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: