‘Coronavirus has me worried sick’
Lauren Bravo on what it’s like to navigate an epidemic when you suffer from health anxiety
Here’s a fun internet quiz for our times! Which coronavirus reaction type are you? Are you A) the naysayer, scoffing to anyone who’ll listen that the outbreak is ‘no worse than a cold!’? Or B) the alarmist, stockpiling baked beans and booming updates on every new diagnosis and worse-case-scenario across the pub like a Fox News auditionee?
Or maybe you’re in my camp, C) the ones for whom the past few weeks have been a haze of headlines and hand sanitiser, false alarms and frantic googling. Who just wish everyone would stop talking about it for five minutes. Whose chests are tight, not with virus, but panic. As far as we know.
Some would call it hypochondria, preserve of attention-seekers, butt of jokes. Psychologists call it health anxiety – I almost wept the day I discovered the term, grateful to realise it’s my brain that’s the drama queen, not me – and they usually file it within the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) spectrum of mental health disorders.
Health anxiety is characterised by constant preoccupation with having or contracting a serious illness, and a hypervigilance of bodily sensations, monitoring every shiver and tingle for signs of imminent death. There are few official figures, but in Australia the condition is thought to affect 6% of people. Anxiety UK has confirmed that it seems to be on the rise here, citing the internet (what else?) as a likely trigger.
Personally, I’ve been like this since I was a kid. But, in more recent years, Dr Google and I have become firm frenemies, with my internet search history reading like a medieval plague diary. I’ve misdiagnosed myself with water intoxication, deep vein thrombosis, multiple sclerosis, tapeworms, gallstones, brain tumours, consumption (I’d watched Moulin Rouge) and toxic shock syndrome (once a month since I first read the back of a tampon box). I’m pretty fortunate, though – I’m functioning. For some, health anxiety can be completely debilitating.
You see, it’s a vicious circle. I worry about a possible illness and my anxiety rewards me with very real bodily symptoms – nausea, dizziness, headaches, palpitations – which in turn makes me more anxious, which in turn makes me feel more ill. This is the detail that snarky jokes about hypochondria fail to grasp: that, for many of us, the idea of illness isn’t ‘all in our heads’ at all. It’s in our stomachs, our chests, our muscles and bones.
The difficulty in distinguishing between anxiety symptoms and symptoms borne from a ‘real’ condition is that, well, often you can’t. The one time you ignore that gut feeling (sod’s law hisses in the back of your mind) is the time it’ll turn out to be cancer. Even writing this article feels like a reckless tempting of fate. ‘Journalist who wrote about worrying she had coronavirus diagnosed with coronavirus,’ the papers will say.
So how do we cope in the current climate? The NHS recommends keeping a diary of health panics, listing every spiralling worry (‘this headache is meningitis’) alongside the most likely explanation (‘I have drunk three coffees and no water today’). In the long-run, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is one of the most proven and effective ways of dealing with health anxiety. I had some, years ago, and it helped. But in the short-term, I know that the best thing I can do is distract myself from coronavirus, if I can, for as long as I can. To stay off Twitter, or at least mute the worst doom merchants and resist clicking on the trending topic to see each update multiply. We can seek solace in statistics, too, in the low risk to the young and healthy. Which, I try to remember, is me.
I’ve also started running more – a mental health cliché, I know. But when I run, I can focus on the sweat and breathlessness and ache that are supposed to be there. It’s a helpful way to remind myself each morning that my body is, for the most part, functioning exactly as it’s supposed to. That I’m one of the very lucky ones, and have been since before the virus hit the headlines.