Book now: https://contextualconsulting.co.uk/live-training/act-for-health-anxiety/
Health anxiety is more than worry about illness. It is a cycle of seeking certainty, avoiding distress, and moving away from life. For practitioners, it is also one of the most under-recognised and under-treated presentations in clinical practice.
This workshop offers a practical, ACT-grounded approach with a focus on function over diagnosis. Participants will leave with tools they can use immediately.
Background to the workshop
Health anxiety affects 1–5% of adults globally, yet it frequently goes unrecognised and untreated. The result can be a revolving door of medical reassurance that offers temporary relief but does nothing to address the underlying processes maintaining the fear.
Health anxiety is often sustained by intolerance of uncertainty, experiential avoidance, and disconnection from bodily experience. The problem is not merely the fear of illness but the behaviours those fears drive. Function, not diagnosis, is the starting point for effective treatment. This helps improve patients’ day-to-day functioning and psychological health, and reduces the strain on wider healthcare resources. By addressing the roots of health anxiety, including intolerance of uncertainty and disconnection from bodily awareness, ACT offers a clinically powerful and outcome-oriented response to this growing challenge.
This workshop takes that functional lens and turns it into clinical skill. Whether clients are caught in compulsive checking, seeking constant medical reassurance, or living in a narrowed, health-dominated world, participants will come away with a clearer conceptualisation and a stronger set of tools.
What you will gain from this workshop
This workshop gives you a practical, theoretically grounded toolkit you can bring directly into your clinical work. Across the two sessions, you will learn to:
- Understand the function of health-anxious behaviour. You will develop a clearer picture of what avoidance, checking, and reassurance-seeking are doing for your clients, and why they persist despite causing so much distress. This includes helping clients recognise that their current strategies are not delivering the relief they promise, laying the groundwork for genuine therapeutic movement.
- Distinguish between different presentations. Health anxiety takes many forms, from fears centred on specific conditions such as cancer or ALS, to health anxiety by proxy, where fear is organised around a child’s or loved one’s health rather than one’s own. You will leave better equipped to identify these differences and tailor your approach accordingly.
- Guide clients toward values-based action. Rather than managing symptoms, you will learn to help clients redirect energy away from cycles of control and certainty-seeking, and toward a life that reflects what actually matters to them.
- Use ACT metaphors and storytelling techniques that are particularly well-suited to health anxiety, a presentation that can otherwise be difficult to shift. You will practise flexible tools you can use straight away.
- Apply cutting-edge research to your clinical practice. The field has moved quickly, and this workshop draws on current findings to sharpen your thinking across all aspects of working with health anxiety.
About this workshop
This interactive online workshop is delivered over two 3-hour sessions. Participants will benefit from a diverse mix of learning methods, including mini-lectures, experiential exercises, role-plays, video demonstrations, and in-depth case studies. The emphasis throughout is on practical, hands-on tools you can bring into your work with clients immediately.
The workshop is led by Dr Ditte Hoffmann Frydendal, a clinical psychologist with an extensive research and publication record in the field of health anxiety. Her research focused on developing and testing internet-delivered ACT for health anxiety, a programme now implemented in routine care across Denmark. Ditte also chairs the Danish Psychological Association’s society for digital psychology and co-hosts the health anxiety podcast “Hypokonder med Ditte og Kasper.”
Who will benefit from this workshop
This workshop is aimed at intermediate-level professionals who already have a foundational understanding of ACT and its core processes. It is designed for mental health professionals, including psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed mental health counsellors.
By attending, participants will gain skills to better identify, understand, and treat health anxiety, positioning them as more effective partners in the care and treatment journey of affected clients.
If you are new to ACT, we offer a free one hour workshop here.
https://contextualconsulting.co.uk/live-training/act-for-health-anxiety/