Googling symptoms is safety behaviour
Googling symptoms can lead to positive health outcomes such as reaching out and receiving proper medical care early. You shouldn’t be ashamed of googling your symptoms. You are taking action to take care of your health. By googling you show that your health really matters and you want to be healthy.
Googling symptoms is also safety behavior. It can become dangerous when it’s excessive. When you feel unwell it’s only natural that you raise your concern and pay attention to your health.
By googling symptoms we try to assure ourselves that nothing bad will happen to us. We use it as tool to lower our stress and anxiety.
Googling symptoms can become dangerous
Excessive googling often leads to stress and anxiety. It can have a negative impact on your mental health and be linked to underlying anxiety disorder such as health anxiety (hypochondriasis) or generalized anxiety disorder.
People with anxiety or tendency towards worry should limit their time spent on googling symptoms. Often stress, that is generated through googling, triggers a body’s stress response. In turn you can experience unpleasant health symptoms such as pounding heart, trouble taking a breath, dizziness, heavy sweating, tingling or numbness in body parts. You might feel unwell and believe that there is an actual health emergency, you might die from fatal disease.
Should you worry if symptoms found on google are similar to ones you experience?
Short answer is no. There are far too many diseases that have similar symptoms. It’s really easy to misdiagnose yourself. You should always reach out to your doctor and get proper medical testing if you feel immediate danger or your health symptoms don’t get better in a few days. Nowadays most of our health problems are caused by stress and overload. They tend to resolve themselves when we get proper rest or resolve stress causing issues.
Why is it hard to stop googling symptoms?
You are sucked into a cycle of fear which is caused by excessive googling of your symptoms. You probably found something that scared you enough where you felt danger, even fear of dying. Fear of dying is what keeps you in a cycle of fear. You are not googling because of curiosity or concern of what’s happening to you. You are trying to reassure yourself that you aren’t dying from an untreatable illness. Best thing to do now is stop. The more you engage in googling behavior the bigger fear grows and harder it becomes to stop it.
Googling symptoms is dangerous when we feel unwell
When we are stressed or tired we perceive reality differently. You might experience life with less bright colors and have a tendency towards negative emotions. You might overreact, draw conclusions prematurely, assume the worst case scenario. When you feel unwell you can perceive your body’s symptoms somehow similar (negative bias) to ones you found on Google. Your sensations can be pretty darn close and you can misinterpret your experience, cause yourself a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety.
When do googling symptoms become a problem?
Googling symptoms becomes a problem when you receive proper medical care and are still worried about your health. Even after doctors have reassured you that you are physically healthy. If you feel unwell and experience illness related symptoms you might feel that doctors might have missed something and illness is actually more serious. Fear and thoughts of serious illness often lead to more googling and stress. You might have a hard time stopping googling habits and fear of the unknown, dying might overwhelm you to the point where it raises panic, uncertainty about the future.
How to deal with stress induced symptom googling?
1. Learning to sit with your symptoms
Sometimes your body needs a longer period of time in order to recover. Some of the symptoms can be a reaction to a virus or even stress. If you feel unwell and your test results are good, it means your body is still recovering. Take time and give the body needed rest, your symptoms will get better.
2. Acceptence
Acceptance is a powerful tool when you are dealing with a fear that isn’t going away. It might be counter-intuitive but sometimes you have to accept your worst fear in order to set yourself free from worry. If you fear having a heart attack (cardiofobia) then you should be okay with having a heart attack in the next 40 years. If it happens it happens. Learning to accept might be scary but remember that accepting doesn’t equal of that outcome becoming true.
3. Self-control
You need to take action and limit your time spent on googling your health symptoms. Googling can become addictive if you don’t exercise self-control. When your mind has the urge to engage in googling behavior try to set it straight. Avoid giving in to your habit because it only makes things worse.
4. Occupy your mind with other things
Tricky part about mind is that things only grow bigger when you focus on them. Sometimes we can’t resolve our problems right away and being stuck, preoccupied with your thoughts doesn’t make things better. It does the opposite, you might start invent worst case scenarios.
Take effort and try to do things you enjoyed before. Go for a walk, talk with your friend, go shopping or watch your favorite Netflix series. By attempting to do some activities you are giving yourself hope and putting your worry on the back burner. You are giving signals to your brain that things aren’t as bad as they seem and you are braking negative link between your worry and habit of googling health symptoms.
5. Perception of symptoms
If you suffer from chronic stress or anxiety it’s important on how you perceive your health symptoms. If you already have been to the doctor and done medical testing which came back clear, you should assume that you are not in danger for the upcoming year or two.
Yes, it’s very difficult when you feel unwell and experience symptoms that frequently doesn’t want to go away. You have to take a break from stressing yourself out even more. When you worry your symptoms only get more intense. You become anxious and depressed by creating these false narratives, scenarios in your head. Thinking and ruminating about your symptoms isn’t helpful. You are driving yourself crazy.