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Module 1: Understanding Health Anxiety
“Helping Health Anxiety – Understanding Health Anxiety” is a detailed guide designed to help individuals understand and manage health anxiety. It begins by defining health and health anxiety, explaining that while worrying about health is normal, excessive and disproportionate concern can become problematic. The guide discusses the negative impacts of health anxiety on relationships, work, and personal well-being, and introduces strategies to address these issues effectively.
Module 2: How Health Anxiety Develops
“Helping Health Anxiety – How Health Anxiety Develops” explores the factors contributing to the development of health anxiety. It discusses how past experiences, such as family illness, personal health issues, or negative media information, can lead to heightened health vulnerability and sensitivity. The guide also explains how unhelpful health rules and assumptions, formed from these experiences, can make an individual more susceptible to health anxiety, which can remain dormant until triggered by specific events.
Module 3: What Keeps Health Anxiety Going?
“Helping Health Anxiety – What Keeps Health Anxiety Going” examines the mechanisms that perpetuate health anxiety. It highlights how internal and external triggers, combined with unhelpful health rules and assumptions, lead to negative health-related thinking, increased anxiety symptoms, and a focus on feared symptoms. The guide also delves into behaviors like checking, reassurance seeking, avoidance, and safety behaviors, explaining how these can provide short-term relief but ultimately maintain and exacerbate health anxiety in the long term.
Module 4: Reducing Your Focus on Health Symptoms and Worries
“Helping Health Anxiety – Reducing Your Focus on Health Symptoms and Worries” offers practical strategies for individuals struggling with health anxiety to shift their focus away from health-related worries. It introduces techniques like mundane task focusing and meditation training, helping individuals to train their attention and reduce the intensity of health-related anxieties. The guide also discusses the concept of postponing health worries, a method to control the amount of time spent dwelling on health concerns, providing tools and worksheets for effective practice.
Module 5: Re-evaluating Unhelpful Health Related Thinking
“Helping Health Anxiety – Re-Evaluating Unhelpful Health-Related Thinking” focuses on understanding and changing health anxiety-driven thoughts. It introduces the concept of a Thought Diary to identify and challenge unhelpful health-related thoughts, offering a structured approach to develop more realistic and balanced thinking. This module emphasizes the importance of evaluating health information critically, especially from internet sources, and provides strategies for more objective and less biased information gathering and interpretation.
Module 6: Reducing Checking and Reassurance Seeking
“Helping Health Anxiety – Reducing Checking and Reassurance-Seeking” offers strategies for people with health anxiety to reduce excessive health-related checking and reassurance-seeking behaviors. It explains how these behaviors, while initially providing relief, can perpetuate anxiety and suggests practical steps to balance them. The guide includes detailed examples and worksheets to help individuals identify and modify these behaviors, emphasizing a gradual approach to manage health anxiety more effectively.
Module 7: Challenging Avoidance and Safety Behaviours
“Helping Health Anxiety – Challenging Avoidance and Safety Behaviours” provides a comprehensive approach to managing health anxiety by addressing avoidance and safety behaviors. It introduces the concept of graded exposure to help individuals gradually confront their fears, detailing the creation of a personalised ‘Exposure Stepladder’ to progressively face feared situations. The guide emphasizes the importance of acknowledging progress and dealing with setbacks in the process, offering practical worksheets and examples to support individuals in their journey towards reducing health anxiety.
Module 8: Adjusting Health Rules and Assumptions
“Helping Health Anxiety – Adjusting Health Rules and Assumptions” focuses on identifying and modifying unhelpful health rules and assumptions that contribute to health anxiety. It encourages individuals to examine the origins of their health-related beliefs, assess their impact on daily life, and develop more balanced, realistic alternatives. The guide includes practical exercises and worksheets to aid in this process, promoting a more flexible approach to health-related thoughts and behaviors.
Module 9: Healthy Living and Self-Management Planning
“Helping Health Anxiety – Healthy Living and Self-Management Planning” focuses on maintaining long-term well-being and managing health anxiety. It revisits key concepts from previous modules and introduces a self-management plan to sustain progress and handle potential setbacks. The guide also emphasizes the importance of engaging in healthy living practices across various aspects of life, such as stress management, diet, exercise, and social activities, to enhance overall health and reduce health-related anxieties.
