How Health Anxiety Affects the Mind & Body: Understanding How the Brain & Body Work Together

What is health anxiety?

Health anxiety involves constantly worrying about your health, either due to a condition you already have, or the fear of developing a health condition in the future. You might find yourself anxious about your symptoms or condition getting triggered, or frustrated that you haven’t gotten a helpful diagnosis or treatment from a doctor.

What do we mean when we say health anxiety affects the mind & body?

This constant worrying negatively impacts your mental and physical health. When your anxiety is high, your nervous system is in a state of stress. As a result of this, your mind and body don’t get to relax. This means that you can have a hard time staying calm or present in your life because anxiety is usually focused on the past or future, instead of the present moment.

Chronic pain and chronic fatigue are two conditions that can perpetuate chronic anxiety because there’s usually fear around when the pain or fatigue will be triggered again, thus you live in a state of stress.

The good news is that these kinds of conditions are curable! It’s just not widely known that if you learn how to regulate your nervous system and retrain your brain, your mind and body can shift out of the state of fear and feel safer, thereby eliminating your symptoms.

The pain-fear cycle

When you live in a state of fear, that fear creates more anxiety and a sense of danger in your nervous system. As a result, your mind starts to send fear signals to the rest of your body, which can cause physical pain or symptoms. This can happen even when it's unnecessary, simply because there is a state of fear in your nervous system all the time.

So, the more health anxiety = the more fear = the more pain, fatigue or symptoms that keep showing up in your body.

For example, if you’ve been experiencing chronic pain or fatigue for a while, you may have tried different diets, and begun to eliminate toxins. While, on the surface level, this may be helpful, it can often create more fear because you're constantly afraid of certain foods or toxins.

However, if you create a consistent sense of safety in your nervous system, your brain won't need to perceive specific foods or toxins as dangerous, and therefore you won't react.

I know this sounds pretty radical. It’s something that takes time to understand and get used to, but, when you do, so much change can come from it! I’ve healed chronic fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and headaches through retraining my nervous system to live in a state of safety. I’ve lived it and I’m super passionate about bringing this knowledge out into the world.

3 tips to work with your health anxiety

1) Learn more about the mind-body connection

By this, I mean learn more about the mind-body condition of fear and continue to affirm that your symptoms don’t have a physical origin (meaning, they start in the brain). This does NOT mean that your symptoms aren’t real. They 100% are. They just aren’t originated physically, so we have to treat the root cause; which is a dysregulated nervous system and fear response in the brain.

As a starting point, I highly suggest downloading the app Curable and reading ‘The Way Out’ by Alan Gordon.

2) Use somatic tracking to help you become more mindful of your anxiety

You can listen to a somatic tracking exercise I created for you here. This will help you become more aware of your health anxiety and how it manifests in your body, approach it without judgment, and get to a place where your physical symptoms don’t need to be perceived as dangerous.

3) Continue to find evidence in your life that your physical symptoms are not physically rooted

For example, ask yourself – does your symptom show up at random times? Is it unpredictable? Or does it usually happen at a certain time of day, like in the morning or evening? Does it happen when you’re fearful of a certain environment or person?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of those last two questions, this means your chronic symptoms are likely to be rooted in a dysregulated nervous system. Usually, symptoms that are physically based can be helped with physical treatment and don’t last longer than 6 months (unless there are signs of tissue damage).

How I work with health anxiety

I’m Grace, a holistic psychotherapist, nervous system coach and pain specialist. I have healed multiple mental and physical health conditions through mind-body healing and retraining my nervous system. I absolutely love what I do and really hope to help as many people as possible get out of their health anxiety, and into a more calm and safe place in their body.

More on what I do

If you’d like an intro to regulating your nervous system, sign up for my Nervous System Reset course, where you’ll learn how to understand your anxiety triggers, and how to work with them from a mind-body perspective. I give you tools, and lead you through mind and body-based exercises, including journaling, breathing exercises, meditations, and physical yoga therapy.

I am honored to help people along their healing journey. Specifically, I help people address chronic pain and illness, anxiety, trauma, disordered eating, and nervous system dysregulation. I help by combining nervous system training, holistic psychotherapy, and yoga therapy. If you want to grow in your healing journey and make exponential changes, I would love to be your guiding support. Check out my other blogs to learn more about my practice.