CBT For Dummies by Rob Willson & Rhena Branch

Author:Rob Willson & Rhena Branch [Willson, Rob & Branch, Rhena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781394333271
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2026-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

At the core of illness-focused anxiety is the fear that if you stop being vigilant for your feared illness, you may miss a key symptom and live (or perhaps not live) to regret it. Fundamentally, this issue is an intolerance of uncertainty, and the solution is to increase your tolerance. The big question to ask yourself is whether remaining on red alert for a particular illness is really all that helpful.

Carry out a cool-headed cost-benefit analysis of trying to avoid missing an important symptom. If your illness anxiety were an insurance policy, would you be happy to pay the premium in terms of distress and impact on your life and the lives of those who care for you?

You may decide to take slightly more direct action against your fear of missing an indicator and ending up ill or dying. Chapter 10 has some guidance on deliberately confronting your fears to reduce them. In this case, writing out a vivid imagined account of your worst case coming true and rereading it for 20 minutes a day over a couple of weeks can be helpful — and challenging.

To manage your mind’s tendency to jump to conclusions about your health and reduce habits like ove thinking, do the following: If you have a physical or mental sensation that triggers your illness anxiety, put a reminder in your diary (say, for a date about two weeks away) to come back to it. The benefit here is that you can decide to avoid preoccupation while assuaging your fear that you may be ignoring something important as a stepping-stone in recovery. Who knows? You may even avoid a needless test.

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