Overcoming Health Anxiety: A self-help guide using cognitive behavioural techniques (Overcoming Books)

being over-protected as a child, especially from illness. being over-protected as a child from deaths, funerals, illnesses in the family.

Many people we meet in our social lives and at work still believe that the answer to an emotional problem is to ‘understand where it comes from’. This idea is based on the assumption that there is clearly identifiable past event to which a person’s problem can be traced, and that once the sufferer recalls this, the magic of ‘insight’ will lead to a

have an emotional problem with being excessively worried by my health and my ‘solutions’ have become my problem and feed my worry.

Health anxiety can be regarded an overloaded system, with your mind trying too hard to solve what it thinks is an actual or potential physical illness. In such cases, your mind’s solutions become the problem. The system is overloaded because of the way you try to escape from unpleasant thoughts, images and feelings, or the way you try to control yo

This in turn creates another feedback loop in which you lose your confidence and feel incapable of doing certain things.