If you live with chronic illness, it’s likely that you’ve experienced health anxiety. It’s a normal response to illness to fear disease progression or recurrence. Will our medications continue working? If not, will new treatments come along that will help us live well? What will it look like if our illness recurs or worsens? Will we suffer greatly? Will our lives be upended? Will we die?

Fear is a natural response to a real threat (Lebel et al., 2016). For a significant number of people, though, health anxiety becomes problematic. At what point does fear of illness progression become disabling? How do we manage our health anxiety so that we can enjoy a good quality of life?

Fear is a signal emotion, as it alerts us to the possibility of danger. When we use fear productively, we respond to it by using our cognition (including our memories, experiences, and knowledge) to ascertain whether we actually are in danger.

Living with chronic illness can cause our fear alarm to be very sensitive—and with good reason. When we’ve experienced suffering due to illness, our bodies remember this. Anything that reminds us of this suffering—an ache or pain, a medical test, even driving past the hospital—can cause our fear alarm to go off.

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