Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a Psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
Today, I'm talking about some
solutions for health anxiety.
I've previously talked about
health anxiety in this video.
If you didn't see it,
watch it after this one.
The clinical term for it
used to be hypochondriasis,
but it's now been split
into two disorders,
somatic symptom disorder,
and illness anxiety disorder.
I am still going to
call it health anxiety,
because I think it's a
more descriptive term.
With health anxiety,
you're over sensitive to
body sensations and fear
that you have a serious illness.
The fear of having that
illness overwhelms you
and leads you to engaging in behaviors
that keep the anxiety going.
Many people realize that
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 to be able to focus on
the problem as being anxiety
out of control,
rather than getting proof or reassurance
that you don't have an illness.
That reassurance is always short-lived.
It's like taking shortcuts to avoid work.
You may feel better in the short-term
when you hear that 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.
Now, to be clear,
you shouldn't always
ignore physical symptoms.
Sometimes physical symptoms
need to be evaluated
to make sure that you don't have something
other than anxiety.
But with health anxiety,
you've been tested several
times for certain illnesses,
and you've been told
that you don't have it,
but as soon as you
experience a physical symptom
that you think is the illness,
you doubt what you've been told
and continue to worry
that you have the disease.
So the road to helping you
focus more on your anxiety
is cognitive behavior therapy.
Now here's some good news.
Some researchers out of Sweden
did a clinical trial
testing, CBT delivered by the Internet.
And the results were
that the Internet therapy
was equally as effective as
therapy delivered 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.
This Internet-based program
isn't available yet,
but this is promising because
this could make the therapy
much more accessible to people.
So I wanna share with you
some of the techniques
that they use to help,
and some of these may be helpful now
as a self-help approach.
One thing that they did
was to practice mindfulness
for 10 minutes a day.
Mindfulness meditation helps
you experience the sensations
in your body and sit with the emotions,
without trying to suppress
them or escape them.
The more you get comfortable
with your emotions
and accept them without judgment,
the less power they have over you.
The University of California, Los Angeles,
has a mindfulness podcast
that has six years of meditations
that you can listen to.
I have a body scan meditation
that you can download on my website.
So you have plenty of
resources to get you started
on guided meditations.
A second strategy was to
practice response prevention.
This means you resist doing the things
that reinforce your anxiety.
These generally fall
under four categories:
Seeking information
like searching the web,
avoiding things that you believe
will trigger your anxiety,
getting reassurance from others
like family members or doctors,
and scanning your body for symptoms.
Those are the broad categories.
You wanna write down your behaviors
that fit into these four categories.
And also take note of how
often you do these things.
Next, you wanna restrict
how much you engage in these behaviors.
So an example may be that you
will only check your pulse
three times a day instead of the usual 20,
or when you start to feel worried,
you'll wait at least an 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 the day
to review your list of behaviors
and track your progress.
If you spent the day holding
back on your behaviors,
you may be tense,
and this may be a good time to
do your mindfulness exercise.
Other parts of the therapy involved
gradually exposing yourself to
anxiety provoking situations
while you resist engaging
in your usual behaviors.
And 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 exposures,
you become desensitized to the trigger.
We call it habituation.
The exposure exercises are best done
under the supervision of a 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.
I don't know when the program
will become available,
but just seeing that
it's just as effective
as traditional therapy,
is the first step toward
gaining acceptance
in clinical practice.
In the meantime,
try using daily mindfulness
and changing how you
respond to your triggers.
That's a very good first step.
I hope this was helpful for you.
See you next time.
