PDF The Hypochondria Cure: A Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Health Anxiety

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In 'The Hypochondria Cure', Jennifer Levine outlines the reasons behind health anxiety - what the root causes of it, and why do we continually seek out the worst case scenarios when diagnosing ourselves? You will also learn valuable tips on combating health anxiety and hypochondria.
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Guided Self Help may also be of benefit.

Depending on your circumstances, you may benefit from one or a combination of these treatments. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy CBT is one of the most effective types of treatment for health anxiety. Generally, CBT helps you to identify unhelpful and unrealistic beliefs and behavioural patterns. You and your therapist work together to change your behaviour and replace unhelpful beliefs with more realistic and balanced ones.

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CBT teaches you new skills and helps you understand how to react more positively to situations that would usually cause you anxiety. Some people find that reading about health anxiety can help. These books can help you understand more about your psychological problems and learn ways of overcoming them by changing your thinking and behaviour.

How you can stop worrying about your health and enjoy life. Health anxiety can be very successfully treated with cognitive behavioural therapy — the approach taken in this self-help guide. Could we simply be paying the price for a lack of proper problem solving skills, and childhood trauma?

Hypochondria

Seems so. Rarely, does health anxiety go away on its own or overnight. As we put the pieces of your health anxiety disorder together we can better understand the conscious and unconscious patterns you run that make you see yourself, your symptoms of anxiety, and the outside world the way you do. Your current mental health status and health anxiety could very well have manifested through generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety or any other disorder.

However, there are also some important differences. In particular, people with hypochondriasis show more fears of bodily sensations and less awareness that their fears are senseless compared with people with OCD.

In my mind, hypochondriasis is a form of OCD. Understanding hypochondriasis as I have described above, we can see that effective treatment requires that a person a corrects their threatening interpretations of certain body sensations and b eliminate behaviors such as compulsive checking and reassurance-seeking. Information from this exam should be reviewed one time only and accepted as evidence of good health. Patients are provided with non-threatening explanations for the bodily sensations they frequently misinterpret as threatening symptoms of underlying diseases.

Of course, this is not the same as providing reassurance. The patient is required to use this knowledge for him or herself, rather than asking the doctor over and over for the same information. It is a form of guided discovery wherein the therapist helps the patient explore the evidence for and against the threatening misinterpretation.

For hypochondriasis, exposure involves gradually confronting the situations and bodily sensations that that person avoids because of the fear of illness. During exposure, patients also learn to tolerate uncertainty about whether or not a sensation is really a symptom.

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Even though at first, people become anxious when they do exposure practice, the distress is temporary—it subsides by a process called habituation. As a result of habituation, the person learns that they do not need to fear these situations and sensations because their distress does not go on forever.

Response prevention is used in tandem with exposure. It involves resisting the urge to seek information or reassurance about health and illness. In other words, once exposed to the feared sensations, the person is taught to use healthy coping strategies such as examining the evidence rather than calling doctors or running to the web.

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Although research is helping us to understand and treat hypochondriasis more effectively, the main obstacle to successful treatment is that many patients are reluctant to view their problems as anything other than physical. Our experience, though, is that helping patients appreciate the role that their thoughts and behaviors play in generating health anxiety allows them to engage in treatment and reduce their symptoms. Recommended reading: Asmundson, G.

Overcome health anxiety

New York: Guilford Press. Jonathan S.