Health anxiety, also known as hypochondriasis, is a preoccupation with the fear of illness or disease.
You may be experiencing constant anxiety about your health, excessive web searches about your symptoms, and seeking reassurance from doctors or therapists.
You may even be seeing a therapist to try to understand where your anxiety comes from and to address your anxiety, sometimes, talking about your anxiety may actually make the anxiety more complex - through what's known as the iatrogenic effect—a condition worsened by the treatment itself.
After weeks or months of therapy, you may actually find your anxiety getting worse because you might have anxiety about your health anxiety. And all the understanding about how you got there doesn’t help your anxiety.
Here’s the thing.
Understanding and logic can’t solve emotions.
The Neuroscience of Health Anxiety
Overemphasis on Symptoms
The process of repeatedly discussing fears and symptoms with your therapist, friends, family actually reinforces the anxiety that you’re trying to overcome. By focusing attention on bodily sensations or the possibility of illness, the brain’s threat-detection system becomes hyper-activated, creating a feedback loop of worry, which leads to further rumination.
Logical Understanding Isn't Enough
While talking about anxiety provides an outlet, and often valuable insight and understanding, it works primarily with the conscious mind. Health anxiety, however, often stems from deeply ingrained fears and beliefs that reside in the subconscious. Without addressing these subconscious drivers, rational understanding alone doesn’t always lead to meaningful change.
Reinforcing Avoidance Behaviors
Some therapeutic approaches inadvertently validate the need for constant reassurance or safety behaviors of checking symptoms repeatedly. This reinforces the cycle of anxiety instead of breaking it. From a Neuroscience perspective, this strengthens the neural pathways of the thoughts, feeling and behaviors supporting the anxiety.
Why Hypnosis Helps
Unlike traditional therapy, where clients talk in conscious monologue about their anxiety, hypnotherapy bypasses the conscious mind to work directly with the subconscious—the place where your deeply rooted fears and emotional patterns hide out.
Health anxiety isn’t just about a conscious fear of illness; it’s all knotted up with unresolved emotions or past experiences that the subconscious trying to resolve. That’s why rational understanding of the problem isn’t quite enough to resolve it.
Hypnosis can help address the underlying, subconscious emotional aspects contributing to health anxiety in a way that talk therapy may not.
Here’s how…
1. Rewire Neural Pathways:Neuroscience has shown that hypnosis alters brain activity, particularly in the default mode network (DMN)—the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thoughts like worry and rumination. Research indicates that hypnosis reduces activity in this area, helping clients break free from obsessive cycles of health-related fear.
2. Access and Resolve Root Causes:Under hypnosis, the subconscious mind can reveal the origin of health anxiety, which may be tied to past experiences, fears and trauma. By addressing these root causes, hypnosis helps clients release the emotional “charge” of their fears.
3. Calm the Nervous System:Hypnosis induces a state of calm relaxation, shifting the nervous system from a fight-or-flight response into rest-and-digest way of being. This physiological change alone can reduce the physical symptoms of anxiety, such as a racing heart or muscle tension, and retrain the brain to wire bodily sensations with a new sense of calm.
4. Build Resilience and Self-Trust:Through hypnosis, clients develop new subconscious associations with their bodies—ones rooted in trust and safety rather than fear. This transformation creates a sense of inner stability, reducing the need for reassurance or symptom-checking.
Neuroscience Evidence for Hypnosis
A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis found that hypnotherapy was effective in reducing anxiety and somatic symptoms in clients, showing measurable improvements in brain activity related to emotional regulation. Further research demonstrates how hypnosis can affect neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to form new, healthier pathways—making it a powerful tool for breaking anxiety cycles.
Finding Freedom from Health Anxiety
If you’ve struggled with health anxiety and feel that traditional approaches haven’t worked—or have maybe even made things worse, and you’re left feeling even more overwhelmed—hypnosis offers a compassionate and effective alternative.
Anxiety is symptom of what is going on below the surface.
By calming the nervous system, and resolving the subconscious root causes, and rewiring your brain’s response to uncertainty about your health, hypnosis can help you build a healthier, more empowered relationship with your body and mind.
This article was written by Liana West, Ericksonian hypnotherapist and creator of Accelerated Hypnotherapy. Learn more at https://acceleratedhypnotherapy.com
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