These Thinking Errors Make You Anxious About Your Health

Health anxiety is the worst. If you struggle with this, you likely recognize it as being a problem in your life. But that doesn’t help you much if you don’t know what is causing it or how to fix it.

At some point in your life, you developed certain core beliefs about health and illness that are dysfunctional and unhelpful. (I discuss dysfunctional core beliefs about health in detail in a previous article.) Because you have these beliefs, when you have new symptoms or bodily sensations, you interpret them through a distorted lens. You have what are called “thinking errors,” and there are many different types.

Types of Thinking Errors

All-or-nothing thinking: Viewing situations in absolute, black-and-white categories instead of taking a more balanced approach and seeing things on a continuum. You are either perfectly healthy or deathly ill.

Jumping to conclusions: Interpreting a situation with little or no evidence. You could do this in a couple of ways:

• Fortune telling: Making predictions about things that have not happened yet, as though you are a fortune-teller. You might assume that you will have cancer because people in your family have had cancer. You might believe you know exactly what doctors will or will not be able to do to treat a health issue. You might predict that you are going to die of a certain type of illness.
• Mind reading: Interpreting the thoughts and beliefs of others without sufficient evidence. You might make assumptions about what medical professionals or loved ones think about your health.

Catastrophizing: You predict only the most disastrous outcomes possible when it comes to your health. Any time you have an unexplained bodily sensation or symptom, you might find yourself saying “something is terribly wrong.” You have a headache, not because you didn’t drink enough water today, but because you have a brain tumor.

Lofty standards: You have unreasonably high expectations of medical professionals and resources. You expect that physicians, scans, tests, or examinations should be able to give you a definitive answer about whatever health issue you believe you have. Or you expect that physicians, scans, tests, or examinations should be able to offer an explanation for every physical symptom or bodily sensation.

Mental filter/tunnel vision: You focus on certain information or facts about health and illness (that supports your health-related beliefs) while ignoring or dismissing other information about health and illness (that challenges your health-related beliefs). You might soak up tragic stories about death and dying in the news and in your social networks. However, you pay much less attention to all of the stories about healthy people or people who recover from an illness.

Emotional reasoning: (a) I feel anxious, so something must be wrong, or (b) If I don’t feel anxious, then that is when the bad thing is really going to happen.

Disqualifying the positive: You only recognize the negative aspects of a health situation and do not focus on the positive.

How to Correct Thinking Errors

There are many steps involved in treating health anxiety. In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), we help you to identify thinking errors related to health and illness. Throughout your week, you complete a “thought record,” which allows you to keep track of all of these distorted thoughts. Once you learn how to identify them, we teach you how to challenge them through Socratic questioning. Through this, you learn to not simply accept these thoughts as facts but to question their validity. Other CBT strategies include helping you to refrain from maladaptive coping mechanisms as well as to correct dysfunctional beliefs about health.

If you take anything away from this article, let it be this: Health anxiety is treatable!