Hollie Sharman, 25, spent years convinced she was dying, visiting accident and emergency departments as often as four or five times a week before being diagnosed with health anxiety and health-related obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). In one visit, she says she remained in A&E for 13 hours, only to be told each time that doctors could find nothing wrong. Her account features in a report by BBC News.
Sharman says the pattern began around her 22nd birthday, when a panic attack at a restaurant meal triggered years of preoccupation with her physical health. She describes spending hours searching symptoms online, using both Google and ChatGPT, in an effort to identify what she believed was a serious underlying illness. ‘I’d go home, but then my legs would feel weak, so I’d Google that and then it would say it’s a sign of heart failure,’ she says. ‘So I’d go back, it was literally a constant cycle.’
What health anxiety can look like
Clinical psychologist Dr Kirren Schnack describes health anxiety as ‘a constant worry about being seriously ill or becoming seriously ill when you are not’.
She identifies several patterns. One is ‘checking’ behaviour: frequently examining the body, monitoring blood pressure or temperature, or researching symptoms online. Another is seeking repeated reassurance from the internet, friends or family. Some people go the other way, avoiding doctors or even looking at their own bodies because they fear bad news. Others, Dr Schnack says, ‘take on the persona of somebody who has an illness’, slowing their movements and stopping exercise as though already unwell.
Sharman says health anxiety affected her relationships as well as her daily life. At its worst, she stopped replying to family messages and describes her partner being unable to say the right thing. ‘I would get upset because he didn’t understand what was going on inside my own head,’ she says. ‘How can you tell someone everything’s fine when I think I’m actually dying?’
Managing the condition
Sharman says her family and partner have been ‘incredibly supportive’ and helped her reach what she describes as a better place. One technique she found useful was keeping a symptom diary: writing down a worry such as ‘chest pain, excruciating’ and then recording at the end of the day that she had been fine. She says this gave her evidence to draw on the next time the fear returned. ‘I thought I was dying then and I wasn’t,’ she says.
Dr Schnack sets out several approaches that she says may help. She suggests challenging worst-case thinking by considering alternative explanations for physical sensations, such as attributing a stiff back to posture rather than illness. She also recommends setting limits on how often someone seeks reassurance from friends or family. Physical strategies she mentions include brief bursts of movement to process adrenaline and cortisol, grounding techniques using strong sensory experiences such as holding an ice cube, and a specific breathing exercise involving a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth.
On when to act on a symptom, Dr Schnack draws a distinction: checking the NHS website for something ‘new, concerning or doesn’t go away’ is, she says, ‘responsible health behaviour’. If a symptom persists beyond two weeks, she advises making a GP appointment.
Sharman says her health anxiety ‘doesn’t control her life any more’, though she is clear it required active effort: ‘You need to push yourself and do things when you’re anxious, don’t put your life on hold because I did for so many years.’
