Online Health Anxiety Therapy (UK-wide)
Reduce checking and worry; build confidence and flexibility

 

 

Health anxiety is particularly well-suited to online treatment. The checking behaviours, reassurance-seeking, and avoidance that maintain it happen in your daily life — not in a clinic — and the therapeutic work is oriented toward changing those patterns in the contexts where they actually occur. Sessions via Zoom are equally effective for this, and for many people the flexibility of online appointments makes it easier to attend consistently.

This page is for people across the UK looking for specialist therapy for health anxiety online.

What Health Anxiety Is

Health anxiety involves a tendency to interpret normal or ambiguous bodily sensations as evidence of serious illness, followed by checking and reassurance-seeking behaviours that provide temporary relief but sustain the anxiety over time.

The sensations themselves are real. A racing heart, a headache, an unfamiliar feeling in the chest or stomach — these are genuine physical experiences. The problem is not that they are noticed, but what happens next: the catastrophic interpretation, the urgent need to resolve the uncertainty, and the compulsive checking that follows.

Each check provides brief relief. But it also reinforces the message that uncertainty was genuinely dangerous, that checking was necessary, and that the next sensation will require the same response. Attention sharpens to physical sensations. The threshold for what counts as alarming lowers. Over time, reassurance from GPs, tests, and internet searches provides shorter and shorter periods of relief before the doubt returns — often about a different symptom entirely.

What Health Anxiety Can Look and Feel Like

Everyone is different, but common experiences of health anxiety can include some of the following...

• Body checking. Examining skin, feeling for lumps, monitoring heart rate, watching for asymmetry, repeatedly testing sensation or movement in a particular area.

• Repeated GP visits and tests. Attending despite previous all-clear results, or seeking multiple opinions. Temporary relief after a negative result, followed by doubt returning.

• Symptom searching. Hours spent on medical websites, forums, and symptom checkers — usually finding something that fits, which increases rather than reduces distress.

• Reassurance seeking. Asking partners, family, or friends whether a symptom is serious. The reassurance helps briefly, then needs to be sought again.

• Avoidance. Staying away from exercise, physical intimacy, certain foods, or activities because of the fear that they might trigger or worsen a symptom.

• The return of doubt. The defining feature: relief never lasts. A new symptom emerges, or doubt returns about the old one.

 

Why It Keeps Going

The reassurance and checking cycle works against recovery because it prevents the one thing that would actually reduce anxiety: learning, through experience, that uncertainty can be tolerated without resolving it through checking.

Every time a check reduces anxiety, it strengthens the pattern. Attention becomes calibrated to physical threat. Ordinary sensations are noticed and scrutinised. Tolerance for uncertainty shrinks. The anxiety does not reduce over time — it tends to expand.

Treatment works by reversing this. Rather than seeking certainty, the aim is to build the capacity to carry uncertainty and to redirect time and attention toward the life that health anxiety has been steadily displacing.
How Treatment Works

The approach is cognitive behavioural, drawing on both CBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Treatment starts with a careful formulation of your specific pattern: what triggers it, what the underlying fears are, how the checking and reassurance cycle is maintained, and what has been lost or avoided as a result.
 

Active treatment involves systematically reducing checking and reassurance-seeking behaviours in a graded and agreed way, while building the skills to tolerate the discomfort that arises when those behaviours are dropped. ACT contributes techniques for relating differently to anxious thoughts and physical sensations, so that they become less controlling rather than requiring urgent resolution.

One important point: therapy does not involve telling you your symptoms are not real, or that you should ignore your body. We establish clear, sensible criteria for when seeking medical attention is appropriate, and work within those. The aim is to reduce compulsive reassurance-seeking, not healthcare generally.

Format: Weekly 60-minute sessions via Zoom, available across the UK.

What Changes

Reduction in checking, body scanning, symptom searching, and reassurance seeking. Increased capacity to notice a sensation without immediately escalating into checking. Greater tolerance for uncertainty. A gradual return to activities that have been avoided. Progress is measured by engagement with life, not by whether you ever notice a physical sensation.

Why Work With Me

I'm Christian Hughes, a BABCP-accredited cognitive behavioural psychotherapist with extensive experience across NHS, military, and private practice settings. Health anxiety is a condition I work with regularly, including presentations with a strong OCD-like checking component, health anxiety entangled with generalised worry or depression, and cases where long-standing avoidance has significantly reduced someone's quality of life.
 

My approach is formulation-led and integrates CBT and ACT. I also have a blog post on the mechanics of health anxiety — Why Does Health Anxiety Feel So Real? — which may be worth reading before we speak.
I work online across the UK via Zoom, and in person in Stourbridge, West Midlands.
 

Fees:£125 per 60-minute session, online via Zoom.
Availability: Daytime and limited early evenings.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Should I stop seeing my GP?
  No. Part of the work is establishing clear, agreed criteria for when seeking
  medical attention is appropriate — new symptoms, persistent symptoms, or symptoms that are significantly affecting your ability to function. Therapy targets the compulsive reassurance-seeking that goes beyond sensible healthcare, not healthcare itself.

• What if some of the symptoms are real?
  Sometimes they are, and this is something we take seriously rather than dismiss. The approach accounts for both possibilities: when a symptom meets the agreed criteria for medical attention, you seek it; when it does not, you follow the therapy approach and resist the compulsive check.

• Is health anxiety the same as OCD?
  There is significant overlap. Many people with health anxiety engage in OCD-like compulsions — checking, mental reviewing, reassurance-seeking — and the treatment principles are closely related, including the use of exposure and response prevention. Whether or not a formal OCD diagnosis applies, the approach is similar.

• How long does treatment take?
  Many people see meaningful functional improvement within 12 sessions. More complex or longstanding presentations typically take longer. We review progress regularly throughout.

• I have had health anxiety for years. Can it still be treated?
  Yes. Duration is not a barrier to treatment. Longstanding health anxiety may involve more entrenched patterns and a wider range of triggers, which typically requires more time, but the approach is equally applicable regardless of how long the difficulty has been present.

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Next Steps

If you would like to find out whether online therapy for health anxiety is the right next step for you, a free 15-minute call is available to talk through your situation before committing to anything.

[Book a free 15-minute chat] | [Book a session] | [In-Person Health Anxiety Therapy in Stourbridge]

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