Health Anxiety Coach

Health Anxiety Coach Dr. Brit, PhD, LCSW | Therapist | Author | Clinical Supervisor | Continuing Education Provider

I help clients improve health anxiety w/ exposure-based CBT.

I also train therapists on how to use exposure-based CBT to treat anxiety-related disorders. Hi, I'm Dr. Britney Chesworth. I am a licensed therapist, researcher, educator and coach. I’ve spent the past 15 years helping people become unburdened by health anxiety so they can live more freely and joyfully. Health anxiety is one of my favorite things to work with because I personally struggled with t

his for so long. I’ve wasted many of my years living in fear of disease and dying. I know how real this struggle can be. You are not alone. It wasn't until I tried cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that I started to notice significant changes in my fear of disease. CBT is a short-term, skill-based, action-oriented type of intervention that reshapes unhelpful thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. CBT is considered a first-line psychological treatment for health anxiety. Inspired by my personal growth and change, I decided to specialize in CBT and began using these methods with my clients. I've watched my clients experience remarkable transformation in their lives, in relatively short periods of time, through retraining their brain to see health and illness more adaptively.

05/26/2026

This is not an easy fix. It can be really hard to learn to live in the present moment. This is especially true if you’ve had anxiety for years or decades and have grown quite used to living in your head. I once heard someone say, “people with anxiety will do their best living as close to the present moment as possible.” I never forgot it because it is so true.

Those of us with anxiety usually tend to be future-focused, worrying about all the possible bad things that could happen. We have a hard time being in the present. The good news is we can get better at it. It is worth improving because, when you really pay attention to what is going on around you and allow yourself to experience it, you will not be in the future. You simply can’t do both.

It can be helpful to practice living in the present moment for small chunks of time at first. Strategies I have used to help me practice this skill: (1) grounding exercises in which you take note of your physical environment through each of your senses (I’ll post a worksheet for this in my stories).; (2) playing board games/lawn games with the hubby (Rook, Codenames, Corn Hole, Ladder Golf) forces me to stay focused in the present because if I don’t I’ll lose the game, lol; (3) detaching from my phone for a small chunk of time so I don’t mindlessly scroll and, instead focus on present surroundings; (4) nature walks without phone, music, headphones and only focus on physical environment; (5) eating a delicious snack or meal with no distractions and being intentional about savoring/enjoying all the flavors. Importantly, expect that your mind will drift at times, especially as you build the habit. Don’t judge yourself-just recognize it and bring yourself back to the present. Try doing a present-focused activity for 10 minutes at time and then lengthen it as you build the skill. 

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link.✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new free guide available. Comment “TreatHAguide” for the link. ✨

05/20/2026

When we have health anxiety and react to situations, there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than we realize. Our life experiences, beliefs, rules, situations and reactions all interact with each other. In short, significant events in your life led you to develop certain health-related beliefs. You then, subsequently, developed certain rules that you assume you need to live by in order to protect yourself and keep yourself safe. In order to meet these rules or expectations and ensure your safety, you begin to use certain coping strategies. And then all of this influences how you react to situations in your daily life.

We all have rules that we live by, whether we realize it or not.
Rules become maladaptive when they are inflexible, rigid, oversimplified and lead to maladaptive behaviors. The scientific literature strongly supports the link between rigidity and emotional distress. Contrarily, decades of psychological research highlights the importance of flexibility in life.
Flexibility has been deemed the key to emotional well-being and mental health.

Can you detect the rigidity in this rules? It is quite extreme and leaves no wiggle room for the diversity of circumstances that exist in our world (and in health-related situations specifically).

The goal is to reshape these rules/expectations into more adaptive ones. Remember, you aren’t ignoring anything or being irresponsible. You will be tempted to think that! If sufficient evidence points to a potential health concern, you will respond. You just don’t need to spend hours a day searching for a problem.

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link.✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new free guide available. Comment “TreatHAguide” for the link. ✨

05/20/2026

We set ourselves up for disappointment when we think we must have answers immediately (or that you will always get it right). Get out of emergency mode. Here’s how to start:

1) Challenge catastrophic thoughts: Instead of immediately assuming the worst, seek alternative, explanations. Your headache is most likely tension, dehydration, stress, hormone-related or perhaps something minor. It’s probably not a brain tumor. Identify thinking errors (like catastrophizingblack-and-white thinking). Use Socratic questions: “What’s an alternative, non-catastrophic explanation for the symptom? What would I tell a friend?

2) Stop feeding the anxiety cycle with those pesky behaviors: Reassurance-seeking (Googling, doctor hopping, asking for constant validation) doesn’t help long-term. It only reinforces anxiety. Same with excessive body checking. The more you check, the more you find, and the more you panic Instead, try this: (A) Set a waiting period before acting on the urge to Google or seek reassurance (e.g., wait 3 days); (B) Have a symptom management plan: “If this persists or worsens after X time, I’ll check with a doctor” and (C) Remind yourself that anxiety makes everything feel urgent but it rarely is.

3) Build your uncertainty tolerance. Remember, we can never be 100% certain about our health. But we can get better at tolerating that uncertainty. Think of it like a muscle. The more you practice sitting with it, the stronger you get. What helps: (A) When anxiety overwhelms you, redirect your focus to the present moment (grounding, mindfulness, or engaging in a task); (B) Remind yourself: “I don’t need certainty to be safe” and (C) Let the fear exist without acting on it. This is how anxiety loses its power over time.

Assume first that symptoms are minor. Go about your life. And if real red flags appear, you’ll know when to take action.

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link.✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new free guide available. Comment “TreatHAguide” for the link. ✨

05/19/2026

When we hold problematic beliefs, we search our environment for data that reinforces these beliefs. If you believe that disease is inevitably going to result in severe suffering, debilitation or death, you will pay selective attention to information in your environment that supports this belief. You might be quick to notice the stories about people who experience significant suffering and/or die, while paying less attention to the many stories of people who overcome an illness or who are managing it well. You also might vividly remember times when you struggled with an illness but have a harder time recalling times that you were ill but coped with it well. This process of reinforcement makes our beliefs stronger over time.

It is important to reconsider your assumptions about the severity of disease and be open to considering alternative views. Of course, I want to acknowledge that getting diagnosed with a disease can be extremely difficult, stressful and anxiety-provoking. And diseases can certainly be terminal. It is a basic fact of life that we will all face death at some point. Learning to live with this reality will no doubt reduce health anxiety. However, despite all of this, it is essential to recognize that getting diagnosed with a medical condition is NOT synonymous with death and dying.

The goal is to interrupt and reset this process. First, you want to identify the common core beliefs that you struggle with (awareness is always the first step). Next, you want to retrain your brain. This involves challenging any “evidence” for the unhelpful core belief (i.e. not simply accepting it as a fact and questioning its validity). It also involves learning to proactively collect evidence for a new, more adaptive belief.
In this case, you would want to develop a new belief, such as
“I am strong, relatively healthy and capable of coping with disease.” You would want to actively identify evidence for this new belief. It takes a lot of effort at first but over time, your brain will start to naturally seek evidence for this belief.

Comment “guide” to get my free guide to improve HA.

Try taking on this new perspective. Confidence over certainty! ❤️✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to impr...
05/19/2026

Try taking on this new perspective. Confidence over certainty! ❤️

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link.✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new course available! Comment “TreatHA” for the details. ✨

03/13/2026

People with health anxiety often have distorted or biased ways of seeing health and illness. This can present itself in many different ways. I’ll provide a definition of each of these below.

CONFIRMATION BIAS: this confirms our common tendency, as humans, to seek out, interpret and remember information in a way that confirms what we already believe. Everyone does this but people with clinical anxiety do this much more often than those without. And people with health anxiety in particular tend to do this with health-related environmental stimuli specifically.

PROBABILITY OVERESTIMATION: This involves assuming that an event or outcome is more likely than it actually is. We think we are MUCH MORE LIKELY to have a serious disease than we actually are. We then go down the rabbit hole, grieving over our assumed diagnoses before anything has even happened. And, while it is true that people get diagnosed with diseases, it is less likely than we assume. I can tell you if all of my estimations were correct over the years, I would have died thousands of times.

PROBABILITY UNDERESTIMATION: People with health anxiety also underestimate the likelihood that a symptom they have is due to body noise or a minor or benign health issue. Even though it is much more likely that your symptom is due to something minor, you think that is LESS LIKELY than being due to a serious disease.

CATASTROPHIC THINKING: This is when we assume that any negative outcome would not just be negative, it would be absolutely devastating. If you did get diagnosed with something, you would live in utter despair and depression and would die from it, rather than the more likely scenario- you would get treatment, learn to cope and live with it and ultimately be okay.

Learn how to identify these thinking patterns. It can really help you to climb back out of that rabbit hole when a new symptom pops up.

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link.✨

✨If you are a therapist and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new training available! Comment “TreatHA” for the details. ✨

01/06/2026

A video I did based on an old IG trend- found it in my drafts and thought I might as well post it 😂.

I would often scroll through Reddit to look for posts about a symptom I had or to just browse personal health stories. What a TERRIBLE idea this was, lol. It always seemed harmless at first. But it never was. If you use Reddit/other forums to ask questions about your symptoms (or even just scroll through threads about health), you probably know deep down it never actually helps. It’s meant to soothe anxiety/uncertainty, but does the opposite. 

Why? I’ll break it down: (1) You’re not getting accurate, personalized info. People answering in forums are not your doctor. They don’t know your health history and are often other anxious people sharing worst case scenarios. You then cling to those scary outcomes, even if there were 50 “it’s nothing” replies in between. (2) You reinforce your fears and unhelpful beliefs. Each time you post, read, or scroll about symptoms, you strengthen the belief that something is wrong and that you can’t tolerate uncertainty. You might get brief relief if you see a reassuring comment, but it never lasts. (3) You worsen memory bias. You forget the boring “it was just gas” comments but remember the one rare cancer story. That becomes your “top of mind” fear and later feels like proof of danger. (4) You train your brain to outsource safety. The more you depend on Reddit, Google, or FB groups, the less you rely on internal coping skills. You teach yourself that you must check to be safe.

If you’re ready to get better, one small shift is to resist the urge to go to Reddit or any health forum for answers. Instead, treat the new symptom/fear like a trigger or an opportunity to practice doing something different. Log the urge. Delay the behavior. Redirect your attention. The urge will pass. Down with Reddit! 

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link. ✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new course available! Comment “TreatHA” for the details. ✨

01/05/2026

If you have health anxiety, you already know how compulsive checking can feel. You might scan your body for lumps, search for symmetry, poke or prod areas that feel “off,” or even compare one side of your body to the other. In the moment, checking feels like it might give you peace of mind but long-term, it fuels more anxiety and hyperawareness.

Here’s an experiment you can try this week to reduce checking and start retraining your brain: STEP 1: Choose one specific checking behavior to target. Maybe it’s looking at your skin in the mirror or pressing on your chest to check your heartbeat. STEP 2: Make a prediction. Write down what you believe will happen if you resist the urge to check. (Example: “If I don’t check, my anxiety will spiral and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it all day.”) STEP 3: Delay the behavior. Start small. Try delaying the check by 5 minutes. Then build to 10, 15, 30 minutes, or an hour. Eventually, aim to skip the check altogether. STEP 4: Track what actually happens. Were your predictions accurate? Did the anxiety go down even without checking? Did anything catastrophic happen or were you just convinced it would? STEP 5: Reflect. The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety but to teach you that you can feel uncertain and still be okay. This is how you build tolerance and reduce anxiety over time.

Remember: checking is short-term relief that comes with long-term cost. Every time you resist it, even a little, you’re rewiring your brain to feel safer without reassurance. And, lastly, to be clear- we are talking about EXCESSIVE behaviors (not what is reasonable/recommended).

Try this experiment for the next 7 days and notice what shifts. You don’t have to do it perfectly. If you give in to the checking, simply regroup and try again. Each time you succeed, you build skills and gain confidence.

✨If you have health anxiety, grab my free guide to improve it. Comment “guide” for the link. ✨

✨If you are a therapist or a mental health/medical professional and want to learn how to help people with health anxiety, I have a new course available! Comment “TreatHA” for the details. ✨

Waiting for test results can feel like emotional torture when you have health anxiety. The uncertainty leaves your mind ...
01/04/2026

Waiting for test results can feel like emotional torture when you have health anxiety. The uncertainty leaves your mind searching for certainty, answers and relief, and it often pulls you into spirals that feel impossible to escape. While you cannot control when results come in or what they will say, you can influence how much power anxiety has over your days while you wait. The tools in this post are not about forcing yourself to be calm or pretending you do not care. They are about reducing unnecessary suffering, responding to fear in a more supportive way and reminding yourself that you are capable of coping, even in moments that feel overwhelming. If you are in a waiting period right now, take this one moment at a time. You can learn to live your life even while uncertainty exists.

If you have health anxiety and want to take the first step toward getting better, grab my free guide! Comment “guide” and I’ll send it your way.

AND if you are a therapist/mental health professional and want to learn how to help your clients improve their health anxiety, I have a new comprehensive course to teach you how to help your clients using exposure-based CBT. Comment “TreatHA” and I’ll send you the info.

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