I Taught Women To Listen To Their Bodies. Now I Can't Stop Listening To Mine

Writing about women’s health has never felt like just a job to me. It’s something I feel incredibly lucky to do: asking the questions women have been asking for generations, sitting down with leading experts and sharing stories that help women better understand and trust their bodies. I've interviewed countless doctors, read the research papers and written the stories that remind women their symptoms matter.

So, in the spirit of being honest (and probably oversharing slightly), here’s the part I'm finding uncomfortable to admit: after spending years encouraging women to trust their bodies, I'm quietly struggling to trust my own.

Health anxiety isn’t new to me. It grew from spending almost a decade fighting to be diagnosed with the chronic condition I now live with after repeatedly being told nothing was wrong. Once you’ve learnt that lesson, it’s incredibly difficult to unlearn it. You see, I’m not just carrying a diagnosis I’d fought hard for. I’m carrying the fear that one day I’ll have to fight that hard again.

The more I’ve tried to understand my anxiety, the more I’ve realised it isn’t mine alone. The Government’s Landmark Women’s Health Strategy from 2022 found that more than four in five women (84%) have felt unheard by healthcare professionals. Nearly three-quarters (72%) said it happened when discussing their symptoms, while more than half (56%) had to push for a referral to a specialist.

As women, we were right to learn to question. But what happens when those two truths collide? Taught to trust your instincts, but also that being heard often means questioning everything? What if that symptom means something more? It whispers. What if you've missed something? Add to that a constant stream of symptom checkers, social media, podcasts and health information, and perhaps it’s no surprise that more than one in four women in the UK now report experiencing high levels of anxiety.

We've never been more empowered to fight for answers, and rightly so. What nobody really talks about is what happens when the searching doesn't stop. For a long time, I thought my health anxiety meant I was somehow failing at the very thing I'd spent my career championing, a fraud even. Surely someone so immersed in women’s health should feel more reassured by knowledge, not less.

Then my therapist changed my perspective entirely. He said I wasn’t the first person who worked in healthcare or medical journalism he’d treated, and I certainly wouldn't be the last. Anxiety doesn’t care how informed you are. If anything, it’ll happily use that information against you.

His words have stayed with me ever since. This isn't a story about getting the balance wrong. It's about finding our way back to trust. Because health anxiety can feel incredibly lonely, but it doesn't have to be something we carry silently. If sharing my experience helps one person feel less alone, then it's worth telling.

After years of learning how to fight to be heard, perhaps the next step is learning that we are also allowed to feel safe.

I Have Health Anxiety—How I Learnt To Trust My Body Again

Living between awareness and anxiety: when does vigilance become too much?

The funny thing about health anxiety, although it really doesn’t feel funny at the time, is that knowledge can become both your greatest comfort and your biggest trigger. Somewhere in the middle, listening to my body looked a lot like constant monitoring.

​And it was this part I wanted to understand. Not how to stop caring about my health, because women have fought far too hard for the right to be taken seriously, but how to recognise when self-awareness quietly becomes hypervigilance.

​Health psychologist Dr Sula Windgassen tells me this is exactly where many people with healthy anxiety find themselves: “When we've spent years being told to advocate for ourselves, the belief that 'it's all on me' can quickly develop," she explains. "Along with this belief, the mental habit of vigilance can accelerate, which means your brain is reinforced to check your body and sensations, and to follow up on thoughts about your health and what you should act on. It is really hard for us psychologically and biologically to find a balance between appropriate vigilance that doesn’t tip over into hypervigilance.”

​The difference, she says, is subtle but important: “Self-advocacy is productive because it moves you towards answers. Hypervigilance is generally about generating fearful questions and 'what ifs.’”

​Her words reminded me of one of the exercises I’d been working on in CBT. The task in question: I wasn’t to stop consuming the health information that matched up with what anxiety I was fixated on that week, altogether - it was to notice what happened when I did. The result: I realised my problem wasn’t that every charity advert or health story made me believe I had the disease being discussed. It was that I knew it would plant a seed. Suddenly I’d be carrying around another possibility. Another thing to keep an eye on. Another what if.

Windgassen explains that this is because more information doesn't always create more certainty. Often, it creates more contradictions, more overwhelm and more uncertainty. Much of the health information we consume isn't processed deliberately, she says. We absorb snippets while scrolling, half-listening to podcasts or watching videos, and our brains quietly file them away as something we might need to remember.

I was lucky enough to study psychology in college alongside the now behavioural scientist India Lesser, so naturally I asked her why our brains seem so willing to do this. Her explanation really stayed with me. "We're not emotionless spreadsheets objectively processing information," she says. "We feel things: worry, fear, uncertainty, and those emotions shape how we interpret what we read."

Which suddenly made my own brain make a lot more sense. Maybe the answer is in learning that certainty doesn’t come from collecting information, but from trusting ourselves to know when we have enough.

The real reason being told “you’re fine” doesn’t always make you feel fine

In what feels like one of my most vulnerable pieces yet, I'm going to let you in on a slightly embarrassing secret. It doesn’t matter how many medical professionals, friends, or my partner tell me “You’re fine” - there’s almost a 99/100 chance I'll be asking again in three to five working days.

Except, naturally, it probably won’t be about the same thing. There’ll usually be something new to send me back into the familiar spiral of what if? But the thing I wanted to understand wasn’t whether I was medically fine. More often than not, I had already been told I was. The question I couldn’t answer was: why couldn’t my brain accept that reassurance?

To Windgassen, it’s one of the most common patterns with health anxiety. “Reassurance can help us feel safer, but when it becomes the only thing we rely on to calm anxiety, the relief is often short-lived. Anxiety builds, and the brain reaches for an immediate reduction through reassurance, and that does the job to a degree,” she explains. “However, it is not fundamentally changing beliefs or an internal sense of safety or relationship with your body.”

Maybe this explains why I keep coming back for more. I’m not necessarily searching for new information - I’m searching for a feeling of certainty that never quite arrives.

But there’s another layer to this. We’re living in a time where health information is everywhere, yet knowing who to trust can feel like a minefield. And this isn’t just my anxiety talking. We are all navigating a completely different healthcare landscape from previous generations. A 2023 YouGov survey found that while doctors remain one of the most trusted sources of medical information, Google has become a major part of how people search for answers, with 71% of Brits saying they use online searches when looking into medicines or medical treatments.

GP Dr Raj Arora says she sees this shift every day: “Patients often tell me they don’t know which source to trust anymore. They’ve heard conflicting opinions from doctors, influencers, podcasts and online communities. Rather than feeling empowered, they often feel paralysed by information overload.”

And here lies the uncomfortable contradiction of modern women’s health: we fought for the right to be heard and to have our symptoms taken seriously. But now we’re having to learn how to navigate the noise that came with them.

Finding the middle ground: learning to trust ourselves again

My question to the experts is this: surely there’s a middle ground in all of this? Their response was clear: the answer to easing health anxiety isn’t caring less about your health. It’s learning to recognise when care starts becoming fear.

For Windgasse, one of the first steps comes with understanding whether your behaviour is helping you make decisions or simply helping you temporarily escape uncertainty. “If you do have health anxiety, it’s a good idea to get some baseline research about the diagnostic criteria and see if you fit,” she explains. “If you do, explore options for getting support with a therapist, as it can be hard to change on your own and you deserve support.”

She suggests paying attention to the moments when you find yourself checking, searching or ruminating: “Try to find alternative things that can tether you in moments of checking, rumination or searching. Things that root you in your day and give you a sense of grounding.”

For me, that distinction has been a hard one to accept - hence why I dipped my toe into the CBT world; I started to equate being a “good” advocate with never letting my guard down. But Dr Raj reminds me that self-advocacy was never meant to mean living in a state of constant alarm: “Advocating for yourself isn’t measured by how many investigations you have or how long you continue searching. Sometimes the bravest thing is continuing to ask questions. Other times, it’s accepting that you’ve had a thorough assessment, trusting the evidence in front of you and allowing yourself to move forward.”

In the midst of some final soul-searching, Lesser gave me a question I’ll add to my toolkit for times when I need to ground myself: Am I trying to make a decision, or am I trying to escape uncertainty? Why this question is so profound is because apparently both behaviours can look identical: “Seeking information to understand your options is self-advocacy. Searching repeatedly because you’re trying to quiet anxiety for another few hours is something else entirely.”

My Final Take

As it stands, I have three sessions of CBT left, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt thus far (my therapist was probably hoping for much more), it's that “getting rid of my anxiety probably isn’t the goal.

The biggest lesson has been realising this was never simply about knowing more; it was about what happens when years of uncertainty, experiences of not being believed, and an endless stream of health information collide - and our brains try to make sense of it all.

I don’t think I’ll wake up one day and never question a symptom again. But maybe I don’t have to. I’m learning that the goal isn’t to eliminate the anxiety; it’s to stop letting it run my show.

A middle ground exists. One where I can listen to my body without constantly interrogating it. Where I can advocate for myself without feeling like I have to prove something is wrong. Because after spending so long fighting to be heard, perhaps the next step is learning that I’m also allowed to trust. The experts who have listened. The evidence in front of me. And, most importantly, myself. Not just to know my body - but to finally live in it.

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