What are the symptoms of hypercondria?

Answer 1

Hypercondria is caused by anxiety. Anxiety can cause both physical and mental symptoms. The physical being headaches, feeling ill, etc. Physcological symptoms include extreme fear of being in grave health danger, being scared of death due to some sort of health risk, etc. I am a hypercondriac, and what triggers it for me is cancer. Cancer runs in my family and 2 of my family members died of it, while several others have been diagnosed with it. I then thought that I would get it. Other things I fear are things that also run in my family, such as Diabetes (my mom had it), schizophrenia (my mom had it), etc. I've gone to doctors and a physcologist and was told I am not in danger these things. Even so, it still runs in my mind that I may get this still. This is called an irrational thought. Other people may call it paranoya or phycotic behaviour, however, it is not. Hypercondria falls under an anxiety disorder, and medicines are often not needed for treatment. Cognitive and behavioral therapy can be very effective in treating hypercondria. The main thing that you must do is rationalize your irrational fears. For example (as with me), I had a headache one day, and feared it was brain cancer. I feared this because my neighbor had it, and sadly passed away from it. A headache is obviously a real symptom, but is it necessary to worry about it? I worried about it because I came to the preassumption that what my neighbor had, also will happen to me. Three things come into play when you think of a sickness, what are my chances of getting it, is it treatable, and is it fatal. Brain cancer can be very deadly and at times untreatable, that in its self scared me severely. However, I missed one key factor, my chances of getting it were slim. Most headaches people have are non-serious at all, and on top of that, I showed no other symptoms. I came to the conclusion that I was in no serious need of seeking a doctor at that time. And guess what? The headache went away the next day, big suprise... A normal person would be frustrated with the headache, taking some Tylenol, while a hypercondriac would be looking up brain cancer on Google. I have been treat by a physcologist and the treatment for this hypercondria has been very effective, and one thing I was taught was to rationalize my fears. I hope this helped.