In addition to eight months of weekly therapy sessions with a mental health professional who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), these are resources I used to improve my health anxiety.

The OCD Workbook:  My therapist recommended this book to me even though I was pretty resistant to a diagnosis of OCD at first. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me (beyond the general “hypochondriac” anxieties,) but this book ended up being instrumental in improving my health anxiety.

Coping with Anxiety: Ten Simple Ways to Relieve Anxiety, Fear, and Worry: This was another one of the first books that my therapist recommended.

The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD.  This book uses some different techniques compared to the other OCD Workbook mentioned above.

The Anxiety and Worry Workbook: The Cognitive Behavioral Solution

The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-By-Step Program

Olympus VN-7200 Digital Voice Recorder: Much of CBT therapy for my hyphochondria involved “exposure therapy.”  Since it’s pretty difficult to expose oneself to a blood clot or brain tumor, my therapist and the OCD workbooks recommend “imagined exposure.”  Imagined exposure involves recording your voice telling a scenario that is scary to you, and then repeating it over and over again.  I didn’t necessarily want any of my weirdo scenarios on my smartphone or cloud account, so I bought this specifically for recording the scenarios.

As always, be sure to check with a mental health professional to see if these books resources would be a good fit for you.

What about you all?  Do you have any particular resources that helped you overcome your Health Anxiety or OCD?  Let me know, and I’ll add it to the list.