Online therapy for health anxiety

Where therapy helps

When the worry takes up more space than the symptom

Health anxiety is a particular kind of difficult. The fear is real, and the things that drive it are usually real too: a frightening news story, a sensation in your body, a friend’s diagnosis, a procedure that didn’t go to plan. Concern about your health is sensible. Health anxiety is what happens when that concern stops dialling down once the immediate trigger has passed.

The pattern often looks something like this. A symptom or sensation gets your attention. You check it, look it up, pay closer attention to it, ask someone for reassurance, book an appointment. Some relief comes, and then it fades. The next sensation arrives, and the cycle starts again. Over time this can occupy hours of your day, narrow what you can think about, strain relationships with people you ask for reassurance, and make doctor’s appointments feel like the only things holding the worry in check.

For some people there’s no underlying condition, and the work is about the anxiety itself. For others the anxiety sits on top of something real: a diagnosis, a chronic illness, a previous medical event. Both versions are taken seriously here, and the work fits accordingly.

Therapy can’t take the underlying medical risks away, and it doesn’t replace the care you have in place with your GP or specialist. What it can do is reduce how much room the worry takes up so you can be more present in the parts of life it has been crowding out.

My approach

How I work with health anxiety

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is the main approach I use for health anxiety. The work helps you build psychological flexibility: practical skills for living well alongside uncertainty about your body, which is something even thorough medical care can’t fully resolve. Rather than trying to argue your worries down, ACT helps you change the relationship you have with them, so they take up less of your attention and dictate fewer of your decisions.

A lot of the work focuses on the cycles that keep the anxiety in place: the checking, the reassurance-seeking, the way attention magnifies sensations. The aim is to loosen those patterns gradually, at a pace that fits, so they take up less room in your day.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is occasionally relevant where the health anxiety has roots in a specific medical experience: a frightening procedure, a missed diagnosis, a hospital admission that didn’t go well. Where that’s the case, EMDR can be a focused piece of work alongside the wider therapy.

CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) shapes how I think about evidence-based practice. My BABCP accreditation grounds the wider approach in proven traditions, even as I draw on what’s most helpful for the person in front of me.

The blend depends on what you’re carrying. Most people I see for health anxiety start with ACT, and we draw on other tools as we go if they help.

Common patterns

What health anxiety can look like

If your experience isn’t listed, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fit. The free consultation is the right place to check.

In sessions

What we’ll actually work on

Therapy for health anxiety isn’t generic. The work focuses on the specific things the anxiety has been doing to your daily life, and on building the skills that interrupt the cycle keeping it in place. The work usually covers some combination of these:

• The worry-checking cycle. Most health anxiety runs on a loop of checking, reassurance, brief relief, and renewed worry. Mapping your version of this loop is often the first move, and reducing the checking is one of the most effective things therapy does.
• The relationship with uncertainty. No-one can give you a permanent guarantee that your body is fine, and most reassurance-seeking is a search for something that doesn’t exist. Therapy helps you live well alongside that fact, rather than spending your days trying to outrun it.
• What attention does to sensations. All bodies make small signals all the time, and the more closely you watch any one of them, the bigger it gets and the more meaning it acquires. Some of the work here is practical: training where your attention goes and what it allows to pass.
• Working well with healthcare. For some people the work involves reducing how often they see doctors. For others it involves overcoming avoidance and being seen more. We figure out which version fits, together.
• Mood, sleep, and energy. Health anxiety disrupts all of these. We work the loop: better sleep helps the anxiety, lower anxiety helps the sleep.
• Identity and meaning. When health anxiety has been part of life for years, it can take up so much space that other things have receded. Some of the wider work is making room for those things again.

Free tool

Make a flare plan on a good day, for use on a bad one

Health anxiety often flares in bursts of checking, googling and bracing for the worst. This free 10-minute exercise helps you decide, on a steadier day, what actually helps you through a flare and which habits tend to make it longer, so you have a plan to reach for instead of the search bar.

Make my flare plan →

Read more

Articles I’ve written about health anxiety

• Health anxiety & chronic illness: why standard advice backfires

  Why generic health anxiety advice misfires when there’s a real condition underneath, and what helps instead.

• What to do while waiting for test results: a guide

  A practical guide to the limbo between an urgent referral and the answers you’re waiting for.

• The globus sensation: why your throat feels stuck

  A worked example of how attention and anxiety can amplify a real bodily sensation, and what to do about it.

See all articles →