Health Anxiety Reassurance Seeking

Excessive reassurance seeking ers is commonly reported in patients who have ocd or health anxiety.

Health anxiety reassurance seeking. I might constantly seek the opinions of my doctors on the same symptoms ask family members the same questions even though i know they can t possibly have the answers or repeatedly look up health information on the internet. As a result the person with health anxiety often engages in checking the body for symptoms. Likely you ask anxiety is relieved briefly and then you ask again.

It has been conceptualised as a type of compulsive checking behaviour but could also be seen as being a supportive maneuver. If you suffer with anxiety there is a good chance you regularly seek some form of reassurance. Once symptoms are perceived the cardinal feature of health anxiety is reassurance seeking.

Excessive reassurance seeking in health anxiety excessive reassurance seeking ers as the experts call it is the constant need to ask someone again and again whether everything is okay. If you are asking your spouse 30 times a day if you seem tired or if a certain symptom is particularly noticeable it is not effectively reducing your anxiety. A state of high alert and chronic reassurance seeking are a couple of the symptoms of health anxiety and also of a realm of other mental health issues.

Reassurance helps to ease. Generally this is done in an effort to ease health anxieties but instead these behaviours can actually fuel the problem. Health anxiety sufferers consistently seek the validation of their good health when symptoms arise and honestly you can t really blame them.

Reassurance seeking and health anxiety are extremely common in sensitized sufferers today s health anxiety podcast show episode is all about the common habit of reassurance seeking. In module 3 we identified that people with health anxiety will often engage in excessive checking and reassurance seeking behaviours. Their motivation for doing this is to decrease their anxiety to feel more certain that they are healthy that they are not in danger and to decrease their worrying.

The person might first engage in excessive research about the symptom to determine what type of illness the symptoms could be indicative of. Different forms of excessive reassurance seeking safety behaviours are explored along with reasons why these unhelpful responses occur across a range of mental health disorders. We ve all done this from time to time and the reasons are sound enough.