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Weigh up the costs and benefits of specific health anxiety behaviours — checking, Googling, reassurance-seeking — to build motivation for change.
Apply the cost-benefit framework specifically to your health anxiety safety behaviours. What does each behaviour give you in the short term? What does it cost in the long term?
Use during the cognitive intervention phase to help clients evaluate the costs and benefits of their health-related behaviours, including checking, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, and Googling symptoms. This facilitates motivational engagement with behaviour change.
Present as a structured way to think through whether health-related behaviours are genuinely helpful or whether they come at a cost. Frame it as an exercise in informed decision-making rather than a directive to stop specific behaviours.
For clients who are ambivalent about reducing health behaviours, use motivational interviewing techniques alongside the cost-benefit analysis. For clients with comorbid medical conditions, carefully distinguish between recommended medical self-management and anxiety-driven health behaviours.
Avoid using this as a tool to argue the client out of their health behaviours. The analysis should reflect the client's genuine perspective, including any real benefits they identify. The therapist's role is to facilitate honest evaluation, not to rig the outcome.
Clients often underestimate the costs of health behaviours (time spent, impact on relationships, reduced quality of life, missed activities) until they quantify them. Asking the client to estimate weekly hours spent on health-related behaviours can be a powerful motivational tool.
Suitable for clients working with health anxiety, cost-benefit, cbt, checking, reassurance, motivation. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
Create a free account to access 10 worksheets per month.
Track health anxiety episodes — the trigger, misinterpretation, anxiety level, safety behaviour used, and the actual outcome.
Track gradual reduction in body checking behaviours — setting targets, monitoring frequency, and recording what happens when you check less.
Test how attention to the body creates and amplifies sensations — demonstrating that body scanning is part of the problem, not the solution.
Track urges to seek reassurance, whether you resisted, and what happened — building evidence that you can tolerate uncertainty without reassurance.