Helping Health Anxiety

Helping Health Anxiety

This course is based on strategies from cognitive behavioural therapy which are known to be helpful for people struggling with health anxiety. You can find information about how to shift your focus of attention from your physical sensations, how to re-evaluate your thoughts regarding health, and how to manage checking and reassurance-seeking behaviours.

Module 1: Understanding Health Anxiety

This module provides an overview of what health anxiety is, how it can be a problem, and what kind of impact it can have on a person’s life. 

Module 2: How Health Anxiety Develops

This module explores, and provides a model of, how health anxiety may develop.

Module 3: What Keeps Health Anxiety Going?

This module explores, and provides a model, of how health anxiety might be triggered and then maintained.

Module 4: Reducing Your Focus on Health Symptoms and Worries

This module explores some attention training exercises aimed at reducing the amount of time you spend focussed on health symptoms and worries.

Module 5: Re-evaluating Unhelpful Health Related Thinking

This module explores how your thoughts can influence your feelings, physiological state, and behaviours. This module then discusses ways to evaluate and overcome unhelpful health related thinking.

Module 6: Reducing Checking and Reassurance Seeking

This module explores the different ways people check and seek reassurance regarding their health concerns, discusses the difference between helpful and unhelpful checking and reassurance seeking, and introduces strategies to reduce or eliminate these behaviours.

Module 7: Challenging Avoidance and Safety Behaviours

This module explores how avoidance and safety behaviours can keep health anxiety going, and introduces a strategy to gradually reduce and overcome these behaviours.

Module 8: Adjusting Health Rules and Assumptions

In this module we will focus on challenging the unhelpful rules and assumptions that can keep you caught in the vicious cycle of health anxiety.

Module 9: Healthy Living and Self-Management Planning

This final module brings all the concepts of this information package together, presents a new model for healthy living, and includes a self-management plan to help you to stay on track in the future.