Do you have anxiety about your health? Living with 'health anxiety' can look like:

• Ruminating over symptoms and envisioning worst-case scenarios
• Spending excess money and time at the doctor's office, urgent care or hospital
• Avoiding the doctor or avoiding anything that reminds you of disease or death that might trigger you
• Incessantly consuming content about diseases
• Googling symptoms to identify any potential diseases you might have
• Asking your friends and family repeatedly about symptoms and health concerns 
• Searching your body for concerning symptoms
• Living in fear of death

If any of this is you, know that you are not alone. And it can get better. 

Perhaps you have tried talking to loved ones or even a therapist. But just talking about it hasn’t made a big difference. You still wind up in the same old place. You don’t need another listener. You need new skills.

What you need is to retrain or rewire your brain.

Health anxiety is fueled by thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that make it worse over time. But there is hope!  You can retrain your brain by making small (but intentional and consistent) changes in the way you think and behave each day. I've watched my clients experience remarkable transformation by seeing health and disease differently.

Imagine noticing a new symptom and still going about your day, calm peaceful and present.  

Learn to ease your health anxiety and start living again, using simple, proven strategies that take less time than your morning coffee.

CBT coaching to retrain your brain.

Drawing on 15 years of professional expertise and personal experience, I’ve created a comprehensive online course designed to help you improve health anxiety with evidence-based techniques.

CBT for Health Anxiety: A Step-by-Step System to Break Free from Health Worries 

In my signature course, I guide you through an evidence-based systematic process to transform the way you see health and disease, empowering you to regain control of your life. 

Take a Sneak Peak Inside the Course...

• The entire course is available in both video and audio formats (in case you want to absorb the information on your commute or during a workout). 
• Each lesson introduces a new CBT technique designed to reshape thoughts, beliefs and behaviors (75+ bite-sized CBT lessons in total)
• A packet of materials for each module (300 pages total) that provides a clear, step-be-step process to make daily changes with your health anxiety. 
• A bonus module filled with dozens of short-form videos illustrating key concepts, such as therapy clips and visual demonstrations of problematic thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. 
• You will be able to ask me questions any time via email and/or comments within the course lessons.  

Hi, I'm Dr. Britney Chesworth. 

I'm a therapist, researcher, educator, coach and former sufferer of health anxiety. For decades, the fear of getting a serious disease sucked the joy out of my life. The fear of a new symptom or scary health story completely ruined my day, week, sometimes even month. I often wondered if it was possible to not have to live this like this.

I tried many things to overcome my health anxiety. I opened up about my fears with family and friends. I journaled. I took medicine. I participated in talk therapy. All of these things were helpful in small ways but, still, the health anxiety persisted. 

What I had NOT yet realized was that I was trapped in a vicious cycle. No one told me this. It wasn't until I tried CBT that my health anxiety finally started to get better.  

Module 2: Reduce Estimation Errors

In these lessons, you’ll learn practical, simple strategies to correct estimation errors and start reshaping your perspective about disease odds. You’ll uncover why your brain tends to overestimate the likelihood of serious illness while underestimating benign explanations, and how to change those patterns using proven cognitive restructuring strategies. 

Module 3: Recognize Ability to Cope with Disease

Module 3 lessons teach practical strategies to shift how you view disease, systematically modifying catastrophic views of disease itself, while building awareness of your resilience, resources, and ability to adapt.

Module 4: Live More Comfortably with Bodily Sensations and Symptoms

In Module 4, you’ll learn how to stop reacting to every sensation as an emergency and start living more comfortably in your body. Through cognitive  and behavioral tools like surveys, twisting narratives, socratic dialogue and interoceptive exposure, you’ll retrain your brain to feel safe with the physical sensations you’ve been fearing. By the end, your body will no longer feel like a threat but a place you can live in peace with again.

Module 5: Stop Using Safety Behaviors and Avoidance

In this module, you’ll learn to break free from problematic behaviors. You’ll discover what healthy, balanced health management looks like and how coping habits like online information seeking, reassurance-seeking, and symptom checking may feel protective but actually reinforce fear. Through tools like the cost-benefit analysis, exposure tasks and experiments, you’ll learn to face uncertainty in manageable steps and take back control. 

Module 6: Live More Comfortably with Uncertainty

In this module, you’ll learn how to live more comfortably with uncertainty, the very thing health anxiety hates most. You’ll uncover how intolerance of uncertainty fuels worry and checking, and practice responding in new ways through experiments and cognitive tools. You’ll explore the hidden benefits of an uncertain world and how to use strategies to face the unknown with more confidence and develop a new appreciation for the unknown future.

Module 7: Build a Reasonable Amount of Trust in Medical Resources

Module 7 helps you rebuild a healthier, more hopeful relationship with medical resources. You’ll explore common beliefs about medicine and learn how certain assumptions or past experiences can increase fear and distrust. You'll use tools to help you challenge unhelpful thinking patterns and develop more balanced perspectives. You'll also practice strategies to limit anxiety-triggering information, test assumptions, and reduce avoidance of healthcare. Finally, you’ll learn practical skills to improve interactions with providers so you can feel more confident, collaborative, and in control of your health decisions.

Module 8: Become Less Afraid of Death

Module 8 helps you gently face and reduce your fear of death, a key contributing factor to health anxiety. You’ll start by understanding what death anxiety is and how it subconsciously fuels worry about symptoms and illness. Then, you’ll work through specific fears, including the dying process, leaving loved ones behind, and what happens after death, using cognitive and behavioral strategies to challenge unhelpful thoughts and create more balanced beliefs. 

Module 9: Reduce Anxiety in the Face of Medical Conditions

In this module, you'll learn to manage health anxiety while living with a medical condition, which is one of the most challenging situations. You’ll learn to recognize common thinking errors and use tools to separate anxiety-driven fears from valid health concerns. We’ll distinguish productive vs. unproductive worry and use strategies to reduce mental spirals. You’ll also reshape illness-related beliefs, practice gratitude journaling, and make behavioral changes that support both your physical and emotional health. Finally, you’ll build skills for coping with uncertainty during testing, waiting for results, and navigating medical treatment.

Bonus Module: Demonstration Videos

This module is filled with examples videos to illustrate key concepts learned in the course. There are numerous videos demonstrating how the vicious cycle of health anxiety plays out in a variety of contexts and situations. You'll also see videos about common thinking errors, core beliefs and problematic behaviors. You'll see brief videos of me explaining important concepts to drive key points home. Lastly, you will see numerous videos illustrating key lessons with therapy clips. 

If you weren't so anxious about your health, your life might look quite different. Perhaps you would be able to:

• Notice a symptom and still be able to go about your day like normal
• Be less scared of diseases because you are able to see the probability and impact of disease more realistically
• Be more comfortable with the inevitable uncertainty about health
• Pay more attention to the common stories about healthy people instead of focusing mostly on the tragic stories
• Spend your time and money doing things you love with the people you love instead of going to the doctor unnecessarily, ruminating on your fears, going down google rabbit holes or incessantly checking your body for concerns.
• Take good care of your health but let go of trying to reach the unnecessary (and unattainable) goal of “perfect health”
• Enjoy healthier relationships with your loved ones that are not strained from the impact of your health anxiety
• Be less afraid of death and more able to enjoy the life you have today

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is considered the first-line treatment for health anxiety. CBT is a skill-based, action-oriented intervention that reshapes the thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that feed health fears. 

Given the large body of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of CBT for health anxiety (see meta-analyses: 1, 2, 3), it isn't surprising that these strategies have been transformative for so many of my clients.  

My private clients pay $3,900 for my intensive one-on-one CBT coaching program. Knowing its value (and that I can only see so many one-on-one clients), I decided to package it all into an online program that anyone can follow in order to make it more accessible. 

If all this program did was...

• If all this program did was help you become a little less anxious when a new symptom pops up, would it be worth it?
• If all this program did was help you learn how to overcome your fear of going to the doctor for check ups, preventative screenings or health concerns, would it be worth it?
• If all this program did was help you save money and not spend an excessive amount of time, money and energy constantly going to the doctor to alleviate your anxiety, would it be worth it?
• If all this program did was help you get back to living a bit more in the present moment and enjoying some of the things that used to bring you joy, would it be worth it?