Health anxiety or Hypochondria is a disorder wherein a person constantly has morbid thoughts about some major illness affecting him or her. In other words, they have recurring thoughts (often coupled with a bodily sensation) that they may be inflicted by a disease like cancer, HIV, dementia, or a heart condition.

Even if they get a green signal from the doctor that everything is right regarding their health, the worrying doesn’t stop. It is not just their health problems that they constantly worry about, the fear or worry can also be about their children’s, partners’, or parents’ health.

To understand what health anxiety is and how it affects us, we have to understand the thought processes behind it.

Health anxiety conditions are generally unreported, but it is believed that almost 24 percent of people do have health anxiety. Many people keep health anxiety-related thoughts to themselves and do not really tell anyone, for fear of being judged, coached, or rebuked.

Health anxiety differs from a typical concern you may have about your health. It is natural to feel anxious about the results of an MRI scan if you’ve had a severe health condition in the past. It is natural to be concerned that a specific body ache is a sign of a serious condition. But those fears are different from health anxiety.

Within the challenges mentioned above, the persons fears may be temporarily alleviated once he or she sees the test reports as normal or when the doctor reasons with them and lets them know that there is nothing to worried about. However, in the case of a health anxiety victim, even after getting repeated and logical assurances from the doctor, he or she constantly thinks that there is something still wrong with their body.

The trust that is gathered during the moments of a negative diagnosis is fleeting, which begs the question of whether the sufferer is completely reliant on authority figures to tell them the way things really are.

People with health anxiety tend to misconstrue seemingly harmless physical symptoms and relate them to something serious. For instance, if someone has a plain headache, he or she may link it to a brain tumor, even after checking out that he doesn’t have symptoms like loss of balance and seizure. Sometimes, they may think that they have a health condition even though there is no related cause. For example, you order an HIV test often, even though you’ve stayed away from unprotected casual sex or other factors that cause HIV in the first place.

Yes, health anxiety can lead to conditions like an increase in heart rate, headache, muscle pain, dizziness etc. This can connect to panic disorder as well.

Where a health anxiety sufferers goes wrong is within the interpretations of what their bodies are doing, along with connecting other peoples stories to their own life experience. Faith in the future goes hand in hand with allowing the body to heal itself as time goes on if in fact the anxiety symptom has gotten checked out recently. A lack of faith connects to a feeling that something will go wrong very soon and that an answer by a person of authority must be given right now.

That is, until you become the authority in your own life and no longer rely on others for answers.

Living in a state of fight or flight can affect our perceptions quite negatively and take us down a path of constant fear. Soon, a person may feel the need to suppress everything from their ideas, to the bodily screams, and even creativity. This suppression is due to a fear of stepping out and into uncertainty, health anxiety sufferers don’t do well with uncertainty.