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3 Signs TikTok Might Be Making Your Anxiety Worse

Repeated health content can make you hyperaware of normal sensations, encourage compulsive checking, and send anxiety into overdrive.

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As someone with health OCD and a rare chronic illness, I know just how easy it is to go down the rabbit hole that is TikTok. While the social media app can be informative in many ways, it can also lead you to false self-diagnoses. Josef Newton, founder of the health anxiety app Condri, calls this “symptom borrowing.”

“’Symptom borrowing’ is a term used to describe an instance where frequent exposure to somebody else’s symptoms leads you to progressively notice, reinterpret or expect similar sensations and behaviours in yourself,” he explains. “This does not mean that a person is consciously copying, pretending, or imagining an illness. The sensations may feel entirely real. Instead, attention, expectation and anxiety can amplify everyday physical feelings or behaviours that previously went unnoticed.”

Of course, we all know how the TikTok algorithm works: the more you interact with a video on a given topic, the more they push similar content. So, if you’re convinced you have, say, a specific autoimmune disease and conduct much of your research on TikTok, you might start noticing more videos about the condition on your FYP.

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