Why googling your symptoms makes health anxiety worse
The search is meant to settle it. Instead it teaches your brain the danger was worth checking for, and the doubt comes back louder. Here is the loop and the way out.
A sensation appears. A headache that is slightly different from usual, a mark you had not noticed, a flutter in your chest. And within seconds your mind has gone to the worst, and within a minute you are searching. Just to check. Just to rule it out.
An hour later you have read forty pages, several of which described something terrible, and you feel worse than when you started. Or you found the reassuring page, and felt better, and then within a day the doubt was back, slightly reformulated, needing another search.
I want to explain why this happens, because the search feels so obviously sensible, and it is one of the main things keeping health anxiety alive.
What the search is for
You search to close a question. Is this serious or not? The idea is that with enough information you will finally know, and once you know, you can stop worrying. It is a reasonable idea. It just does not work, for two reasons.
The first is that the internet cannot answer the question. Any symptom you can name is consistent with something harmless and something dreadful, and a search will show you both. The harmless explanation does not stick, because you already suspected the dreadful one, and now you have read about it in detail. Rather than narrowing the possibilities, the search furnishes the fear with specifics.
The second is that every search teaches your brain that the sensation was worth investigating. That is what checking does, in health anxiety as in OCD, which is its close cousin. The relief you feel when you find the reassuring page is the same relief a person with OCD feels after a ritual, and it has the same cost: it confirms that the danger was real enough to need checking, so the next sensation gets flagged faster, and the search gets more urgent.
The engine
Health anxiety runs on a loop. A sensation is noticed. It is interpreted as a possible sign of serious illness. Anxiety rises, which itself produces sensations: a racing heart, tension, a churning stomach, all of which can be interpreted as further evidence. Something is done to reduce the anxiety: searching, checking the body, asking someone, seeing the GP again. The relief is real, and it never lasts, because the checking has just made the sensation more important.
Searching is the most available form of checking, which is why it is so central. It is there at three in the morning, it never says no, and it never settles the question, because the question cannot be settled that way.
Why reassurance from a doctor does not last either
Many people with health anxiety have seen the GP repeatedly and been told, reasonably, that nothing is wrong. The relief lasts days, then the doubt reformulates. What if they missed it? What if it has changed since? The doctor becomes another search engine, and the reassurance becomes another check.
Therapy never asks you to skip sensible medical care. If a symptom is new and significant, see a doctor. What we work on is the checking and fear that continue after reasonable medical reassurance has been given, because that is the part that medicine cannot fix.
The way out
The treatment is CBT, and the centre of it is retiring the checking, gradually and deliberately, as a series of experiments rather than by willpower, which fails at three in the morning. When a sensation arrives and you do not search, the anxiety rises. Then, given nothing to feed on, it falls, and the sensation fades, because most sensations do. That falling is the thing you have never experienced, because you have always searched before it could happen.
Alongside that, we work on carrying the uncertainty that every human body produces. Nobody can promise you that you are well. Bodies produce odd sensations constantly, and the goal is getting your time and attention back from the search for a certainty that is not available.
It is uncomfortable at first, and it works. Most people find the noise fades far faster than they expected. If you recognise the forty pages and the relief that lasts a day, there is more on how I treat health anxiety, and searching is usually the first thing we retire.