Reassurance Seeking: The Habit Keeping Health Anxiety Alive
Why checking, Googling, and asking "do I look ill?" calms you for an hour and feeds the worry for months, and what to do instead. It is 11:40 pm, and your heart skips a beat. You press two fingers to your wrist, then your neck. You pick up your phone "just to see" what palpitations can mean. Twenty minutes and nine tabs later, you read that it is usually harmless, and your shoulders drop. Then another page mentions a rare cause, and it starts again. By 1 a.m., you are waking your partner to ask, for the third time this week, "Do you think this is anything?" If that sounds familiar, the checking may not be keeping you safe. It may be what keeps the worry going, a pattern common in health anxiety . What is reassurance seeking in health anxiety? Reassurance seeking is anything you do to get a feeling of certainty that you are not seriously ill. Asking someone, searching online, examining your body, booking another test, or rereading an old result all count. ...