What’s Really Behind Your Obsessive Symptom-Googling
Cyberchondria is real. And largely unhelpful.
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For those who live with hypochondria, myself included, this pandemic has added layers to our concerns around health. Many of us have spent hours Googling risks and symptoms. And as science has revealed more information about the virus and illness, some of it comforting (it’s probably not foodborne), some of it terrifying (some sufferers’ symptoms seem to be lingering for months), the anxieties have shifted, evolved — and persisted.
It turns out, the information we take in about the virus can have a surprising impact on cyberchondria, the incessant need to use online sources to track symptoms and speculate a diagnosis (or, really, to self-diagnose). Recent research carried out through surveys in Germany shows that during the pandemic, increasing anxiety around the novel coronavirus has led to an increase in cyberchondria. The study included 1,615 participants and was conducted by professors Stefanie M. Jungmann and Michael Witthöft of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in mid-March 2020 when the outbreak began within the country. Unsurprisingly, anxiety around the coronavirus itself was particularly strong in people who already had health anxiety (hypochondria). But one unexpected finding was that feeling well-informed about the virus was linked with lower virus-related anxiety levels.
“Constantly checking all the various social media channels for any Covid-19–related news 10 or 20 times per day clearly appears dysfunctional from a mental health perspective.”
“According to our findings, the feeling of being well-informed about Covid-19, for example in terms of transmission routes and survival time of the virus on certain surfaces, may serve as a buffer towards Covid-19–related anxiety and a maladaptive excessive search for information online—which we call ‘cyberchondria,’” Jungmann and Witthöft told Elemental. The researchers note that due to the cross-sectional nature of the study — in which data was gathered at one specific point in time — causal conclusions cannot be drawn, but correlations can be made. They add: “It might therefore also be possible that…
