The symptoms of health anxiety include having persistent thoughts that your are sick or have a serious medical illness, despite your doctors and medical tests telling you otherwise. Any change in your body (for example, stomach pain) will illicit significant worry that you may have an illness, such as cancer. You worry so much that you have a medical illness that you visit multiple doctors, and despite them telling you that you don't have any such illness, you don't believe them or are convinced they missed something, so you go to another doctor. Soon, you find yourself visiting multiple doctors and obtaining multiple medical tests that are all normal. The constant worry about having a medical illness makes you quite anxious and stressed out. You may develop other anxiety-related symptoms, such as panic attacks, sleep problems, appetite problems, muscle tension, and headaches or stomach aches. In turn, these anxiety symptoms can make you worry that these are part of the imagined medical illness that you are afraid of having, rather than attributing the symptoms to your anxiety and worry.
