If you have health anxiety, you likely seek reassurance about your health-related concerns from doctors and/or loved ones. In other words, you repeatedly seek the simple reassuring message that there is nothing wrong with your health. What does reassurance-seeking look like?

People with health anxiety often have inaccurate beliefs and interpretations of their bodily symptoms. They misinterpret benign bodily changes or sensations as being indicative of some serious disease or illness. Research on cognition shows that people with health anxiety (compared to non-anxious control groups) are:

I have written about the intolerance of uncertainty many times. Why? Because it is such an integral part of all types of anxiety disorders and is highly associated with excessive worry- a key factor in generalized anxiety. The more you worry, the more likely it would be that you would have high levels of intolerance of uncertainty.

We all have deeply held beliefs about ourselves that we may or may not be aware of. From a cognitive therapist’s perspective, these are known as core beliefs. Core beliefs originate and develop throughout our childhood and then are continuously reinforced in adulthood. Some core beliefs are healthy and accurate and some are inaccurate.