Health Anxiety and the Highly Sensitive Person: How Depth Psychotherapy Can Help
For the highly sensitive person (HSP), the body is not just a vessel—it’s a finely tuned instrument picking up on every internal and external signal. A slight ache, a flutter in the chest, a moment of dizziness—these sensations don’t just pass unnoticed. They are absorbed, analyzed, and often magnified into something much larger. When paired with health anxiety, this sensitivity can feel overwhelming, leaving the HSP caught in a cycle of hypervigilance and worry.
Why Do HSPs Struggle with Health Anxiety?
Health anxiety is more than just occasional worry about illness—it’s a deep and persistent fear of bodily sensations and what they might mean. For highly sensitive people, this fear can be amplified due to several factors:
• Heightened bodily awareness – HSPs tend to notice subtle changes in their bodies before others might. While this can be useful for self-care, it can also lead to over-focusing on normal fluctuations in health.
• Emotional intensity – Sensitivity doesn’t stop at physical sensations. HSPs also feel emotions deeply, which can lead to intense anxiety when health concerns arise.
• Overstimulation – A body already processing high amounts of sensory input may be more prone to stress responses, making anxiety cycles harder to break.
• Early life experiences – Many HSPs grew up in environments where emotions were invalidated or where illness was a major concern, creating subconscious patterns of fear.
When left unchecked, health anxiety can take up mental and emotional space, leading to compulsive symptom-checking, excessive researching, and a constant fear of something being wrong. This hypervigilance can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where stress itself leads to real physical symptoms—tightness in the chest, digestive distress, dizziness—further reinforcing the cycle.
How Depth Psychotherapy Can Help
Depth psychotherapy, rooted in Jungian and psychodynamic traditions, offers a way to move beyond symptom management and into the deeper roots of health anxiety. Rather than just telling an HSP to “stop worrying,” depth work validates their experience and helps them uncover the unconscious material driving their fear. Here’s how:
1. Exploring the Symbolic Meaning of Illness
In depth psychotherapy, symptoms are not just random occurrences—they hold meaning. What is the body trying to express? For the HSP, health anxiety may be pointing to a deeper fear of vulnerability, mortality, or loss of control. By exploring these themes, therapy helps shift the focus from fear-based reactivity to deeper self-understanding.
2. Uncovering Childhood Conditioning
Many HSPs with health anxiety have early experiences of illness being a source of distress, either in their own bodies or in their families. Did caregivers react with fear to health concerns? Was there a lack of attunement to emotional needs? By processing these early experiences, therapy helps untangle past fears from present reality.
3. Regulating the Nervous System Through Inner Work
Depth psychotherapy supports nervous system regulation not just through cognitive awareness but through deepening the connection to the unconscious. Practices like active imagination, dream work, and somatic attunement help HSPs cultivate a sense of inner safety, reducing the need for external reassurance-seeking.
4. Integrating the Shadow
For many HSPs, health anxiety is linked to a disowned part of the self—perhaps the part that fears death, the part that struggles with uncertainty, or the part that needs nurturing. Depth work allows these aspects to be seen, honored, and integrated, reducing the need for anxiety as a protective mechanism.
Healing Beyond the Fear
The goal of depth psychotherapy is not to eliminate sensitivity but to create a relationship with it that feels less like a battleground and more like a conversation. Instead of fear ruling the body, HSPs can develop a sense of trust in their inner world. Instead of seeing every sensation as a threat, they can begin to see their sensitivity as a guide—one that, when met with curiosity and care, offers a path to greater wholeness.
For the highly sensitive person, healing from health anxiety isn’t about suppressing sensitivity. It’s about learning to listen to the body’s wisdom without letting fear take over. Depth psychotherapy provides a way to do just that—by going beyond the surface of anxiety and into the deeper, more meaningful layers of the self.
If you’re experiencing health anxiety, and are interested in exploring therapy for highly sensitive perople with me, contact me today.