I want you to imagine that one day you notice that there's a mole on your R and that the mole was bigger than you remembered it to be you start thinking to yourself maybe this is skin cancer and begin to think about all of the potential worst case scenarios that could happen this is a really common type of worry in health anxiety and when people have these types of worries it's natural to want to seek reassurance from a doctor to get some certainty as to what's going on with the mole or to engage in repeated
checking Behavior to see whether or not the mole is continuing to grow or change or if there are any signs that the mole is dangerous now while this reassurance seeking and checking is understandable it doesn't help with a person's anxiety in a previous video I talked about how reassurance seeking and checking behaviors serve to perpetuate and maintain health anxiety because these types of behaviors never give the person complete certainty or relief about what they're worrying about rather the checking and reassurance seeking is actually counterproductive because it keeps a person's focus and attention on the thought
that there is something seriously wrong with their health so it's important to recognize and reduce the amount of checking and reassurance seeking behavior that you might be engaging in if you're experiencing high levels of health anxiety so what we want to talk about in today's video is how exactly does a person go about reducing the amount of Health checking and reassurance seeking that they're doing and it's not simply a matter of telling yourself to just stop it because that's a lot easier said than done so I want to talk about three steps that a person
can use to reduce or eliminate their health checking and reassurance seeking behaviors and the first step is to evaluate the actual benefits that the reassurance seeking or checking behavior is actually giving you so for example if I have a mole on my arm that I'm concerned about I might notice that I'm measuring it on a daily basis or poking it and prodding it to see if it's getting more painful so once I recognize the checking Behavior I want to ask myself a few questions to figure out how helpful the behavior is so I want to
ask myself what's the purpose of doing this what's the benefit or the advantage of doing this Behavior as frequently as I'm doing it are there any disadvantages or costs associated with doing this Behavior as much as I'm doing it does this Behavior actually helped me accomplish what I want in this situation how reasonable is it for me to continue doing this health checking Behavior as frequently as I'm doing it and and once I have all of these potential advantages and disadvantages I want to ask myself do the benefits of engaging in this checking Behavior outweigh
the disadvantages or the costs of what I'm doing but asking yourself these questions what you're doing is taking a step away from the checking or reassurance seeking behavior and you're examining why you're actually doing it and the potential benefits of doing it if you recognize that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages of this Behavior that's a pretty good sign that you need to change what you're doing and this recognition could help motivate you to do something about it now that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to completely eliminate the behavior it doesn't mean that I completely
ignore and stop paying attention to this mole on my arm rather I may want to reduce how often I'm checking or postponing that behavior I can still check the mole but not necessarily checking the mole when I feel a Pang of anxiety and I feel a sudden rush to look at it and compare what I'm seeing to pictures that I took of the mole last week rather I might want to put off checking the mole for maybe a week and see if I still feel that same level of urge or need to check the mole
so in doing this I can reduce how frequently I'm engaging in the checking Behavior now there are some reassurance seeking and checking behaviors that may just be best eliminated because there's little chance that the potential benefits are ever going to outweigh the potential costs most common example that I talk about is going online going to online discussion sites about health conditions or diseases and seeking reassurance or asking other people on those sites about symptoms that you're experiencing the quality of information that you're going to get in that scenario is likely pretty low and so that
may be something that you don't just want to reduce the frequency of how much you're doing it but that may be something to completely eliminate so once you've decided that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages of the checking and reassurance seeking behavior and you've determined that you either want to reduce the frequency of behavior or to eliminate the behavior step two focuses on making a goal and a plan for how you actually change your behavior and I've talked a lot in previous videos about how to set goals in the context of depression but the exact same
approach works for reducing or eliminating these re reassurance seeking or checking behaviors in health anxiety so when you're setting these goals you want to make sure that the goal is specific and that you you know exactly what it is that you're going to do you want to make sure that the goal is defined in terms of in terms of your behavior it's something that you're going to be doing not how you're going to feel doing it you want to make sure that the goal has a clear end line that you'll know exactly what you need
to do to know when you've accomplished the goal and the goal has to be realistic and that you're 95% certain that you'll be able to accomplish the goal so for example imagine that I've been researching information on skin cancer on the internet and my ultimate goal may be to postpone or reduce how much of that internet research that I'm doing so I can set a goal of for this week whenever I feel an urge to look up something about skin cancer on the internet I'm going to set a timer for an hour and not do
any internet research until that hour has expired I know exactly what I'm going to do it's defined in terms of my behavior I'll know whether or not I've done it and I may be 95% certain that I can actually do it now that last part can be a little bit tricky for people it's common that when people start to try and reduce or eliminate these Health checking or reassurance seeking behaviors that people start to experience increased levels of anxiety in the short term so it could potentially be too big of a step for me to
set a timer for an hour maybe I can set the goal that for this week I set a timer for five minutes and after that five minutes then I can engage in the internet research and then maybe the next week I set the timer for 10 minutes and the week after that the timer gets set for 20 minutes and so on and so forth in this way I gradually increase the amount of time that I'm postponing my internet research and doing it in a way that I'm not spiking my anxiety and causing too big of
a surge in anxiety that I'm not going to be able to complete the goal and this brings up an important point that when you start to reduce or eliminate these reassurance seeking or checking behaviors it's going to cause your health anxiety to increase at first that's because these reassurance seeking and checking behaviors can be helpful to reduce anxiety in the short term if I check the size of my mole and it's no bigger than it was last week I get some reassurance that it's not grown and I feel better the problem is in the long
term this reassurance seeking and checking behavior perpetuates my anxiety so by eliminating or reducing the reassurance seeking or checking what that's going to do is cause a temporary increase in anxiety in the short term but as long as I continue to not engage in these reassurance seeking and checking behaviors the anxiety about my health will go down in the long run so part of this is understanding and recognizing that there is going to be a temporary increase in the anxiety but also learning that you can tolerate that anxiety without having to do anything to make
it go away so once you have your goal and your plan for what you're going to do the third step is to actually implement the plan so I start sitting a timer every time I feel an urge to do some internet research about skin cancer and I see what happens it's at this point where you can really evaluate whether or not reducing or eliminating the checking or reassurance seeking behavior is helpful ask yourself by delaying or eliminating the checking or reassurance seeking Behavior how did I feel did I know noticed that my anxiety was worse
was it better was there no difference did I surprise myself with how capable I was at not engaging in the checking or reassurance seeking Behavior was the anxiety really as bad as I thought it would be what are the conclusions that I can take away from changing these reassurance seeking and checking behaviors what most people find is that over time as they engage in less less of these checking and reassurance seeking behaviors their focus on potential Health catastrophes goes down and with it they feel less anxious about their health more generally so I hope that
gives you a bit of a better sense of how to reduce or eliminate these checking or reassurance seeking behaviors that goes beyond just stop it and instead gives you a plan for what you can actually do to reduce these health anxiety promoting behaviors and if you're interested in learning more about how to set goals that you'll always be able to achieve I encourage you to check out this video so that's all for today's video as always thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and I will see you in
the next one
