Reframe Your Thoughts - with Health Psychologist Joanna Rodriguez
🧠Your brain is not always right about what your body is telling you.
Health anxiety has a way of taking a headache and turning it into something far more sinister. A chest pain becomes a heart attack. A missed diagnosis. A worst-case scenario that feels, in that moment, completely believable.
But believable is not the same as true.
Joanna Rodriguez walks through two practical strategies for interrupting that spiral before it takes hold.
The first is to challenge the catastrophic thought rather than accept it as fact. Ask yourself what the most likely explanation actually is. Consider whether you have experienced this symptom before and what happened. Think about what you would tell a friend who came to you with the same worry.
The goal is not to eliminate anxious thoughts entirely. It is to stop automatically believing the scariest version of them.
The second is to ask a simple question: what else could this mean? Chest pain might be stress, muscle tension, or indigestion. A headache is far more likely to be dehydration than anything serious. Pausing to consider other possibilities creates just enough space to shift from panic to perspective.
Which symptom do you find your mind most often catastrophises about?
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