It's Not All in Your Head: How Worrying about Your Health Could Be Making You Sick--and What You Can Do about It

by Gordon J.G. Asmundson, Steven Taylor

Where do you go for help when no one believes you're really sick? The doctors can’t explain your symptoms, but you know there’s something wrong because you can sense it in your body. Living with the specter of an unresolved health issue isn't just painful, it's isolating. The preoccupation and stress it causes can disrupt your career or interfere with personal relationships. If you continually experience symptoms of illness, or worry a lot about disease, you may be suffering from health anxiety--a condition that can produce physical effects of its own, including muscle tension, nausea, and a quickened heart rate. In this compassionate and empowering book, noted psychologists Gordon J. G. Asmundson and Steven Taylor provide simple and accurate self-tests designed to help you understand health anxiety and the role it might be playing in how you feel. Concrete examples and helpful exercises show you how to change thought and behavior patterns that contribute to the aches, pains, and anxiety you're experiencing. The authors also explain how to involve friends and family--and when to seek professional help--as you learn to stay well without worry.

Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) Self-Help Book of Merit

Genres: Health, Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Help

212 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

Reviews

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book for anyone who has health anxiety. It talks about reasons why people may have it, and what they can do about it. It provides some insight into behavior modification and gives techniques for relaxation. As a person who suffers from health anxiety and stress, I didn't find this book to be an all-encompassing solution, but it did provide me some strategies that I'm finding useful. I'm sure I'll be re-reading this book at some point or another.

[Zach Koenig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up because I happened to stumble across it and didn't realize that "health anxiety" was such a known condition in the medical community. I struggle with it as well, and as such was curious to see what it had to saw about the topic.

What I found is that "It's Not All In Your Head" took the pretty traditional approach to self-help books: It explained what health anxiety is, confirmed that it is a real, not imagined, phenomena, and then gave a number of approaches towards lessening its effects (relaxation, less self-monitoring, etc.). These are all good pieces of advice, and could be very helpful to people.

What I think is missing from the book, however, is almost inherent from the title: I think that health anxiety is very much "all in one's head" in many cases. Not to say that it is imagined and its symptoms are not real, as I know all too well that isn't the case, but the "anxiety" part of health anxiety stems from thoughts. So, what is going on "inside the head" is very key to understanding how the manage the condition. This book is a bit light on that, instead giving more concrete, relaxation-based techniques.

So, I consider a book like this to be a great "first step", so to speak, in understanding the concept of health anxiety and some of its basic tenants. Will it truly help the reader? Maybe, maybe not...that can be said about any self-help tome. In my case, I wanted to see a lot more discussion on the mental side of things, and that really isn't what this book is all about. I wanted to hear more personal stories (not just fictional-sounding "example cases") and get some scientific data or in-depth discussions on the thought patterns behind health anxiety.

[Edu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A helpful book for those that discovered that anxiety symptoms are taking over your life. Following the activities patiently and together with further means (meditation, therapy, other resources,...) the tide turns. If you're thinking about getting this book because you're feeling overwhelmed or scared, well done, getting to search for help it's not easy. Remember to reach out to your close ones as well, in spite of finding people that will be dismissive you will be surprised by how many people can help you and happily will do so as, in their own way, they have been under the anxiety strain.

[Katie Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

The problem with books like these is that they are poisoning patients and medical professionals with the scientifically baseless idea that anything that can't be immediately explained is psychological and that patients who believe their pain has a physical cause when one can't be found are just "anxious". Disagreement isn't anxiety; it's freedom of thought. It's both ridiculous and disgraceful that the medical community has tried to rebrand "it's not all in your head" as if it's their thing and pro-psychogenic medicine. "It's not all in your head" was the phrase used to comfort, validate, and spread awareness of thousands of people who were falsely diagnosed with psychogenic illnesses because doctors were either too stupid or too lazy to figure out that they had organic illnesses. And now the medical community has the audacity to imply that they were never saying their pain wasn't real? That is wasn't "all in their head" despite being "all in their head"? It's nonsense. All the medical community is doing is saying the same thing in a different way so they can avoid backlash from the infuriating and incredibly harmful thing they are doing. They want to say audacious things that negatively impact people's lives, but they don't want people to get mad at them for saying them, so they say to patients "your pain is real--even though it's not". It's illogical. With chronic illness patients, the problem is the pain, not worrying over the pain. Addressing the worry won't help the pain, because the worry is not the problem; it is the response to the pain. The worry is there for a reason, so that people will do something about the pain, and make it go away.