Excessive Worry About Your Health
We live in an age where everyone is constantly bombarded with information. The topics regarding care and protection of the body are the order of the day. This has created an environment where excessive worry about your health has a foothold from which it can be projected into everyday life.
Health is defined as a state of physical, emotional, and social well-being. It’s not simply the absence of disease. It’s increasingly common to find people who are afraid of getting sick or that their close friends and relatives will.
While it’s true that worrying about your health and having a proper lifestyle is essential to prevent disease, excessive worry can be a problem. Therefore, in this article we’ll explain what to do about it and what strategies you can take to manage it.
What is excessive worry about your health?
As you can imagine, worrying about yourself is normal. We all have a certain fear of getting sick. This is natural and beneficial if it leads you to improve your habits. For example, to eat a proper diet or exercise regularly.
In the same way, it makes you alert to the signs of a disease and encourages you to go to the doctor when necessary. However, once worry continues to grow, it can lead to anxiety.
When this happens, negative thoughts and anxiety about getting sick can occupy your mind. This creates a state of alarm in which any minimal pain or risk of contagion makes you think that you’re sick.
The general misinformation about various world situations has caused people’s fear to increase drastically. There’s a phenomenon of collective concern that goes beyond the individual and puts large groups of people in the same alert state.
Anxiety can also lead us to do irrational things. If we don’t control excessive worry about our health, we’ll take drastic measures that end up being counterproductive, causing disease, instead of protecting us.
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Signs of excessive worry
The line between normal and excessive worry is very fine. However, there are certain signs that can tell you that the limit is being touched or crossed. In the first place, that state of fear that we indicated.
When someone is constantly aware of any ache or pain, no matter how small, it can indicate an obsession. Even more so if you start looking for information on the subject or can’t stop thinking about it. The behavior of these people causes them to organize their lives around the supposed problem. Their family, work and friendship relationships are changed due to the obsessive disorder.
Many people even conclude that it’s a symptom of a specific disease. They catalog their hypothesis with the name of a condition and diagnose themselves, establishing the direct path to hypochondria.
In this case, they begin to worry about the consequences of that supposed disease. They also tend to make it a frequent topic of conversation, leaving no room for other explanations or stories.
On the other hand, excessive concern for health can also manifest itself with very strict control of diet or exercise. In the same way, the person might take medication or vitamin supplements that weren’t recommended by a doctor.
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What can you do about it?
The most important thing in this situation is to try to ask for help. When worry turns into anxiety, it’s best to see a psychologist to try to solve the problem. Psychotherapy is usually the best form of treatment.
In addition, you should keep in mind that the sources of information you have aren’t always reliable. It’s essential to contrast the data and prevent fear from taking hold of you. There are many articles on the internet, but you should verify that they’re written by reliable authors and that the site you’re reading is trustworthy.
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