Body Checking, Social Media, and the Google Spiral

Natalie Dyson is a florist and a mother of three. She has been living with health anxiety for about five years, and she talks about it openly on TikTok and Instagram with an honesty that resonates with thousands of people. We spoke to her about how it started, what keeps it going, and why the people around you often have no idea what you are dealing with.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

How it started

For Natalie, the trigger was specific. She was happy, trying to become a mum, and then a pain appeared.

"I got a pain in my breast and never had it before. I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this could be breast cancer.' I called the doctors and she told me that I was fine. It was probably because I'd come off contraception. But it was like the spark to my health anxiety life."

The doctor's reassurance should have been the end of it. But it was just the beginning. Natalie became pregnant shortly after, and health anxiety took hold. Five years later, it is still a daily presence.

One of the most striking parts of the conversation was Natalie's description of how social media interacts with health anxiety. It is not just background noise. It is an active participant in the cycle.

"You know you shouldn't read it and you know you should just scroll past it. But that thought inside your mind is, 'You need to read it.' And you end up reading it. And then instantly your intrusive thoughts are, 'Oh my gosh, it's a sign.' And then you're reading the symptoms, and all of a sudden your health anxiety mimics those symptoms."

The algorithm accelerates this. Once you engage with health-related content, even once, the feed recalibrates.

"If you think you've got a brain tumor, give it an hour and your feed will become brain tumor videos. And it will become even crazier. It will be someone who is the same age, looks similar, has almost like a similar sounding story. It's crazy what the algorithm can do."

Natalie has tried to pull away. She has tried scrolling past. But the pull is strong, not just online but in real life too. She described delivering flowers to a customer going through chemotherapy and standing at the door for an hour asking questions, unable to walk away. Afterwards: "Why have you just done that?"

Body checking and reassurance

If you have health anxiety, you will recognise what Natalie describes. The checking is constant, invisible to others, and never enough.

"You chase reassurance. Even if I have a symptom or something, no matter how much reassurance I get, it's never enough. Even off strangers -- the postman or anything. You just need that reassurance."

She gave a vivid example of how body checking works in daily life:

"If you think one leg's bigger than the other -- DVT -- when I'm driving down the street or walking, I'm comparing people's legs. Nobody from the outside would see that. They'd just think, 'Oh look, she's a happy person.' But inside our mind, that is all we do."

This invisibility is part of what makes health anxiety so isolating. The distress is enormous, but from the outside, everything looks fine.

The doctor's waiting room

Natalie raised something that rarely gets discussed: the environment of the GP surgery itself.

"I always find waiting in the doctor's surgery, there is just cancer adverts plastered on every single wall. Before you even go into that surgery, you are triggered."

She wants to see health anxiety awareness materials in waiting rooms. Posters that might help someone recognise what they are going through before they even see a doctor. For the people who come back five or ten times with the same worry, being directed toward help for the underlying anxiety, rather than just receiving another round of reassurance, could change the trajectory entirely.

The OCD connection

Natalie sees the link clearly between health anxiety and OCD, and her experience confirms what clinicians describe.

"I think everybody that has health anxiety has OCD. The body checking, the Google checking. It's body OCD. It's the compulsion of your health."

She found that general anxiety therapists often missed the compulsive element. It was only when she worked with an OCD-specialised therapist that the treatment started to address the right thing: the behaviours that keep the anxiety alive.

"When you went to an anxiety therapist, they didn't realise that it was the body checking that was keeping you in the loop."

This distinction matters. If the treatment does not address the compulsions (the checking, the Googling, the reassurance-seeking) the underlying cycle continues (Cooper et al., 2017).

What people get wrong

Natalie was clear about the biggest misconception:

"I think people think that having health anxiety, we're drama queens. They think you're just being dramatic. Or you're just overthinking."

And on the word "hypochondriac":

"I hate that word. It's such a stigmatized word. It's so much more than that."

She wants people to understand that health anxiety is not a personality trait or a tendency to overreact. It is a condition that takes over your thinking, affects your relationships, and can consume your entire day, all while being completely invisible to the people around you.

It needs a bigger conversation

Natalie believes the awareness is growing, particularly on social media, but that it needs to come from the top: from GPs, from the healthcare system, from public health campaigns.

"People can just stay in such an anxious loop. It just needs such a bigger national conversation."

Until then, conversations like this one matter. Not because they solve the problem, but because they show people they are not alone in it.

Where to go from here

Not sure if this applies to you? Take the SHAI-14 quiz (it takes 3 minutes)
Read more about what health anxiety actually is
Watch more conversations like this one

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. If you're concerned about your health or mental health, speak to a qualified professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact a helpline near you.