Dr. Brittney Chesworth has a good read on a phenomenon that was growing even before Covid made it more prevalent — “Health Anxiety.”
I’ve written about it extensively, having developed it after becoming a dad, and if you struggle with this enormously challenging and often private battle, I’d suggest you read her article.
And then, of course, look for a therapist or psychiatrist.
But Chesworth notes that people with health anxiety often fall into “all-or-nothing” thinking where they think of health as binary.
They think they’re either perfectly healthy or deathly ill.
For example, take a suspicious mole on your arm.
Someone with health anxiety might immediately think it’s melanoma that’s spread.
In reality, it could be completely benign, or if it is, indeed, cancerous, it could be a much less serious basal cell carcinoma (Plopped in the middle of seriousness between basal cell and malignant melanoma is a squamous cell carcinoma).
There’s a spectrum of skin cancers, and while something might be wrong with that mole, it doesn’t mean death is imminent.
So one of the roots of health anxiety, Chesworth notes, is seeing “health and illness in rigid, inflexible terms.”
An inability to see that “health,” however it’s defined, is a spectrum.
No one’s body is perfectly healthy, but not every person is facing imminent death.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Chesworth suggests, is particularly helpful in challenging cognitive distortions such as the “all-or-nothing” thinking that’s common in health anxiety.
Finally, I want to mention this.
Thanks to the theological errors underpinning “victorious Christian living,” Christians often feel particularly ashamed of fearing physical suffering.
This, despite the fact that Jesus took physical suffering, deadly seriously.
He told John’s disciples of his ministry in Matthew 11, “The blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor.”
That was proof of his Messiahship, and many of those proofs were about alleviating physical suffering.
Jesus understood the pain of physical suffering and he certainly dreaded the cross.
Yet Christians today often adopt some kind of pseudo-gnosticism where they dismiss physical suffering because this life is all about the soul.
And so, scores of Christians with health anxiety are shamed into silence by a church that promotes faulty theology.
If you’re looking to engage with others who struggle with health anxiety, I’ve found No More Panic a particularly good discussion board, as well as Beyond Blue.
And finally.
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
[Painting: You know it. What’s the connection to this post? Well a) I try to put as much art on here as possible and b) did you know that one professor of pathological anatomy believes that Lisa del Giocondo, the supposed inspiration for The Mona Lisa, suffered from high cholesterol?
He came to this diagnosis after noticing fatty acid buildups on her left eyelid — called xanthelasma. You will also notice that she has a small lipoma on her right hand. A lipoma is a benign fatty tissue tumor common in those with high cholesterol.
