Specialty
Health Anxiety Therapy
When every sensation feels like a warning
A headache is never just a headache. A skipped heartbeat, a strange twinge, a lingering cough, each one sets off a cascade of dread, searching, and checking. You may know, rationally, that you are probably fine. But your body does not believe it, and the fear returns with the next sensation. *
Health anxiety often comes with exhausting rituals, googling symptoms late at night, examining your body, seeking reassurance from doctors or loved ones. The reassurance works, briefly. Then the doubt creeps back in, sometimes within hours, and the cycle starts again. *
None of this means your physical experiences are not real. Sensations are real, and taking care of your health matters. The problem is a threat system that has become stuck on high alert about your body, and that is something therapy can genuinely change. *
Signs health anxiety may be affecting your life
- Frequently scanning your body for signs that something is wrong
- Googling symptoms and ending up more frightened than when you started
- Repeatedly seeking reassurance from doctors, family, or friends
- Relief after a clear test result that fades within days or hours
- Interpreting normal sensations as evidence of serious illness
- Difficulty tolerating uncertainty about your health
- Avoiding medical appointments, or booking far more than you need
- Anxiety spiking when you hear about someone else’s illness
- Checking parts of your body over and over
- Health worries crowding out your ability to enjoy daily life
Our approach to health anxiety
Health anxiety is fundamentally a problem of uncertainty. The mind demands a guarantee about the body that no test or doctor can provide, and every attempt to secure that guarantee, checking, googling, reassurance, feeds the cycle it is trying to end. Treatment helps you step out of that loop rather than run it faster. *
Our work is individualized and integrative. Traditional psychotherapy helps unwind the checking and reassurance cycle and build genuine tolerance for uncertainty. Clinical hypnosis can help calm the body’s threat response and change your relationship with physical sensations. When health fear traces to a frightening medical moment, in your life or in your family’s, EMDR can address that root directly. *
Throughout, we respect your medical care. This work complements appropriate evaluation and treatment by your physicians. It never asks you to ignore your body, only to stop being ruled by fear of it. *
Clinician who specializes in health anxiety
ACT · EMDR · Hypnosis
Dr. Faiwiszewski specializes in the intersection of mind and body, including health anxiety and fears around medical situations. She helps clients break the cycle of checking and reassurance seeking while building a calmer, more trusting relationship with their own body. *
Full profile →Modalities
Therapy approaches that may help
We integrate these techniques, custom-tailored to you, in the order your nervous system can use first.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is health anxiety?
- Health anxiety is persistent, distressing worry about having or developing a serious illness, usually accompanied by body monitoring, symptom searching, and reassurance seeking. The fear persists even after medical evaluations come back clear. *
- But what if something really is wrong with me?
- Sensible medical care always has a place, and therapy never replaces it. The signature of health anxiety is not having symptoms, it is that no amount of reassurance settles the fear for long. Therapy targets that stuck fear, alongside whatever medical care you appropriately need. *
- Are my physical symptoms just in my head?
- No. Your sensations are real. Anxiety itself also produces genuine physical symptoms, tension, racing heart, stomach distress, which can then become new sources of worry. Treatment takes your body seriously while calming the fear response around it. *
- How is health anxiety different from medical trauma?
- Health anxiety centers on fear of possible future illness and difficulty tolerating uncertainty. Medical trauma is the lasting emotional impact of a frightening medical event that already happened. They can overlap, and we treat both, on this page’s concern and on our dedicated medical trauma page. *
- Why does googling my symptoms make things worse?
- Searching offers a moment of relief, which teaches your brain that checking is the answer to fear. But search results skew toward worst cases, and the relief never lasts, so the cycle tightens. Learning to tolerate not checking is a core part of recovery. *
- What treatment approaches help with health anxiety?
- We integrate traditional psychotherapy with clinical hypnosis to calm the body’s threat response, and EMDR when the fear is rooted in a specific frightening medical experience. Your psychologist designs the sequence around your particular pattern. *
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