How To Help A Person With Hypochondria?

Helping a person with hypochondria is usually not an easy task. Being exposed to the worrisome symptoms of these people can generate a feeling of frustration and exhaustion in the family, when the resources available to be able to be agents of aid are limited. In turn, it is common for these people to feel emotionally invalidated by their environment with respect to their complaints, favoring the feeling of loneliness and isolation.

Regardless of whether the illness is potentially real or perceived, the physical symptoms causing the complaint are actually experienced (not a simulation). Although medical examinations rule out the presence of a disease of physical origin, the concerns of the person with hypochondria often motivate them to request more examinations and tests that confirm their suspicions or support their certainty in front of others.

Hypochondria: emotional and behavioral components

Hypochondria is characterized by excessive concern about the health of the individual and its possible causes. The key emotional component in hypochondria is fear. A fear that is specifically health-oriented. Thus, the individual attributes most of the signals that he obtains from the body to a potentially serious disease that endangers his well-being and even his life.

On many occasions, fear is linked to anxiety, being the visible part of anxiety disorders; specifically, generalized anxiety disorder.

Another of the key components in hypochondria are usually the repetitive self-examinations around the physical symptoms and the changes that can occur in the body (moles, weights, wounds, types of pain …), trying to extract from that observation to demonstrate that this disease is real.

Hypochondria on the web: collecting diseases

What appears in search engines when we type “headache”? The fact of reading certain symptoms that characterize some type of serious illness gives the person clues, or what she thinks are keys, for self-diagnosis. From that moment on, the usual sequence is for the person to search for even more information, paying attention to the one that fits with that initial diagnosis and discarding the rest -confirmation bias-.

In this way, search tools on the web become a double-edged sword when it comes to generating and feeding fears associated with health. Information available to everyone that, misinterpreted and managed, can illuminate and feed 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 what they feel It is the product of their anguish.

How to help a person with hypochondria?

All of us at some point and circumstance have shown ourselves to be somewhat hypochondriacs . However, these types of concerns in people with hypochondria tend to last over time, being little or not at all sensitive to the opinion of the specialist. The person is so convinced that they have a serious illness that they find no relief from the test results and the interpretation that their doctor makes.

That said, we want to advance some keys to help a person with hypochondria :

Validate your experience

It is one of the most important points. On certain occasions, the person with hypochondria encounters a barrier that prevents them from expressing their symptoms and fears.

For this reason, the validation of the experience means “being able to run with that person’s shoes” understanding that they may feel that way in their circumstances, in their way of seeing and understanding the world at that moment. It is not an easy goal; in fact, we tend to give up reaching it when we use simpler and more dangerous formulas that are made explicit by using phrases such as the following:

• “That’s nothing”.
• “You’ll see what the doctor tells you is not so bad.”
• “My father really suffered from that 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 again?

Take distance from the loop of discomfort

That is, do not participate in the complaints of the individual. Frequently, the need for reassurance of the patient leads to consultations with acquaintances; somehow, the hypochondriac person needs others to tell him that what he has “is nothing” and even that his imaginary illness is going to have a good prognosis .

This calm that he obtains from others does not usually last too long, so it does not usually take long for the person to claim those words of relief again, entering a very dangerous circle.

Develop alternative activities to reinsurance behaviors

Activities that are to the liking of the individual and that are incompatible with the self-examinations carried out in search of the confirmation of the disease.

Doing physical exercise as a form of distraction can function as a stressor in the first moments, since the activity can generate signals in the individual that can be added to all the material collected to support their suspicions, their fear or their self-diagnosis.

However, once you have done the appropriate exercise for your physical condition at that time, what usually predominates in the body is a feeling of well-being that will hardly fit with your fears.

Encourage him to ask for help

It is possible that the situation will exceed our own resources. May it drain our patience and our energies. Getting to this point is never recommended; it is better to ask for help much earlier. However, if we have not done it yet, we can no longer delay it. It is about helping or encouraging the person to seek psychological help.

The person with hypochondria may be reluctant to take this step: they may think that by doing so they are investing resources in a place that is not the source of their problem. In these cases, to make you go to a consultation we can rely on the fact that you need someone to help you calm your anxiety instead of talking about hypochondria, as much as we suspect that this is actually the origin of what is happening to you.