends and your family,
(26:53):
and they can kind of act as a voice of
reason in those situations when your logic is failing you.
They are kind of the rational voice that you need,
because once again, in those moments, your brain is just
looking for a source of fear. It is fear mongering.
It wants answers, it wants certainty, so it's gonna find
whatever explanation is going to bring it comfort and peace,
(27:16):
even if it's not the right one, even if it's
totally off the mark. I really do have a lot
of sympathy. I feel like, if you can't tell it,
this is part of my reality, and sometimes it's really
really hard. I've been like traveling a lot recently, and
I think that's a big trigger for me where I
get really worried that I'll get sick when I'm oversee
(27:36):
so I start becoming really hyper vigilant to like any
small thing as like a reason not to go or
as like a reason to go to the doctor. So
it's definitely been on my mind, and I want you
to know that you are not alone. Obviously, as I
was saying that about talking to friends and being reassured
by other people's experiences, I hope you can hear my
experience and realize that you are not the only one
(28:00):
who was conscious of this, who was conscious of these
worries and these anxieties. You are going to be completely fine.
You are going to be so okay. I'm really rooting
for you. I know it can be hard to feel
like you are not in control of your body because
of whatever experience in the past, scared for your future,
the future of your health and your well being. But
(28:21):
I'm right there with you, and I really get it.
So I hope this episode has been of some help.
I hope these strategies have been helpful. They personally are
amazing for me. I really do hope you enjoyed this
episode or at least got something out of it. As always,
if there is someone who needs to hear this, please
feel free to share it along to share the love,
and make sure that you leave a five star review
(28:43):
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening. I read them all,
I see them all. They make me feel so happy
and I can't believe that we have this beautiful community
of people who care about these things. So thank you
so much for coming along for the ride. If you
have an episode suggestion, you can follow me at that
Psychology podcast and send me a DM. I love hearing
(29:04):
from you, I love hearing what you're going through and
thinking about the psychology behind it. So once again, thank you,
and we will be back next week with another episode.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we break
down the Psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to
talk about a topic that I don't think is spoken
about nearly enough, particularly amongst those in our twenties or
(00:48):
really at any age, despite it being so much more
common than I think we recognize, and that is health anxiety,
the fear or preoccupation with the belief that we are
currently or our risk of developing a serious illness, that
our death or some kind of serious harm is either
inevitable or currently occurring somewhere in our bodies, even if
(01:13):
we don't have symptoms. We misinterpret normal bodily sensations as dangerous,
and it's that very fear that we may secretly have
a condition like cancer, or that we're having a heart
attack or something else that can actually produce feelings that
are similar to those conditions that we expect that we
have because it activates our anxiety and a fear response
(01:37):
such that we no longer really feel in touch with
our bodies. This cycle can mean that we need constant
reassurance from doctors. We're always scheduling appointments, searching for answers
on the internet, and we are constantly coming up with
this new explanation for a sensation or feeling that is
either not that serious or may need you know, may
(02:00):
not even exist. The thing is, though, is that it's
our anxiety that triggers our imagination to go to the
worst possible outcome, and that is where we land, and
that is where we stay. On a personal note, health
anxiety is something I've dealt with on and off for
the greater part of my twenties, I would say even
(02:20):
my teen years as well before that, and I want
to really speak about that experience today for others who
might be able to relate, but also just kind of
sharing what I've learned and how I have come to
manage the times real chronic anxiety that something in my
body is not quite right, but also where this unique
(02:40):
type of anxiety or set of fears comes from whether
it is hypervigilant parents, catastrophic thinking, our intolerance for uncertainty,
fear mongering. There is so much to be said for
the origins of this kind of unique type of anxiety.
There is actually a term for the fact that a
lot of us believe that we have certain conditions because
(03:02):
of our exposure to the Internet. It's called cyberchondria, where
we repeatedly google our symptoms and look for examples that
kind of justify our own explanations to ourselves. Honestly, I
think talking about this in the aftermath of a global
pandemic is also so important because I think COVID and
(03:23):
the changes that brought to the world around us have
been such a huge catalyst for so many people when
it comes to health fears and health worries. I think
when we are in our twenties, we're expected to feel
very invincible because we are young. This is normally when
we are our healthiest, our fittest, our immune system is strong.
(03:44):
We think we're going to live forever. But we also
have this very instinctual urge to want to stay alive
for as long as possible, and that means worrying about
our health, especially if you're an especially anxious person. Our
minds like to find anything in our environment, external or internal,
to be hyper vigilant towards, so that we are aware
(04:06):
of any threats. I remember vividly when the embola virus
was making like international headlines back in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
and I was so scared. I was terrified that my
entire family was going to be infected with this rare
disease and die. I would google survival rates and symptoms.
(04:29):
I'm pretty sure I ordered one of those like protective
suits on Amazon using my mum's credit card. Anytime I
had a cough, the smallest pain, even the hiccups, I
would go into a state of panic. And I didn't
really have a term for what that feeling was. The
constant googling, the anxiety, the endless doctor's appointments for symptoms
(04:50):
that would disappear as soon as they told me I
was fine. But it was when I was in my
twenties that someone finally said to me, like, hey, look,
it it's unlikely that you are suffering from every rare
disease on the planet and that you're still alive. I
think the underlying condition here is really health anxiety. This
(05:11):
was after I had been experiencing headaches for a few
weeks and I had my friend Kate, God bless her,
an actual angel, but she drove me to get an
emergency MRI because I was convinced, convinced to the point
of thinking I would need to write my will that
I had a serious brain clot or terminal cancer. Spoiler alert,
(05:32):
it was neither. I had just become so hyper vigilant
towards any abnormalities and how I was feeling so alert
to my body, so consumed with my worry and my
stress that I was experiencing these phantom symptoms, or I
was applying unreasonable, irrational explanations to things that are just
normal to experience as a human being that is going
(05:53):
through life. That explanation actually brought me a lot of peace,
even if at times I still feel a lot of
my anxiety spike. I understand it now, I can apply
logic and understanding to my need to go searching for answers.
And you know what it really all comes down to.
It feels terrible to not be in control of your body.
(06:16):
It is scary to feel like you are out of touch,
which with what's going on inside of you, and to
realize and recognize your vulnerability as a human. That is
the origin of the fear. Understanding that although illness and
sickness is a part of life, we want to be
prepared for whatever is possible. We want to be able
(06:39):
to avoid anything that might happen, so we experience a
lot of false alarms. I would always rationalize it that
it was better safe than sorry, but I think I
actually wasn't being safe. I was just creating more stress
for myself. So what are some of the roots, the
root causes of our health anxiety, because I think being
aware of those first allows us to actually gain the
(07:01):
control that we feel or sense that we lack. To
understand health anxiety, we firstly have to really consider our
evolutionary history and the fact that we all are, at
the end of the day, just animals, just another species
whose primary goal is survival. Anxiety is a protective mechanism
(07:23):
that serves that purpose, and it allows us to scan
the body for an illness that we might need to
protect ourselves from. Our ancestors really relied on that keen
sense of hypervigilance to survive in a hostile environment, one
that they couldn't always predict, So those of us who
are more cautious about potential threats were more likely to survive,
(07:46):
more likely to pass in our genes. Normally, we would
interpret that as being threats in our environment, like a
massive tiger coming to eat us or predators, and in
many ways that is true. That is what ancient hypervigilance
was normally directed towards outside threats. But as we've evolved
as a species, this hypervigilance has now turned inward. We
(08:10):
are now on hilt for science of illness because that
illness is just as dangerous as something external or in
our environment, and we now have the knowledge to treat
and eliminate the threat. Therefore, if we catch something early enough,
maybe we'll be okay. So we start looking for signs
that what we are experiencing is a larger problem to
get that diagnostic care. Another part of our programming or
(08:34):
I guess, our basic instincts as humans that has made
us more aware of potential sickness or conditions is the
innate and automatic prioritization of negative information. This is known
as a negativity bias. So basically, we are more likely
to attend to learn from focus on negative information more
(08:57):
than positive information, and that bias, that tendency has been
with us since infancy. It's something that is so important
to our survival that even as children we do it
because you have to know that if you have a
beautiful rainbow on one side and a terrible storm on
the other, prioritizing the storm, thinking about how you're going
(09:18):
to escape or protect yourself was more likely to mean
that you would survive. So we focus on that negative
information when we think about that. In the context of
health anxiety, this means that we are hardwired to excessively
focus on the worst possible outcome. We magnify and amplify
the perceived threat or small minor symptoms into a catastrophic illness.
(09:42):
That small pain on your side, that's a heart attack,
that headache, it's a brain tumor. And that catastrophic thinking
has obviously emerged to help us, but in a modern
context it actually does more harm than good because we
can't help but think of an explanation first before there
is actually a reason to think that, so it reinforces
(10:05):
our cycle of anxiety. The next thing we need to
appreciate is that when we are struggling with our health anxiety.
What we really are struggling with at the end of
the day is our intolerance of uncertainty. A lot of this,
if you haven't realized, is once again coming down to
our innate human nature and our fear of the unknown.
(10:26):
We don't like it as humans when we don't know
what's going to happen next, when we don't feel a
sense of control, when we are just uncertain, that leaves
room for danger. Uncertainty is obviously a really normal part
of life. We can never be one hundred percent sure
about what the future holds, not even fifty percent twenty
percent good and bad. However, if you already have a
(10:50):
high baseline or high levels of anxiety, you are more
likely to want to plan and prepare for everything as
a way of eliminating ambigunit or uncertainty because we are
so fearful of it. It's why we like going to
the same restaurants, where we like watching the same comfort
TV shows or movies, or only going to parties or
(11:11):
social events where we know people. It minimizes the things
that will be out of our control. However, our health
is not something we can always control and realizing that
creates further worry. We can become infected with something from
a thoughtless cough or for pure chance, some genetic mutation
that has just happened, so we overthink every small thing
(11:34):
in order to mitigate our sense of stress. At that realization,
it's where a lot of those symptoms are coming from,
the fear of uncertainty. There's a lot of reasons why
we do that, but it normally comes down to two
main sources. Firstly is our upbringing and past experiences, and
second is the Internet. We are going to discuss how
(11:57):
these two things contribute to our health anxiety, but also
how we can begin to manage these feelings in a
very healthy, sustainable, helpful way after this show of break.
When I was a child, I used to get these really,
really terrible stomach pains, like the worst pain that you
(12:19):
have ever experienced. It felt like someone was ripping out
my organs, and I would complain about this to my
parents all the time. It would come on randomly when
I was at school, when I was with my friends,
when I was playing basketball, and my parents would always
dismiss it. They'd be like, no, you're just overreacting. It
took over a year for them to realize that something
(12:41):
was actually wrong, and when we went to the doctor,
they found out that I had this really random condition,
especially for people like under the age of forty. I'm
not going to go into what it is, but basically
this condition is super super rare unless you're like over
(13:01):
and you're suffering from obesity and like high blood pressure
and a poor diet. And it's also really really painful.
And you know, my parents never could have known that
this is what was going on, because who is going
to think that their twelve year old daughter has a
condition that mostly impacts sedentary, pregnant adult women with high cholesterol.
(13:23):
That memory, though, of knowing for a while I that
something was wrong, trying to communicate that not being believed
that really stuck with me. We think that those memories,
those childhood experiences aren't important, and we think that we
don't subliminally learn from them, But those are teachable moments,
(13:44):
and our brain takes those times when we were in
pain or experiencing hurt or something damaging and holds onto
those memories really tightly because they might be useful in
the future. So I look at that experience as being
a big origin point for me, because whilst my rational
brain can see that this was really rare, this was
really out of the blue, it wasn't life threatening, it
(14:07):
was managed. All that that situation taught me was just
how little control that we have, how little we know
about what our bodies are doing. And I'm not trying
to use that example to like fearmonger. I'm just more
so using it to illustrate my point that childhood experiences
(14:28):
and moments from our upbringing play a really pivotal role
in the development of health anxiety. Individuals who maybe experienced
frequent illness when they were children or had a significant
loss in childhood, grow up associating health related issues with
deep emotional pain. These unresolved emotions can resurface in the
(14:49):
form of this health anxiety, where the fear of illness
becomes intertwined with this unresolved trauma. Further to that, some
of us have also been raised with parents or family
mene members who themselves are hypochondriacs, and they project their
fears onto us as a way of coping with their
own personal anxiety. It might have been a mother who
was always sanitizing things, taking you to the doctor, keeping
(15:12):
you home from school. These experiences imprint on us. They
stay with us. We begin to mimic it through observation
or learning, and then when we become adults who have
been raised in this way, where those behaviors we thought
kept us safe and provided a sense of false sense
of security, we begin to take those on ourselves. It
(15:35):
may also be that someone in your family has unfortunately
suffered from a really terrible disease or condition, and so
you know firsthand what that looks like and you want
to avoid it at all costs. A family member with
a condition also creates a predisposition, which may give you
(15:56):
more reason and justification for your excess of worry, because
now you feel more at risk, you feel more in danger.
It also creates what we call a frequency illusion or
a frequency bias, where we tend to notice something more
after we notice it for the first time, leading to
(16:17):
the belief that it is more common than it is.
An example is that if your family member has Parkinson's,
the more you're going to start seeing Parkinson's in the
news in the media overhearing it on the street in conversations,
leading to the belief that you should actually be more
afraid when really It's just an illusion created by where
(16:39):
your brain is deciding to direct attention. This is really
only aided by the fact that most of us belong
to the first ever generation that grew up on the Internet,
and we know that the Internet loves fear mongering. It
loves clickbait novel stories that capture our attention, that get
(17:00):
more likes, that get more views, because people are naturally
drawn to information that is more emotionally charged. So those
stories of cancer, patience and rare diseases and infections, they
become more salient, especially once again in the minds of
anxious people who are already on high alert for this information.
(17:21):
The Internet is very quick to give you the worst
possible answer to any question that you ask it. I
think this is a common experience to be like googling
your minors stomach pains at two am, and the first
response is that you have some uncurable infection and you'll
be like dead in three weeks. That is what we
were talking about before hypochondria. Even if we are googling
(17:44):
our symptoms in the first place as a way to
seek reassurance, suddenly you're given this like unexpected answer and
you're thinking, oh yeah, I fit the profile for all
of these things because you have this bias, right, you
want to meet this profile. You've been told the answer,
so you want to make sure that you are part
of the answer because doctor Google has told you so,
(18:07):
and you trust that information. So how do we counteract
that if we know we have this tendency, if it
is creating concern for us, meaning that we are in
that constant state of panic. What are our strategies here?
Because I think the most important thing to remember is
(18:27):
that when you have anxiety of any sort, your thoughts
are still within your control. They originate from you, Your anxieties,
your worries, they come from you. They can be controlled
by you, even if it seems hard. So there's three
main strategies here that I want to talk about. Firstly,
(18:48):
get comfortable with uncomfortable feelings. A lot of our health
anxiety comes from feeling disconnected with our bodies and experiencing
phantom symptoms which we know are actually the result of
our anxiety. These feelings make us very aware of our
bodies and also very aware of the stress response that
(19:10):
we're going through. And so if we're not comfortable with
that discomfort and cannot identify the true origin, which is
a false alarm or a fear response. We're going to
read further into that, and the next thing you know,
we're in the doctor's office. If you think about it,
a lot of the symptoms of anxiety also mimic a
lot of the symptoms of more serious illnesses, so we
(19:32):
can't tell the difference, and we're not we don't feel
safe in those feelings. A lot of these sensations we
can actually bring back into our control using methods associated
with this idea called biofeedback. So biofeedback is this idea
in psychology that we can actually train our minds to
influence what we typically see is automatic bodily functions as
(19:55):
a way to restore a sense of mental stability. There's
the things like using like breathing patterns to control heart
rate or meditation to control racing thoughts. The easiest way
to tell whether your racing heartbeat is a heart attack
or just anxiety is to stop for a second, take
(20:16):
eight really deep breaths, let your arms float, lie down flat,
continue to breathe, and I want you to think of
your anxiety as a bubble slowly flowing past you, or
like a shell in the waves that are slowly getting
swept out. Picture the most beautiful place you've ever been.
(20:38):
Focus on that anxiety floating away, moving out of your
line of sight, and start focusing on the environment that
you're imagining around you. Identify five things you can see
in that place. What are you smelling, what are you hearing,
what are you feeling? And has your heart rate dropped?
(20:59):
Is your breathing more in your control? That is a
sign that this is a symptom of anxiety, not a
real illness. I also do this thing where, when I'm
like getting those racing thoughts that we all are so
so so familiar with, I visualize all of my anxiety
resting in the palm of my hand, and I concentrate
(21:20):
all of my worries onto that area. They're just in
my hand. They're not anywhere else in my body. I
hold onto them tightly and then slowly I let them go,
but only when I'm ready to, And until that point
they stay right there in the palm of my hand.
They're not in my mind, They're not anywhere else in
my body. I can see them. I know where they're
(21:41):
going to go, and they're not going to hurt me,
and I slowly release them. That is a really important
tactic for me because it stops me from feeling like
my anxiety is this thing that has control over me,
and I actually have control of it. Yet I also
would say begin to notice when you experience it's these
phantom symptoms as a way to rationalize them and better
(22:04):
understand your triggers. Is it that you often start to
feel like you have a sickness or an illness or
a condition during periods of really high stress, after you've
had a really tough conversation with your partner, when you've
had a really busy day. Often there is an environmental catalyst,
and our health. Anxiety is really just us projecting a
(22:27):
sense of uncertainty in our lives onto uncertainty around our
health because that feels more serious and valid to worry about.
That's okay. Sometimes our mind does what it needs to
do to compartmentalize our stress, but it is about being
aware of that. Secondly, invest in your health as a
(22:48):
way to build your confidence instead of googling or instead
of searching for answers. At the end of the day,
our health is really precious. Health is wealth. It's so
important That is why we are so pritive of it
and so hyper vigilant towards things that might be going wrong.
But we have to remember that our health anxiety is
really just us unconsciously trying to do what's right by ourselves.
(23:10):
By being overly cautious, our brain just doesn't realize when
it's maybe gone too far. Flip the narrative. Instead of
looking for illness, look for ways to promote wellness. Let
me explain this a little bit more. If you feel healthy,
if you feel well, if you know that you are fit,
taking care of yourself, that entire bodily sensation is going
(23:35):
to give you peace of mind and a much deeper
sense of confidence that you are in fact totally fine.
You're okay. So instead of overthinking and googling, go for
a walk instead, prioritize exercise, eat foods that make you
feel good, Go and get your regular checkups, take your vitamins,
get eight hours of sleep, Make that your focus instead
(23:58):
of your worries. It's going to have two effects. Number one,
you're just going to feel a lot better, and your
anxiety will actually just be lessened because you're adopting these
healthy habits and Secondly, it brings that sense of control
back into your life. You feel like the control that
(24:18):
you're giving up when you worry about your health, you
are reclaiming by prioritizing your health. If that doesn't work,
you can always challenge these unhelpful thoughts. Anxiety is irrational.
Helpful thoughts are logical. What are the actual prevalence rates
of what you're worried about here? How common is it really?
(24:41):
What are your chances of surviving? How would doctors treat
you if this was to happen? Is there a more
rational explanation for your symptoms? You've got to realize that
if something was really wrong, your body is going to
tell you in ways that are very of you would
not have any doubts, and worst case scenario, you would
(25:04):
still be okay. I promise you you are going to
be okay. Our medical system is so far advanced often
we forget that. We feel like we have to do
all the work to keep ourselves safe when there are
people who have trained for years to do that for us.
Sometimes we think that our anxious thoughts are the only
things protecting us, Like if I can I can outthink
(25:25):
my anxiety, or if I overthink something enough, I'll jinx
it and it can't possibly come true. But your anxiety
is lying to you. Your nervous system has developed a
fight or flight response, and sometimes it means it misfires
our health. Anxiety is an instant of that. So my
final tip when you can't escape this spiral or your
(25:48):
thoughts are just really loud today, is to talk it
out with your friends. And I find this really helpful
for two reasons. Firstly, when you verbalize something, you often
realize how silly it sounds. And secondly, you'll be surprised
how many other people out there have similar thoughts to
you at some time or another. I remember so clearly
sitting down with my friend Kate when she was about
(26:11):
to take me to get that MRI, and just hearing
from her how she felt the same way. Obviously, I
knew how hard it was, so it wasn't like a
pleasure to hear. It wasn't like happy. But I believe
that seeing our experiences reflected back on us is one
of the most calming, reassuring things we can feel. It
makes you realize that no one, no feeling that we
(26:33):
experience is felt alone, No human experience is completely unique
or experienced. In solitude, we operate in the same way
as humans our quirks, our anxieties, our insecurities. That is
a good feeling, that is a comforting feeling. Talk about
it openly, discuss it with your friends and your family,
(26:53):
and they can kind of act as a voice of
reason in those situations when your logic is failing you.
They are kind of the rational voice that you need,
because once again, in those moments, your brain is just
looking for a source of fear. It is fear mongering.
It wants answers, it wants certainty, so it's gonna find
whatever explanation is going to bring it comfort and peace,
(27:16):
even if it's not the right one, even if it's
totally off the mark. I really do have a lot
of sympathy. I feel like, if you can't tell it,
this is part of my reality, and sometimes it's really
really hard. I've been like traveling a lot recently, and
I think that's a big trigger for me where I
get really worried that I'll get sick when I'm oversee
(27:36):
so I start becoming really hyper vigilant to like any
small thing as like a reason not to go or
as like a reason to go to the doctor. So
it's definitely been on my mind, and I want you
to know that you are not alone. Obviously, as I
was saying that about talking to friends and being reassured
by other people's experiences, I hope you can hear my
experience and realize that you are not the only one
(28:00):
who was conscious of this, who was conscious of these
worries and these anxieties. You are going to be completely fine.
You are going to be so okay. I'm really rooting
for you. I know it can be hard to feel
like you are not in control of your body because
of whatever experience in the past, scared for your future,
the future of your health and your well being. But
(28:21):
I'm right there with you, and I really get it.
So I hope this episode has been of some help.
I hope these strategies have been helpful. They personally are
amazing for me. I really do hope you enjoyed this
episode or at least got something out of it. As always,
if there is someone who needs to hear this, please
feel free to share it along to share the love,
and make sure that you leave a five star review
(28:43):
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening. I read them all,
I see them all. They make me feel so happy
and I can't believe that we have this beautiful community
of people who care about these things. So thank you
so much for coming along for the ride. If you
have an episode suggestion, you can follow me at that
Psychology podcast and send me a DM. I love hearing
(29:04):
from you, I love hearing what you're going through and
thinking about the psychology behind it. So once again, thank you,
and we will be back next week with another episode.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.