How To Help A Person With Hypochondria?

Helping someone with hypochondria is usually not easy. Being exposed to these people’s worrying symptoms can create a sense of frustration and exhaustion in the family, when the resources available to help are limited.

In turn, these people can often feel emotionally crippled by their surroundings when it comes to their complaints, which fosters a sense of loneliness and isolation.

Whether the illness is potentially real or perceived, the physical symptoms that are at the root of the complaint are actually being felt. This is not a simulation.

Even though medical examinations rule out the presence of a physical illness, the worries of the person with hypochondria often motivate them to request additional examinations and tests to confirm their suspicions or to substantiate their certainty in front of others.

Hypochondria: emotional and behavioral components

Hypochondria is characterized by an excessive concern for the health of the individual and its possible causes. The key emotional component of hypochondria is fear. A fear that is specifically oriented towards health.

Thus, the individual attributes most of the signals he receives from the body to a potentially serious illness that threatens his well-being and even his life. In many cases, fear is linked to anxiety, being the visible part of anxiety disorders; more specifically, generalized anxiety disorder.

Another key element in hypochondria is usually the repetitive self-examination around the physical symptoms and the changes that can occur in the body (moles, weight, injuries, types of pain…). The person is trying to show that the disease is real.

Hypochondria on the Net: Collecting Diseases

What appears in search engines when we type “headache”? Reading certain symptoms that characterize a type of serious illness gives a person clues, or what they think are clues, to self-diagnose.

From this point on, the usual sequence is for the person to seek out even more information, paying attention to which one corresponds to that initial diagnosis and rejecting the rest – confirmation. Thus, web research tools become a double-edged sword when it comes to generating and fueling health-related fears.

This information is accessible to everyone. If misinterpreted and managed, they can raise fears that cause a lot of anxiety in the person, making intervention difficult in many cases: the person is convinced that they have a real problem and not that it is that she feels is the product of her own anguish.

How to help a person with hypochondria?

We have all, at some time and under certain circumstances, shown ourselves to be somewhat hypochondriacs. However, this type of concern in people with hypochondria tends to persist over time, being little or not at all sensitive to specialist advice.

The person is so convinced that they have a serious illness that they find no relief in the test results and the interpretation made by their doctor. That said, we want to put forward some keys to help someone with hypochondria:

Validate the experience of a person with hypochondria

This is one of the most important points. Sometimes the person with hypochondria finds a barrier that prevents them from expressing their symptoms and fears. Therefore, validating the experience means “putting yourself in the other’s shoes, ” understanding that they may feel that way in their circumstances.

It is not an easy goal. We usually forgo achieving it when we use simpler, more dangerous formulas that are made explicit by phrases like this:

• “It’s nothing.”
• “You will see that what the doctor tells you is not serious”.
• “My dad really suffered from this disease and if you had it you wouldn’t be like this.”
• “But if the doctor has already told you no, why do you want to go back?”

Take some distance from the discomfort loop

That is to say, not to participate in the motivated complaints of the individual. Often, the need to reassure the patient leads to consultations with acquaintances; somehow, the hypochondriac needs other people to tell him that what he has “is nothing” and even that his imaginary disease will have a good prognosis.

This calm he gets from others usually doesn’t last long. So it usually does not take long for the person to recover these words of relief, thus entering a very dangerous circle.

Develop alternative activities to reinsurance behavior

Namely, activities which are to the liking of the individual. And above all, which are incompatible with the self-examinations carried out in search of confirmation of the disease.

Exercise as a form of distraction can work as a stressor in the early stages. The activity can generate signals in the individual that can be added to all the material gathered to support their suspicions, fears or self-diagnosis.

However, once a person has had the appropriate exercise for their physical condition at the time, what usually predominates in the body is a sense of well-being. This feeling will hardly correspond to his fears.

Encourage the person with hypochondria to seek help

It is possible that the situation exceeds our own resources. It can drain our patience and energy. It is never advisable to get there; it is better to ask for help much sooner.

However, if we haven’t yet, we can’t wait any longer. This is to help or encourage the person to seek psychological help. The person with hypochondria may be reluctant to take this step. She may think that by doing this she is investing resources in a place that is not the source of her problem.

In these cases, to get her to come for a consultation, we can rely on the fact that she needs someone to help her calm her anxiety rather than talking about hypochondria, even though we suspect that it is. is in fact the origin of what is happening to him. This prospect may convince her to consult.

Our thoughts

Is it possible to control hypochondriac thoughts? How to avoid this obsession of constantly listening to the sensations of our body …