When treating health anxiety, there are specific considerations beyond those in standard anxiety treatment. Health anxiety often involves a cycle of excessive worry about one’s health, misinterpreting normal bodily sensations as signs of serious illness. Due to the nature of the condition, logical arguments often exacerbate the client’s anxiety. Thus, therapeutic approaches that focus on processes rather than disputing the content of thoughts are more effective.
Here are some tools and processes used to help someone overcome health anxiety:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): ACT aims to alter how clients respond to their emotional and psychological experiences, rather than the structure or content of those experiences. This involves:
- Acceptance of Reality: Encouraging clients to recognise anxiety as a part of being alive. Accepting anxiety responses and the circumstances that cause such responses is a viable approach.
- Values Clarification: Helping clients identify their values and committing to putting those values into freely chosen action. This shifts the focus from symptom alleviation to living a valued life.
- Experiential Exercises: Using exposure-like exercises framed in the service of fostering greater psychological flexibility, experiential willingness, and openness. These exercises aim to help clients develop willingness to experience thoughts and feelings for what they are.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a cognitive defusion strategy, not an anxiety control strategy. It aims to help the client make contact with experience as it is, without evaluative baggage.
- Creative Hopelessness: Assessing clients’ efforts to manage their anxiety-related difficulties and how well such efforts have worked. The focus should be on what clients have done in the past to manage anxiety and how well these strategies have worked.
- Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT): SFBT shifts the focus from reducing distress to building success and positively thriving. Key tools and processes include:
- Focusing on Strengths and Resources: Identifying and amplifying existing coping mechanisms. Questions like, “How do/did you cope?” and “What helps you keep anxiety/worries under control?”
- Finding Exceptions: Identifying times when anxiety is less of a problem and exploring what is different during those times.
- Future-Oriented Techniques: Encouraging clients to describe their preferred future, setting well-defined goals, and using different perspectives to assess motivation and hope.
- Compassionate Mind Training: This approach involves creating an inner sense of kindness, support, and encouragement when facing anxiety.
- It is a 10-step program to tackle anxiety.
- Exploring reasons to face anxiety and what improvements it would bring.
- Learning to tolerate anxious feelings.
- Havening Techniques: This involves depotentiating traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala. It empowers the brain to release experiences that serve as a trauma filter for present-day information processing.
Benefits of These Tools and Processes:
- Increased Psychological Flexibility: Clients learn to experience a full range of emotions without defense, adapting and behaving effectively despite their thoughts and feelings.
- Reduced Experiential Avoidance: By addressing the struggle to control and avoid unwanted thoughts and feelings, clients can relax with their anxiety.
- Improved Quality of Life: Shifting the focus to valued living enriches a person’s life, fostering meaningful change and growth.
- Empowerment: Clients gain a sense of control by knowing they have tools to improve how they feel, reducing the “what ifs”.
- Greater Self-Compassion: Compassionate approaches encourage self-kindness and support, which can reduce self-criticism and promote healing.
Summary: Treating health anxiety effectively requires moving beyond traditional anxiety management techniques. Instead, emphasis shifts to process-oriented strategies like ACT, SFBT, Compassionate Mind Training, and Havening Techniques, which help clients accept anxiety, clarify their values, and live richer, more meaningful lives. By fostering acceptance, self-compassion, and value-guided action, people can overcome health anxiety and embrace wellness.
Tags: Health Anxiety, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Compassionate Mind Training, Experiential Avoidance, Psychological Flexibility, Values Clarification, Mindfulness, Havening Techniques.