Health Anxiety Test (SHAI)

Health anxiety is the tendency to worry about being or becoming seriously ill, out of proportion to one's actual medical situation. Psychologists once grouped severe forms under the label hypochondriasis, but the modern cognitive account, developed largely by Hilary Warwick and Paul Salkovskis, reframed it as a pattern of interpretation: ordinary bodily sensations get read as evidence of disease, attention then locks onto the body, and checking or reassurance-seeking keeps the alarm going. On this view, health anxiety runs along a continuum that nearly everyone occupies somewhere - most people worry occasionally about their health, some hardly at all, and a minority live with fears intense enough to dominate daily life.

The Short Health Anxiety Inventory (SHAI) grew out of that cognitive model. Published by Salkovskis, Rimes, Warwick, and Clark in 2002, it was designed to measure health anxiety independently of a person's physical condition, so that it works for medically healthy worriers and for people managing real illness alike. It has become a standard instrument in both research and clinical practice, used to screen the spectrum from mild unease to the severe presentations now diagnosed as illness anxiety disorder or somatic symptom disorder.

This test profiles three facets of health anxiety. Illness worry captures the intrusive, returning fear of having or developing a serious disease - the thoughts that outlast a doctor's reassurance. Body vigilance describes how closely you monitor your body: noticing every ache and change, checking, and researching what sensations might mean. Feared outcomes reflects the SHAI's negative-consequences dimension - what you believe a serious illness would do to you, from manageable setback to total catastrophe. The three feed one another: catastrophic beliefs make bodily signals more threatening, and closer monitoring supplies ever more signals to worry about.

Research using the SHAI has connected elevated health anxiety to more frequent medical visits, repeated reassurance-seeking that relieves worry only briefly, and higher distress during public health scares. A related line of work studies cyberchondria, the escalation of worry through repeated online symptom searching. The encouraging finding is that health anxiety responds well to treatment: controlled trials show that cognitive behavioral therapy produces lasting reductions, often in relatively few sessions, by changing how bodily sensations are interpreted rather than by offering more reassurance.

Your three facet scores are averaged into a single Total Health Anxiety score, shown as a percentage from low to high. Alongside your bars, the chart marks estimated comparison values for a typical adult, who lands near 32% - reflecting that most people carry a little health worry, watch their bodies somewhat, and expect illness to be hard but survivable. These markers are approximations rescaled from published community samples using the original inventory, not validated percentile norms for this exact test, so treat them as a rough point of reference rather than a precise ranking.

A degree of attention to your health is adaptive - it gets real symptoms checked and real diseases caught early. What distinguishes health anxiety is not caring about your health but the distress and interference the worry itself causes, often exceeding the burden of any illness it anticipates. Scores also move with circumstances: a recent loss, a friend's diagnosis, or a pandemic year can raise anyone's vigilance for a while. A high score here is a description of your current relationship with your health, not a verdict on your body or your character.

This test is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not a diagnostic instrument and cannot tell you whether you have an anxiety disorder or a physical illness. The test is based on the Short Health Anxiety Inventory but uses its own items and is not affiliated with Salkovskis, Rimes, Warwick, Clark, or any of their institutions. If worry about your health is causing you significant distress, consider speaking with a qualified professional.

References

• Salkovskis, P. M., Rimes, K. A., Warwick, H. M. C., & Clark, D. M. (2002). The Health Anxiety Inventory: Development and validation of scales for the measurement of health anxiety and hypochondriasis. Psychological Medicine, 32(5), 843-853.
• Alberts, N. M., Hadjistavropoulos, H. D., Jones, S. L., & Sharpe, D. (2013). The Short Health Anxiety Inventory: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 27(1), 68-78.
• Pilowsky, I. (1967). Dimensions of hypochondriasis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 113(494), 89-93.