Health Anxiety: When You Can't Stop Worrying That Something Is Wrong With Your Body
The sensations are real. The fear is real. And you're not making it up.
You've probably been to the doctor. Maybe more than once. Maybe you've been to the emergency room, convinced that this time something is seriously wrong. And when the tests come back normal, there's a moment of relief. But it doesn't last. Because your body is still doing something. And your mind can't let go of the possibility that everyone is missing something.
If you're exhausted by the cycle of checking, worrying, and waiting for the next sensation to trigger the next spiral, this page is for you. Not to tell you it's all in your head. It isn't. But to help you understand the pattern, and to show you that there's a way to live in your body without being afraid of it.
The health anxiety cycle
Health anxiety follows a pattern. Once you see it, you can start to recognize it in real time. But when you're inside it, it just feels like fear.
It usually starts with a sensation. A twinge. A headache. A flutter in your chest. A feeling of tightness that wasn't there yesterday. Something your body does that catches your attention.
Then comes the interpretation. Your mind jumps to the worst possibility. What if it's something serious? What if my doctor missed something? What if this is the one time the fear is actually right?
From there, the checking begins. You might Google the symptom. You might press on the spot, test your body, take your pulse, or ask someone close to you for reassurance. You might call the doctor or book another appointment.
And for a moment, it helps. The reassurance brings relief. The article says it's probably nothing. The doctor says you're fine. The tension eases, and you can breathe again.
But then another sensation appears. Or the same one comes back. And the whole cycle starts over. Sometimes within hours. Sometimes within minutes.
This loop is the core of health anxiety. It's not that you're irrational. It's that your nervous system has learned to interpret normal body sensations as threats. And the strategies you use to manage the fear (checking, searching, seeking reassurance) actually keep the cycle alive by reinforcing the idea that there was something to be afraid of in the first place.
Why Googling symptoms makes it worse
If you've ever typed a symptom into a search engine and emerged thirty minutes later convinced you have a rare disease, you already know this on some level. But it's worth understanding why it happens.
Search engines are not designed to reassure you. They're designed to return results. And the results that rank highest are often the most alarming, because those are the pages people click on. So a headache becomes a brain tumor. A muscle twitch becomes a neurological condition. A heart flutter becomes cardiac arrest.
For someone with health anxiety, searching symptoms does the opposite of what you're hoping for. You go in looking for safety. You come out with more fear. And the brief moment of reassurance you might find gets swallowed by the next link, the next article, the next possibility.
This is also how health anxiety expands. Each search introduces new symptoms to watch for. New conditions to worry about. New parts of your body to monitor. The scanning widens. The vigilance increases. And the anxiety grows, not because something is actually wrong, but because your attention has become hyper-focused on looking for what might be.
If you've noticed that the searching feels compulsive, that you can't stop even when you want to, that's the worry loop doing what it does. It disguises itself as being careful. But it's anxiety running the show.
Your nervous system has learned to interpret normal body sensations as threats. The strategies you use to manage the fear actually keep the cycle alive.
Body hypervigilance
One of the most exhausting features of health anxiety is the way it changes your relationship with your own body.
When you're not anxious, your body does hundreds of things in a day that you don't notice. A muscle twitches. Your stomach gurgles. Your heart skips. You feel a small ache and it passes. These are normal, unremarkable events.
But when health anxiety is active, your attention turns inward. You start scanning. Monitoring. Noticing every sensation, every shift, every irregularity. And the more you pay attention, the more you find. Not because there's more happening, but because you're looking harder.
This is sometimes called interoception on overdrive. Your body's internal alert system, which is designed to flag genuine problems, has become too sensitive. It's picking up signals that don't require a response and amplifying them into alarms.
The result is a kind of constant low-grade surveillance. You can't fully relax because part of you is always monitoring. You can't enjoy your body because you've come to associate its signals with danger. And the more you watch, the more your nervous system interprets the watching itself as evidence that something must be wrong.
This pattern often overlaps with panic. The physical sensations of anxiety (racing heart, chest tightness, dizziness) can become the very symptoms you're afraid of. And the fear of those sensations can trigger more of them. It's a feedback loop that can feel impossible to break on your own.
When health anxiety starts after a real scare or loss
Health anxiety doesn't always appear out of nowhere. For many people, there's a moment it began. Or at least a moment when it intensified significantly.
Sometimes it starts after a real health scare. A diagnosis. A surgery. A frightening symptom that turned out to be something minor, but the fear left a mark. Your body learned that it could betray you, and now it's watching for the next time.
Sometimes it starts after someone else's illness. A parent's cancer diagnosis. A friend's sudden health crisis. A loss that reminded you how fragile the body actually is. You might not have connected the two at the time, but the anxiety arrived in the wake of that experience and never fully left.
Grief and health anxiety are more connected than most people realize. When you've lost someone, or when illness has touched your life in a way that felt out of your control, your system can become hypervigilant about the body as a way of trying to prevent another loss. It's not irrational. It's a nervous system that learned, through painful experience, that bodies can fail. And now it's trying to stay ahead of the next failure.
Understanding this context doesn't make the anxiety disappear. But it can take some of the shame out of it. Your health anxiety didn't come from nowhere. It came from something real. And therapy can work with that.
Your symptoms are real
This needs to be said clearly. The physical sensations you feel are not imaginary. The tightness in your chest is real. The headache is real. The tingling, the fatigue, the stomach distress. All real.
Health anxiety doesn't create sensations from nothing. What it does is change how you interpret them and how much attention you give them. A normal heartbeat variation becomes a cardiac event. A tension headache becomes something sinister. A moment of dizziness becomes the beginning of the end.
The problem isn't that you're feeling things. The problem is that your system has lost the ability to let normal sensations pass without sounding the alarm.
This is an important distinction, and it's one that many people with health anxiety haven't heard before. You don't need to be told to stop worrying. You need to understand why your body and mind are stuck in a loop, and what it takes to help them find their way out.
Therapy for health anxiety isn't about convincing you that nothing is wrong. It's about helping your nervous system learn to read its own signals more accurately. To feel a sensation and let it be a sensation, not a catastrophe.
How therapy helps with health anxiety
Therapy for health anxiety works differently than you might expect. It's not about challenging your fears with logic or telling you to stop checking. Those strategies often fail because health anxiety doesn't live in the logical mind. It lives in the body and the nervous system.
In individual therapy, we start by understanding your specific cycle. What triggers the fear. What the checking behavior looks like. What happens in your body before the spiral begins. This isn't about cataloging symptoms. It's about recognizing the pattern so you can catch it earlier.
From there, we work with the body directly. This is where somatic therapy becomes essential. Rather than trying to think your way out of the fear, we practice being with body sensations without immediately interpreting them. Over time, this builds what some therapists call a wider window of tolerance, meaning your system can experience a sensation without jumping to alarm.
We also look at where the anxiety started. If health anxiety followed a loss, a scare, or a period of chronic stress, understanding the root can help the work go deeper. The anxiety often makes more sense once the context is visible.
This kind of therapy is not about suppressing your instincts. It's about helping your system become more accurate. More discerning. So that when something real does need attention, you can respond with clarity instead of panic. And when something doesn't need attention, your body can let it pass.
Somatic, relational, and trauma-informed
Leanne works with health anxiety from a somatic, relational, and trauma-informed perspective. What that means in practice is that the work doesn't stay at the level of thoughts. It goes into the body, where health anxiety actually lives.
We pay attention to what happens in your body during sessions. Not to diagnose anything, but to practice something different. To notice a sensation and stay with it for a moment rather than immediately checking, interpreting, or escaping. To learn that a body sensation can just be a body sensation.
This is quiet work. It happens gradually. And it's paced carefully, because people with health anxiety often have a nervous system that has been in overdrive for a long time. Rushing the process can make things worse. Leanne works at the speed your system can handle, not faster.
Leanne offers both in-person sessions in Kitchener-Waterloo and virtual therapy across Ontario.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is completely normal to have questions before reaching out.
Yes. Anxiety itself produces physical symptoms. Muscle tension, headaches, chest tightness, stomach distress, dizziness, and fatigue are all common. These are real sensations caused by your nervous system's stress response. And they can become the very symptoms you then fear, which keeps the cycle going.
This is one of the hardest parts of health anxiety. And it's a valid concern. Therapy for health anxiety doesn't mean ignoring your body. It means building the capacity to respond to body signals with clarity rather than panic. If you have medical concerns, you should always follow up with your doctor. Therapy works alongside medical care, not instead of it.
Yes. This is very common. A real medical event can sensitize the nervous system and create a pattern of hypervigilance that persists long after the event is over. Therapy can help your system process that experience and learn to settle again.
No. Leanne's approach takes your physical experience seriously. The goal is never to dismiss what you're feeling. It's to help you understand the relationship between anxiety and body sensations so that you can live in your body with less fear and more trust.
Yes. Virtual therapy is available across Ontario. Many people find online sessions effective for this kind of reflective, body-aware work. In-person sessions are also available in Kitchener-Waterloo.
You deserve to live in your body without being afraid of it
Health anxiety steals something that most people take for granted. The ability to feel a sensation and let it pass. The ability to trust that your body is doing what it's supposed to do. The ability to be present without scanning for the next sign that something is wrong.
You've been carrying this quietly, and it's taken more from you than most people realize. The time spent searching. The appointments made just in case. The worry that sits with you even when everything comes back clear.
That pattern can change. Not by forcing yourself to stop worrying, but by helping your system learn a different way to respond. Therapy is a place where that work can begin.
If you're ready, you can book a free consultation. It's a conversation. No diagnosis. No judgment. Just space to talk about what you've been going through.