How Grief Can Cause Illness Anxiety
Often times, illness anxiety can begin as a way of managing grief. For some, your mind grapples with why someone’s health issues weren’t caught earlier so they could have been treated and saved. This focus on trying to foresee and prevent illness can lead to the belief that hyper focusing on your body can help you to catch illness before it escalates.
For others, we struggle to process our feelings about how life can change so drastically from one moment to the next. Whether it’s the result of an accident or an unexpected diagnosis, sudden changes to our health can be jarring. If you find yourself dwelling on how it would feel to experience a sudden change in your physical health, it can lead to illness anxiety over time.
Ironically, illness anxiety often develops from our experiences with the health of OTHER people such as friends, family members, or even strangers such as a celebrity. Here are a few of the experiences that commonly trigger the onset of illness anxiety:
Someone you know has died of a sudden serious health issue such as a heart attack or brain aneurysm
Someone you know has died of a long-term health issue such as cancer or ALS someone you know is diagnosed with a terminal illness such as cancer
Someone you know suffers a permanent disability that is NOT terminal but changes their life significantly such as blindness, deafness, or loss of a limb
You or someone you know is threatened with a serious illness that turns out to be minor
These kind of experiences can affect you even more if you are close to the person or around them during their diagnosis, treatment, or death. As a result. some risk factors include caretaking for a loved one during a serious or terminal illness or disability, illness of a family member during your childhood, and having parents who worried too much about their own health or yours when you were growing up.
People with illness anxiety often recognize that their health-related fears are excessive. For example, you might recognize that your worry that every headache is a possible brain tumor, is excessive. You might be more afraid, however, that if you stop worrying about your headaches, that you could dismiss real signs and symptoms of a brain tumor. And so the worrying continues.
We can help.
If you or someone you love is struggling with health anxiety, please reach out. We offer anxiety treatment with CBT Therapists in Orlando and online throughout the state of Florida. Call today or send us your info and we’ll reach out for a free consultation to see if one of our therapists would be a good fit.
