Find helpful resources for understanding and managing health anxiety, including books, blog posts, podcasts, and TED or TEDx Talks.
Books
Blog Posts
- Hypochondria: How to Deal with Health Anxiety?
- How to Cope with Health Anxiety without Medication?
- How to Calm Yourself After Googling Symptoms?
- How to Create a “Safety Plan” for Health Anxiety Flare-Ups?
- How to Challenge “What If” Thinking Around Illness?
- How to Recover After a Health Anxiety Spiral?
- How to Respond to Friends or Family Who Don’t Understand Health Anxiety?
- How to Handle Health Anxiety in the Middle of the Night?
- 200 Things to Do Instead of Googling Your Symptoms
Health Anxiety Podcasts
- Health Anxiety Podcast Show — The Anxiety Guy
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One of the longest-running podcasts focused specifically on health anxiety. It covers symptom fear, body checking, reassurance-seeking, uncertainty, intrusive health thoughts, and reducing the habit of constantly monitoring the body. It remains active in 2026.
- Living With Health Anxiety: How to Stop Worrying About Every Symptom — Inside Mental Health
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A recent 2026 episode with anxiety expert Dr. Karen Lynn Cassiday. It explains the difference between reasonable health concern and illness anxiety, why repeated medical reassurance often fails to solve the problem, and how symptom Googling can intensify the cycle. - How to Handle Health Anxiety — Speaking of Psychology
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Dr. Karen Lynn Cassiday explains illness anxiety disorder, excessive reassurance-seeking, body checking, avoiding doctors, “Dr. Google,” and evidence-based treatment. It is one of the strongest expert introductions to health anxiety. - I Tested AI on Health Anxiety — Your Anxiety Toolkit
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A 2026 episode exploring how asking AI repeated medical questions can turn into another form of reassurance-seeking. Kimberley Quinlan shows how symptom searches can escalate from a simple question into increasingly frightening possibilities and more uncertainty. - Health Anxiety: The Disordered Guide to Health Anxiety — Disordered
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Explores different ways health anxiety appears, including constant Googling, tracking health metrics, checking sensations, avoiding medical appointments, and needing certainty. It also explains why recovery involves responding differently to uncertainty rather than proving that nothing bad could ever happen. - Dr. Josh Spitalnick: Health Anxiety and Living Life Well — The OCD Stories
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Clinical psychologist Dr. Josh Spitalnick discusses different forms of health anxiety, social media, bodily sensations, ERP, ACT, and learning to continue living normally even when health-related uncertainty is present. - What If It Isn’t Anxiety This Time? — Health Anxiety Podcast Show
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A 2026 episode about one of the most persistent health-anxiety thoughts: “What if this symptom is different?” It focuses on the repeated search for certainty and why reassurance rarely settles the question for long. - Health Anxiety and Somatic Hyper-Focus — Disordered
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Explains what happens when attention becomes locked onto heartbeat, breathing, twitching, stomach sensations, pain, or other bodily experiences. It discusses how constant monitoring can make sensations feel increasingly noticeable and threatening.
TED & TEDx Talks Related to Health Anxiety
- How to Google Your Symptoms Without Freaking Out — John Whyte
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A 2025 TEDx talk from the former chief medical officer of WebMD about why online symptom searching can quickly make people more frightened. It explains how search results, algorithms, health influencers, and too much information can feed anxiety instead of providing useful clarity.
