Healing Space | How your fear of being sick is making you ill

People who self-medicate and self-diagnose, end up dealing with greater anxiety than those who don’t. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

Have you been self-medicating for that cough for longer than you ought to have by now? Those of us who have lived through the pandemic can fear even a seasonal flu, a cough, and may end up over-medicating, self-medicating or refusing to address the concern medically at all. People who have survived serious illnesses, like cancer, can fear the symptoms of a relapse in the smallest of bodily aches and pains. And those of us who have elderly parents or vulnerable infants at home, can begin to fear the onset of simple household ailments as the doorway to something bigger.

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You don’t need to have hypochondria, in which you have the feeling of being ill despite the doctor’s reassurance that you are not, or nosphobia, a lingering fear of disease itself, to be shrouded in anxiety about your health. Many of us are living with health anxiety and aren’t coping very well with it.

For one, it is a symptom of the age we live in, with bad AQI, poor health infrastructure, epidemics, pandemics, raging flu, and seemingly unprepared authorities and ineffective public health policy. We may have personally faced or witnessed in close proximity the consequences of failing infrastructure, seen corporate hospitals stick patients with massive bills and read about health scams, pharmaceutical adulterations, and malpractice often enough. As a result, we live with a trust deficit, lacking faith in governments, hospital administrations, staff, faculty and health allied roles.

The underlying anxiety can eat into your mental health and cause you to lose sleep, confidence, and self-esteem. You can worry about factors in the larger environment that you are unable to control, fear developing a major illness and this may cause you to act in ways that affect how you eat, sleep, work and relate to your family and others.

For one, you may avoid the doctor entirely for fear of discovering something you don’t want to face, or you may spend thousands in getting over-tested for conditions you don’t have or that a doctor has not asked you to get tested for. For instance, you could have a sore throat and imagine that it’s early-stage throat or lung cancer and either avoid a doctor or get expensive tests to rule out the cancers. When what it really is, is a polluted environment, the weather and a corresponding infection. You might end up firing the domestic help when she had a persistent cough because you are afraid family at home could end up sick, and wind up piling additional chores on yourself.

People who self-medicate and self-diagnose, end up dealing with greater anxiety than those who don’t. This is because they function on the basis of assumptions. You might be a very intelligent person in your work role, let’s say you’re a software engineer from a premiere university, but unless you spent about seven years getting a medical degree, it’s highly unlikely you know exactly what’s going on.

Sometimes we get so caught up in recognising and labelling symptoms that we assume we know as much as certified doctors. Doctors who deal with patients and specific diseases day in and out, recognise much more quickly the parts of the anatomy infected and correlate it better to prevalent symptoms going around, or can identify if something is out of the ordinary.

If it’s your regular doctor, they will also know if something is out of the ordinary for you. It’s therefore important to trust a doctor, and find a doctor you feel you can trust in order to keep your illnesses and related anxiety under control.

Health anxiety is natural as we age, and as we enter crowded environments such as public transport or large workspaces with air conditioning, equipped with poor natural ventilation and lighting. One of the reasons why our minds go on high alert is that we instinctively know we aren’t putting our bodies in the optimal health situations for them, and we are probably already conscious that we don’t really lead a healthy lifestyle. These can get exacerbated by our reading and listening to cases that are often exceptions or extremes cited, rather than the norm. So what you’re probably responding to is this innate knowledge of where you’re going wrong, the guilt and regret about it that you carry, and the related fear rather than something concretely wrong.

Health anxiety is highly treatable with simple systematic measures that ensure you neither over-diagnose yourself nor ignore your health issues. It begins with finding an expert/s you can trust and investing your faith in their knowledge and knowledge systems.

How to reduce the fear of falling sick