When getting up this morning, maybe you felt a twinge in your side. Or the sensation that your heart skipped a beat. It could also be a persistent cough or a crack in your knee. For most, any of these discomforts go almost unnoticed in daily routine. They barely capture a few seconds of attention while preparing coffee or hurrying the children to finally get dressed.
For others, however, they can be a turning point: the trigger that unleashes a true ordeal.
Hypochondria causes people like Laura, Amanda, Belén, or Andreu to often interpret any banal symptom as the beginning of a grim fate, the first sign of a certain illness. This concern, which can become constant, is capable of dragging them into a spiral of anguish that can paralyze their lives.
Laura Honrubia has experienced this many times, losing count of all the diseases she has been convinced of having at some point in her life. She has been dealing with hypochondria for over three decades, a disorder she compares to addiction. "You live as a slave. You go from one doctor to another, but it's never enough. When you solve one symptom, you jump to another. You live halfway, with fear, with midnight tears, always imagining the physical or emotional pain that awaits you, feeling like you have little time left in this life. You even imagine saying goodbye to your loved ones. I have often felt like I was dying," she recounts.
She recalls having this anxiety about getting sick since she was a child, barely seven years old. "If my stomach hurt a little or I was tired, I already thought I had something serious," she remembers.
This fear, which has always accompanied her and marked her life in various periods, reached its peak during the Covid pandemic when a "perfect storm" unleashed for her hypochondria: an unknown disease, difficulties in accessing medical care, restricted contact with loved ones, and a scenario of uncertainty.
"In the early days of the State of Alarm, I self-diagnosed. I felt all the symptoms they were mentioning on TV and constantly went to the Emergency Room," she recalls. Additionally, in parallel, she began to experience other types of discomfort not related to a possible infection: oppressive chest pain, headaches, urinary problems, paresthesias in arms and legs... "Anxiety is capable of mimicking any illness, and I felt like I had Covid, sclerosis, bladder cancer, heart attacks... absolutely everything."
This social educator by profession took her blood pressure over 10 times a day and took her temperature just as many times. "I spent thousands of euros on MRIs, tests, ultrasounds... I consulted different doctors in the same specialty because I was never reassured," she recalls. "All my thoughts kept coming back to the same thing."
As explained by José Luis Carrasco, head of the Psychiatry Department at the Hospital Universitario Clínico San Carlos in Madrid, hypochondria, also known as illness anxiety disorder, is an obsessive-type disorder characterized by excessive or disproportionate concern about having a serious illness.
Those who suffer from it have a high level of health-related anxiety, to the point that it can block their lives.
"The fear of death or illness is a very human, very anthropological trait. We all have it, but most of us keep it tucked away, we're not thinking about it all day," he explains. In people with hypochondria, however, that drawer stays open, allowing fear to overshadow everything else in their lives. "When we talk about hypochondriacal illness, we are talking about a disorder that can prevent you from living or enjoying life and can completely paralyze you."
"When you notice anything, like your heart rate increasing, you immediately think you're having a heart attack," he adds.
It is estimated that its average prevalence reaches up to 4% of the population, with no significant differences between men and women.
"The term hypochondria tends to be used, in everyday language, to describe the state of a person who is more concerned about illness than they should be, but this is not always accurate," points out Manuel Oliva, a clinical psychologist and member of the Madrid College of Psychologists. "There are people who are more sensitive or apprehensive about illness, but this does not always imply a real diagnosis," he explains. Those who truly suffer from a disorder see their lives greatly affected because all their attention is focused on worrying about having a serious illness despite not having significant symptoms. "This circumstance alters the person's behavior, who excessively monitors their body, checks their health status, or frequently visits the doctor."
These visits, "generally do not reassure people suffering from this disorder, so they start asking for second or third opinions and even change medical specialties without ever feeling at ease," Carrasco agrees.
Amanda Delgado is familiar with that loop of thoughts that can completely spike her anxiety levels and even generate physical sensations. Due to this spiral, she has self-diagnosed all kinds of illnesses: from a heart attack to cancer, through a stroke.
Anything can trigger it. "It can be a personal symptom, like noticing some discomfort or something different in your body, but also something external. A news item on TV, a comment on social media, someone telling you what happened to their neighbor... Something clicks in your head, and you start thinking that maybe that is happening to you too," she explains.
To further fuel that loop of thoughts, "you often tend to search on Google or ChatGPT about those symptoms or that illness, thinking it will help you, but it's just the opposite. You never find peace there. What you achieve is falling deeper into the obsessive spiral of 'I'm worried, I search the internet, I overanalyze, so I worry twice as much and keep searching'," says this 25-year-old from the Canary Islands, who emphasizes that "it's very difficult to break free from that loop."
"A news item, a comment on social media, what happened to the neighbor... Something clicks in your head, and you think it's happening to you," she adds.
Will Rees, a British editor and writer, knows this well. He claims that while in college, he spent as much time on his Literature and Philosophy career as he did consulting websites about the alleged ailments he believed he had. Every time he had a new symptom, he rushed to search it online, always receiving a gloomy response. His concerns about his health overshadowed his daily life for five years, an experience he has just captured in Hypochondria (Alpha Decay), a book that also delves into the history of this disorder and the figures who tried to understand it, such as Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Kant, or Susan Sontag.
Writing has not been an exorcism for him, he claims, although he has found "some satisfaction in taking this experience, an experience that was long, boring, frightening, and shameful, and turning it into a book that other people want to read," he asserts.
For Rees, "there is a certain structurally inherent irony to the experience of hypochondria itself." The hypochondriac, he explains, is "someone who has contradictory perspectives on their condition." On the one hand, they are convinced they have a real physical illness, and on the other, they also harbor hopes and have some awareness, because they have been told so, that it is possible that it is all just in their head.
For five years, Rees lived under that yoke. "There were days when I felt like I had no life beyond waiting for the results of an analysis or a test, no future beyond the horizon of the bad news I expected to receive imminently," he recounts in the book.
Belén Giménez remembers feeling that same anxiety about getting sick from a very young age, an experience that "has been very debilitating" at times in her life. "I would go straight to the Emergency Room if I saw an asterisk in the results of a blood test and didn't have an appointment with my primary care physician until four or five days later. I always assumed the worst," she recalls.
This physicist, who works for an aerospace engineering company, emphasizes that in her particular case, what causes her the most anxiety is "uncertainty." That's why, like Laura, the coronavirus pandemic also marked a turning point for her in her condition. "I had terrible anxiety. I went from specialist to specialist, I had dozens of tests done. Until finally I sought psychological help because I couldn't take it anymore."
In contrast, for María, who prefers not to give her last name or appear in the photos for this article, Covid wasn't the cause of her greatest suffering. "I've had much worse times," she emphasizes. In her case, hypochondria doesn't lead her to frequent doctor visits; rather, it has the opposite effect: she tries to avoid or postpone appointments as much as possible for fear of receiving a serious diagnosis. Her mind, however, constantly dwells on the cycle of worry and anguish, convinced that the illness she fears is already growing inside her.
And when she finally undergoes a medical test to dispel her doubts, the peace of mind is only momentary. "It's perverse." "Because if I get an MRI to rule out a brain tumor, what my mind is thinking is, 'Okay, you didn't have cancer when you had the test, but what if you started developing it between that day and today when you got the results?'" she explains.
In her case, her hypochondria affects her own health and that of her children.
"Most people worry just enough when their children have a sore throat or a headache. They think it's not serious and that it will pass. But my mind jumps to the worst-case scenario and I can't seem to get out of it. Plus, I have to try to hide it so they don't notice and end up copying this same thought pattern, which is torture," she explains.
"I always imagine the worst-case scenario. In my head, I've died of a heart attack a thousand times. If I start to get a headache, the first thing I think is that it's cancer. It's awful living with this anxiety," she adds.
Andreu Martínez has also experienced these anxiety spikes many times, triggered by a minor symptom or a simple comment. "As soon as you notice anything, no matter how small, like your heart rate increasing because you're walking uphill, you think you might be having a heart attack." "Because that heartbeat you're constantly checking isn't the usual one, you automatically imagine the worst-case scenario, and the next moment it feels like even your arm is hurting."
The worst part, Andreu emphasizes, is that "usually, when you share these kinds of worries with other people, you only encounter incomprehension or sometimes even ridicule, so there comes a point when you keep quiet and don't say anything because you know it won't do any good. Then the suffering is even greater, because it's a suffering you have to endure in silence," she explains.
"I'm ashamed to talk about it, because it often provokes mockery," María agrees. "There are always a lot of jokes and teasing about hypochondriacs, perhaps because everyone has experienced that hypochondria at some point in their lives, that tremendous worry about their health. Then most people get over it and find it ridiculous that the first thing some of us think when we get a sharp pain in our head is that maybe we've ruptured an artery." But the reality is that this way of thinking causes tremendous suffering for many people. It paralyzes our lives."
Belén also acknowledges that for many years she carried the problem in silence. "Especially during my university years, the possibility of being seen as the annoying one who's always going on about whether I'm going to die or not made me feel bad. You feel like nobody understands the anguish you feel. So you keep quiet and bear it in silence."
At that time, she says, she would have liked "to see testimonies from people who were going through the same thing." That's why she decided to share her story on social media (beligim_ig on Instagram), a step also taken by Amanda Delgado (amandadelgadoo_) and Andreu Martínez (tatandreu). For the same reason, Laura Honrubia (laurahonrubia) decided to self-publish a book—When I Embraced Hypochondria—sharing her experience and that of some of the professionals and friends who have supported her during this time.
"When I decided to write the book, I was in a taxi. I was leaving an appointment with a third neurologist, an appointment I hadn't told my partner about because I was embarrassed to tell him I was going to see another specialist. I felt like an addict returning from getting my momentary dose of peace of mind, and I thought I had to do something different. I was also thinking about other people who have hypochondria and perhaps don't have the support I do. I felt I had to share my experience with others. To help, and in doing so, to help myself as well," she says today, satisfied with the result.
Hypochondria, Carrasco and Oliva remind us, is treatable. In addition to some medications, cognitive-behavioral therapy has proven useful in treating the disorder by reducing anxiety, repetitive thoughts, and checking and self-monitoring behaviors.
"In some cases, it's important to consider traumatic events that these people have experienced and that may have triggered this anxiety," Carrasco points out. For example, Laura and Andreu, who lost several close relatives as children, are convinced that their experience and the management of those emotions has had a lot to do with their hypochondria.
Today, they are all stable, have learned to recognize the early signs of crises, and have the tools to manage them. However, they are also very aware that "hypochondria will always be there, like an Achilles' heel, taking advantage of the most difficult times to try and surface."