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Improve Health Anxiety with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

How to Improve Death Anxiety with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
How to Improve Death Anxiety with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Jan 04, 2024
Behind health anxiety often lies a fear of death or death anxiety. It is important to tackle this in order to improve health anxiety. The...
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Questions to Ask Yourself When Anxious about a Symptom
Questions to Ask Yourself When Anxious about a Symptom
Jan 04, 2024
With health anxiety we often engage in thinking errors when interpreting symptoms and bodily sensations. It can be helpful to use socrati...
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Recognize Your Ability to Cope with Illness
Recognize Your Ability to Cope with Illness
Jan 01, 2024
Health anxiety can lead us to have rigid views when it comes to our health. We assume that getting an illness is equivalent to serious, d...
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Posts tagged "core beliefs"

How do You Interpret Symptoms and Bodily Sensations? Learn How Not to Catastrophize.

Oct 26, 2023 Posted by: Brittney Chesworth biased information processing,  bodily sensations,  body noise,  catastrophize,  cognitive behavioral therapy,  cognitive restructuring,  core beliefs,  health anxiety,  hypochondria,  symptoms
How do You Interpret Symptoms and Bodily Sensations? Learn How Not to Catastrophize.

Health anxiety leads us to assume all or most symptoms or bodily sensations are indicative of a serious disease. However, our bodies are "noisy." Learn about the common sources of body noise so you can reshape your beliefs around this and refrain from automatically assuming you have a serious disease.

How Anxiety about Health can Disrupt Someone's Life

Sep 27, 2023 Posted by: Brittney Chesworth anxiety,  core beliefs,  cycle of health anxiety,  fear of disease,  health anxiety,  hypochondria,  safety behaviors,  symptoms
How Anxiety about Health can Disrupt Someone's Life
People with severe health anxiety hold dysfunctional or maladaptive beliefs about health and illness. Dysfunctional beliefs develop early in life and are strengthened through reinforcement. Dysfunctional beliefs enter one into a cycle of unhelpful thoughts and behaviors that worsens health anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy aims to interrupt this cycle by modifying maladaptive beliefs, thinking errors, and safety behaviors.

How Information Processing Biases can Increase Health Anxiety

Sep 23, 2023 Posted by: Brittney Chesworth anxiety,  biased information processing,  cognitive behavioral therapy,  cognitive restructuring,  confirmation bias,  core beliefs,  hypochondria,  memory bias,  thinking errors
Memory bias with health anxiety
With health anxiety, we have unhelpful or inaccurate core beliefs about health and illness. These beliefs lead us to process information in a biased way. We tend to seek out "evidence" of our belief (e.g. that serious disease is everywhere) and we ignore or dismiss evidence to the contrary. It can be helpful to use a CBT technique and track your thoughts and assumptions in a thought record so that you can identify these patterns.