Does Your Health Anxiety Make You Avoid the Doctor?
It can be helpful to evaluate the costs and benefits of medical avoidance.
Posted June 25, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
For many living with health anxiety , the idea of going to the doctor can stir up intense fear . Your mind may spiral: How will they treat me? Will I be taken seriously or dismissed? What if they find something terrible? What if I can’t handle the diagnosis? What if this changes everything?
If you have experienced any kind of medical trauma , including facing a difficult diagnosis or having negative experiences in the healthcare system, avoidance is a common way of coping with these difficult experiences. It makes sense. If you've had scary or unpleasant experiences in the healthcare system, you don't want to go back!
What does medical avoidance look like? You might delay scheduling appointments, ignore symptoms, or skip check-ups and screenings. Although the tendency to want to avoid the doctor is understandable, it can increase anxiety over time and create more problems.
In the short term, avoidance brings relief. You dodge the initial spike in anxiety you’d experience if you actually went to the doc. Of course, we all know that “peace” doesn’t last long. In fact, you’ve probably spent more time and energy feeling anxious about not going to the doctor than the amount of time you’d feel anxious if you actually went. For example, I have a client who, for years, would spend time every day feeling anxious about the fact that he hadn’t been to the doctor in a long time. When he finally went to the doctor, he was anxious for a couple of days leading up to it and then felt a huge amount of relief afterward. So, this begs the question, which situation is worse-avoiding or facing the doctor?!
The Cost-Benefit Analysis
This CBT tool helps you critically evaluate the costs and benefits of a given behavior. The goal is not to shame or criticize, but to help you explore whether avoidance is truly serving you or just keeping you "stuck." Let's start with the benefits. We will then critically evaluate these perceived benefits. After all, we don't just want to automatically accept these benefits as facts, right?? The Benefits of Avoiding the Doctor (and a Critical Evaluation): 1. "I don’t have to feel anxious right now." CRITICAL EVALUATION: Yes, avoidance temporarily reduces your anxiety. You don’t have to sit in a waiting room with a racing heart or worry about scary 'what-if' scenarios. However, this relief is short-lived and costly. Avoidance reinforces the belief that anxiety is dangerous and must be escaped. Over time, this can actually make your anxiety stronger and more disruptive. REFRAME: “I can feel anxious and still take action. Avoiding discomfort now often creates more distress later.” 2. "I won’t have to hear bad news." CRITICAL EVALUATION: This assumes that bad news is inevitable. Contrarily, what if you received neutral or good news? How good would that feel? Further, this “benefit” also assumes you wouldn’t be able to cope if there is something wrong. It is much more likely that if there is something wrong, it would be treatable/manageable. The reality is most doctor visits do not result in terrible news. And even if there is something wrong, you would have options and would likely be able to cope better than you assume. REFRAME: “If there is nothing wrong, not knowing only hurts me. I am robbing myself of the ability to feel relief. If there is something wrong, not knowing also only hurts me because I am unable to address it if I don’t know what the problem is. In other words, avoiding the doctor is a ‘lose lose’ situation.” 3. "If I don’t go, maybe the problem will go away." CRITICAL EVALUATION: Just because it is 'out of sight' and temporarily 'out of mind' doesn't mean the problem disappears. In fact, when we avoid, the problem will get bigger. The anxiety and increase in health obsession often gets worse. Further, in the event that you do have a medical problem, early intervention is key to managing it and/or overcoming it. REFRAME: “Facing a fear gives me strength. Avoidance only makes me feel weaker, as it worsens my anxiety and uncertainty.” Next, let's discuss all the ways avoiding the doctor has negatively impacted your life (or the "costs" of this behavior). THE ‘COSTS’ of Avoiding the Doctor 1. Reinforces the fear and keeps anxiety strong: Each time you avoid a doctor visit, you reinforce the belief that the situation is too dangerous or intolerable to face. This keeps your fear alive and growing. 2. Strengthens the avoidance cycle: Avoidance brings temporary relief, which your brain then associates with safety. The more you avoid, the harder it becomes to approach in the future. It builds a habit loop that’s difficult to break. 3. Prevents disconfirmation of catastrophic beliefs: You never get the chance to learn that your feared outcomes (e.g. receiving a devastating diagnosis) either don’t happen or are more manageable that you assumed. You miss opportunities to update inaccurate beliefs. 4. Increases long-term anxiety: What feels like short-term relief actually fuels more long-term worry and preoccupation. The fear doesn’t go away. It tends to simmer in the background and resurfaces repeatedly. 5. Increases health-related rumination and self-monitoring: Ironically, avoiding the doctor doesn’t stop health anxiety. It often increases your focus on bodily symptoms, self-diagnosing, and health-related information seeking. This leads to even more anxiety. 6. Delays appropriate medical care: If there is a legitimate health concern, avoidance delays proper treatment. If there's nothing wrong, you lose the chance for a professional to detect and treat the problem. 7. Undermines self-efficacy : You send yourself the message: “I can’t handle this.” This weakens your confidence in your ability to cope with fear, discomfort, or uncertainty. 8. Makes future appointments harder: The longer you avoid, the more overwhelming it feels to finally face the situation. Avoidance increases anticipatory anxiety over time. 9. Narrows your life: Health anxiety and avoidance can lead to a more limited lifestyle. This might include missed work, social withdrawal, or avoiding other situations that could trigger medical fears (like hospitals, fitness trackers, or health-related conversations). 10. Reduces quality of life: Living in fear, constantly scanning for symptoms, and avoiding doctors can create chronic stress and a sense of being “trapped” in your own mind and body. 11. Increases dependence on maladaptive coping behaviors: Avoiding the doctor often goes hand-in-hand with body checking, seeking reassurance with loved ones and online information seeking, all of which maintain anxiety. 12. Delays recovery from health anxiety: Avoidance stalls progress in CBT or exposure-based therapy . Without facing what you fear, the anxiety has no opportunity to shrink. 13. Reinforces distorted beliefs about uncertainty and health: Avoiding doctors supports unhelpful core beliefs like: “Uncertainty is dangerous,” “Any symptom could mean something catastrophic,” or “If I go to the doctor, they’ll find something terrible.” Thus, these beliefs get stronger over time. Now, in looking at a breakdown of the costs and benefits, what is the takeaway? When I look through both of these lists all at once, it seems clear that avoiding the doctor is a lot more unhelpful than it is helpful. Review these lists any time you need motivation to start taking baby steps toward going to the doctor!
Challenge the Pattern
You don’t have to face everything at once. In CBT, we work with small, manageable steps. If avoiding the doctor is your default pattern, begin by noticing that impulse and get curious about it. Try this- sit down with pen and paper and do your own cost-benefit analysis. Ask yourself:
You might find that the short-term relief isn’t worth the long-term consequences. Avoidance makes anxiety louder. Let’s quiet that bad boy down. Every step you take toward facing your fear (even a small one) is a step toward progress and, ultimately, freedom.
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Brittney Chesworth, Ph.D., LCSW , is a psychotherapist with a private practice that focuses exclusively on the treatment of anxiety disorders through cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.