109 | Hacking Hypochondria: Health Anxiety, Cybersecurity, and the Search for Certainty

What happens when the things we do to protect our health become the very things that keep us anxious?

Jason Webb is a lifelong tech enthusiast who works in cybersecurity. After years of struggling with health anxiety, he channeled his experience into Hacking Hypochondria, a book about understanding the cycle of health anxiety and learning to relate differently to uncertainty.

In this episode of Beyond Trauma, Jason and I explore how an ordinary bodily sensation—a flutter in the heart, for instance—can set off a cascade of fear, symptom searching, and reassurance-seeking that ultimately makes the next wave of anxiety more likely. We discuss why checking your blood pressure, searching symptoms online, and other attempts to get reassurance can offer temporary relief while strengthening anxiety over time.

Jason brings a fresh perspective to the problem through his work in cybersecurity, drawing parallels between health anxiety and the way security systems can become overwhelmed by alerts, generating false positives and making it harder to distinguish real threats from noise. We also talk about the limits of the advice to “listen to your body,” the role of the outdoors in shifting our relationship to anxiety, and what to say to someone who wants to eliminate every possible health risk.

If you’ve ever found yourself searching for symptoms late at night, monitoring every bodily sensation, or struggling to accept that you can’t know for certain that everything is okay, this conversation offers a different way to think about what it means to take care of yourself.

In this episode, we explore:

• How a heart flutter can trigger panic and create a self-reinforcing cycle of health anxiety
• Why symptom searching, repeated blood pressure checks, and reassurance-seeking can make anxiety worse over time
• What cybersecurity can teach us about false alarms, alert fatigue, and the anxious mind
• Why “listen to your body” isn’t always helpful advice
• How spending time outdoors can help interrupt the cycle
• What it means to live with uncertainty when you want to catch every possible sign of illness

Content note: This episode discusses health anxiety and fear of illness.

Learn more about Jason and his book, Hacking Hypochondria.

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Intro & Outro Music by Daniel Zaitchik