Читать книгу Anxiety Toolbox: The Complete Fear-Free Plan - Gloria Thomas - Страница 47

Research suggests that anxieties about health are a means of expressing vulnerability. This process, called Somatization, occurs when emotions that we find difficult to express are transformed into a physical expression of the psychological pain. It is now well established that mind and body act as one. Everything you think and everything you feel produces chemical changes in the body. Hence, anxious and worrying thoughts can be expressed through the physical body.

It is thought that this is a very common way for men to express their feelings. Whilst many men refuse to recognize that they are worried or anxious, because they see it as being indicative of weakness, they are much more open to accepting physical illness as a sign that something is not quite right. According to Dr Lipsitt, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, most of us somatize but people with hypochondria clutch at their physical symptoms to explain why their life is so painful. It isn’t the ‘illness’ that is painful, but the underlying psychological conflict that manifests in physical symptoms. Some anxiety disorders, such as depression and OCD, develop as a result of somatizing.

Illness is also a very useful way of getting support, attention or time out. If, as children, we got away with using a tummy ache or headache to get out of something that we didn’t want to do, then we may well use this strategy in adulthood (consciously and unconsciously) to avoid things we don’t like or have difficulty confronting. At such times, we can develop aches or pains or suddenly become incapacitated by nausea or a feeling of faintness. People can also sometimes hold on to or develop an imagined illness because it is a good excuse to stop them getting on with their lives.

Of course, the problem with health anxiety is that powerful, worrying beliefs can lead to poor health – they are often a self-fulfilling prophecy. High levels of anxiety and stress create wear and tear in the body. One study, which assessed how the immune system responds to anxiety and stress, found that of the healthy individuals subjected to the cold virus those who were suffering from high anxiety developed a weakening of the immune system and were far more susceptible to the virus than those with lower anxiety levels.