What it’s like to live with severe health anxiety

This is a guest post from Jenny, who blogs at Jenny in Neverland

As a healthy person who’s never had any serious physical health conditions, to say I was stumped when my health anxiety got so bad I ended up sobbing in the nurse’s office was an understatement. 

Growing up, the worst thing I had to deal with is a weak ankle that I had sprained 3 times and an array of ear and eye infections. Add severe hay fever into the mix and you’ve got a pretty good image of my health growing up.

And until the age of 19 (ish), my mental health was pretty spotless too. 

I started suffering from a severe anxiety disorder in the Autumn of 2011, which ended up debilitating and changing my entire life completely. But even then, health anxiety was never at the forefront of my mind.

Although I was always terrified of fainting.

But in 2019, when I found myself starting to really rebuild my life again from my almost decade long anxiety batlle, health anxiety reared its ugly head. Perhaps it was because I was finally getting my life back on track and was worried something else was going to stop it?

Who knows.

But prior to this, I’d not ever really gone overboard with health worries.

After my first cervical screening test came back as abnormal cells and HPV when I was 25, I had quite a lot of anxiety around having to go to the hospital for a colposcopy and the prospect of what they might find.

But I think that’s a pretty normal thing to feel anxious about as a 25 year-old woman.

I’d always been pretty clued up with my body and what’s normal for me too, always knowing what to look for and what to feel for and the warning signs of anything that might seem amiss. 

Starting Yoga around 5 years ago also helped me get in tune with my body more deeply too.

But then suddenly, things started to spiral.

Honestly, I can’t pin-point any particular thing that jump started my health anxiety. I can’t remember what I was worrying about or what symptom I had or what body part it concerned. 

All I know is that I started to slowly become fixated on things. 

From around January of 2019, I had started to become hyper aware of certain things on my body.

And thinking back now, that was the time where my Granddad was very ill in hospital, before he came home to palliative care before he passed away from lung cancer in August. 

That may have subconsciously had something to do with it. But I was picking things up more and more and finding myself fixating on them for longer and longer. A mark on my body, I would check every time I went to the bathroom. Or a pain I felt that I’d Google 4 times a day – even though I already knew what I was going to read. This is how it started but it gradually got worse and worse as the months went on.

And by the Summer I was getting such intense bouts of health anxiety that I couldn’t function. I was spending entire days laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling because I literally couldn’t think about anything else.I was physically hurting myself too.

Not in a self-harm type of way but because I was prodding and poking myself so much that I was bruised. I started checking my boobs an obsessive amount to the point where it hurt to wear a bra because I had bruised myself so much. I would Google and Google and Google things until I had nothing left to Google.

I would join forums that I had no place being on, to talk to people or read from people who had various conditions that I thought maybe on some tiny level I could have.

It had well and truly taken over my life because I found myself not able to do anything without thinking about whatever it was I was fixated on in the back of my mind.  Then like I said, it got so much that I would just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, unable to do anything else. The thing that makes me feel like a complete a**hole in all of this is that I was worrying incessantly about conditions that I obviously didn’t and don’t have yet there are people out there who are really and truly struggling with these things. 

It didn’t and still doesn’t sit right with me and although health anxiety (hypochondria) is a recognized mental health condition, it still makes me uncomfortable.  So on a routine trip to the nurse to discuss my contraceptive pill, I ended up mentioning my health anxiety. Which turned into me sobbing in her office and her booking me an emergency appointment to see my doctor about it.

Honestly I cannot fault my nurse and doctor for the care they provided me this day. I’m so grateful to both of them.The doctor prescribed me anxiety medication and referred me to counselling – something I didn’t think I still needed, thinking that I was past that stage of my anxiety disorder already. Yet I was very wrong. That’s why it’s so important to seek medical help from your GP or private healthcare provider; it really could be exactly what you need to make a positive difference in your life.

As it turned out, I needed anxiety medication. I had probably needed it for a very long time. And going on Citalopram (which I’m still on today) completely changed my life and gave me my life back. I no longer suffer with health anxiety. I deal with any health-related concerns in a healthy way and don’t fixate on things anymore. And I definitely don’t prod and poke to the point of causing harm! 

Health anxiety can often be a bit of a taboo condition. With the notion of hypochondria almost a laughable thing. But it’s not. It’s serious and can be life changing. And it’s much more common than you think.

If you suffer with health anxiety to the point where it’s impacting your daily life, please don’t hesitate to seek help!