Karen Lynn Cassiday - Freedom from Health Anxiety: Understand and Overcome Obsessive Worry about Your Health or Someone Elses and Find Peace of Mind

As a health anxiety specialist, I applaud Karen Cassiday for helping readers understand that the illness they fear is not the illness they have. If you worry about fatal diseases, Freedom from Health Anxiety is a must-read. Cassiday provides real-life examples, captures the torturous inner dialogue of people who suffer needlessly, and then provides a way out with exercises and tools.

Ken Goodman, LCSW , board member of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), and creator of The Anxiety Solution Series

Karen Lynn Cassiday is one of the leading experts in the anxiety field, not only because she is knowledgeable, but because she has a way of translating information for health anxiety sufferers to understand and use immediately in their lives. Freedom from Health Anxiety is packed with success stories, specific strategies, and meaningful ways to change how you respond to your health worries. This book is exactly what you need to take back your life from health anxiety!

Kimberly Morrow, LCSW , anxiety therapist, author, national speaker, and co-owner of www.anxietytraining.com

Karen Cassiday compassionately outlines a clear blueprint for dealing with anxiety about illness, dying, and death. Read this wonderful book to learn from a master clinician how to live a happy life even with medical uncertainty.

Elizabeth DuPont Spencer, LCSW-C , co-owner of Anxiety Training

Karen Cassiday has written a helpful book on how to incorporate creative exposure and response prevention (ERP) exercises into the treatment of health anxiety. The guidance offered throughout is straightforward and easy to implement. Readers will learn how to use gratitude to counterbalance the negative chatter that anxiety injects into ones unfolding experience. I will be recommending this book to my clients looking for additional support working on moving past health anxiety.

Debra Kissen, PhD, MHSA , CEO of Light on Anxiety, author of Rewire Your Anxious Brain , and coauthor of The Panic Workbook for Teens and Break Free from Intrusive Thoughts

This is an incredibly timely resource from such a talented clinician in our field. What a gift this is to the professional community, as well as to those who suffer with health anxiety. Karen shares her expertise in a validating and relatable way, and those who need help can now get it from one of the best. Thank you, Karen Cassiday!

Beth Salcedo, MD , psychiatrist and medical director of The Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, with offices in DC, Northern VA and New York City, NY; and board member of the ADAA

This book is an amazing gift in times such as these. I know too well how debilitating health anxiety can be, and this is exactly what I needed thirty years ago. Cassiday clearly and compassionately presents valuable context, personal accounts, and science-based therapies to help those struggling build resilience and cultivate peace. This book is the key that will unlock a happier and healthier mindset for countless readers.

Wendy Tamis Robbins , speaker, anxiety coach, attorney, and best-selling author of The Box

An essential resource for anyone overwhelmed by illness concerns, Freedom from Health Anxiety is loaded with evidence-based suggestions to help you step away from avoidance, reassurance seeking, and other tactics that counterintuitively make anxiety more difficult to manage. The powerful concepts in this book will help you understand and work through persistent patterns of worry, tolerate the difficult emotions driven by uncertainty, and selectively respond to health concerns in new, more productive ways.

Joel Minden, PhD , licensed clinical psychologist, and author of Show Your Anxiety Whos Boss

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

NEW HARBINGER PUBLICATIONS is a registered trademark of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

Copyright 2022 by Karen Cassiday
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Daniel

Acquired by Ryan Buresh

Edited by Teja Watson

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cassiday, Karen, author.

Title: Freedom from health anxiety : understand and overcome obsessive worry about your health or someone elses and find peace of mind / Karen Cassiday, PhD.

Description: Oakland, CA : New Harbinger Publications, Inc., [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021047413 | ISBN 9781684039043 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Anxiety. | Worry--Prevention. | Stress (Psychology) | Peace of mind. | Mental health. | COVID-19 (Disease)

Classification: LCC BF575.A6 C375 2022 | DDC 152.4/6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047413

This book is dedicated to everyone who longs for peace of mind as they journey through a life that includes both the potential for great beauty and meaning alongside the certainty of bodily suffering and death.

Contents

Foreword

As I write this in July 2021, the world is approximately eighteen months into the COVID-19 pandemic, which has to date affected 220 countries and territories, with more than 191 million cases and 4 million deaths reported worldwide. In addition to its staggering impact on physical well-being and mortality, large-scale disasters like these are almost always accompanied by increases in mental health disorders, with the mental health footprint typically eventually exceeding the medical one.

Prior to this pandemic, studies on the epidemiology of health anxiety suggested that it is a relatively common condition that, unlike other anxiety disorders that are more prevalent in women, appears to affect men and women equally. There were also already suggestions that rates of health anxiety were increasing, in part due to a more intense focus on monitoring health via smartphones and other connected health devices (activity trackers, Bluetooth-enabled scales and chest-strap heart rate monitors, sleep tracking devices, etc.) and in part due to an increasing use of the Internet to search for medical information for self-diagnosis of concerning symptoms.

With this backdrop in mind, it is easy to imagine health anxiety taking center stage amongst the many medical and mental health consequences of COVID-19. People with health anxiety prior to the pandemic may have experienced an exacerbation in their symptoms, and people without health anxiety prior to the pandemic may now have been primed to interpret bodily sensations and symptoms, no matter how small, as dangerous or potentially even lethal. While both scenarios may be justified and even considered reasonable during this time, we know that once established, health anxiety leads to continued vigilance and is often associated with constant scanning of the body, repeated requests for reassurance, and increased browsing on the Internet, all of which may fuel the vicious cycle by increasing anxiety and intensifying symptoms, leading to catastrophic misinterpretationseven after the pandemic recedes.

Fortunately, highly effective psychological treatments exist for treating health anxiety, with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) being the most well-established of the lot, enabling patients to achieve relief from their symptoms that is both rapid and durable. One of the most commonly cited limitations of CBT, however, is the difficulty involved in finding access to an expert mental health provider who is capable of delivering treatment as designed and tested in empirical studies. That is where a book like Freedom from Health Anxiety comes in.