ACT for health anxiety
Addressing uncertainty, fear, and disconnection
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.
Continuing education credits are available both for attending the live workshop and for completing the workshop by viewing the recording of the live event.
APA psychologists: This program is sponsored by Contextual Consulting and is approved for 6 CE credits for psychologists. Contextual Consulting is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Contextual Consulting maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
Nationally certified counselors: This workshop is available for 6 credit hours. Contextual Consulting Ltd. has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7578.
New York psychologists: This program is sponsored by Contextual Consulting and is approved for 6 CE credits for psychologists. Contextual Consulting is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0316. To find out more, including attendance requirements and how to access your certificate, go to our continuing education information page.
If you have disability and require adjustments or accommodation, please email us at admin@contextualconsulting.co.uk to discuss your needs and we will do our best to help you.
Booking cancellation
The registration fee will be refunded minus a administration charge if cancellations are received at least two weeks before the workshop date.
Cancellations within two weeks of the event date are charged the full registration fee, other than in exceptional circumstances that can be verified.
Event cancellation
In the event of cancellation of the course outside of our control we will not be held accountable for travel and/or accommodation costs incurred. However, the workshop fees will be refunded.
All workshops will be subject to minimum delegate numbers being met; in the event that a workshop should be cancelled delegates will be given no less than 2 months’ notice.
Replacing delegates
If a delegate is unable to attend and a replacement is nominated there may be a charge depending on the individual circumstances, this will be advised at the time. Please contact the us to request a replacement of delegates at least a week before the workshop date.
Contextual Consulting is committed to the identification and resolution of potential conflicts of interest in the planning, promotion, delivery, and evaluation of continuing education. Potential conflicts of interest occur when an individual assumes a professional role in the planning, promotion, delivery, or evaluation of continuing education where personal, professional, legal, financial, or other interests could reasonably be expected to impair their objectivity, competence, or effectiveness.
There was no commercial support for this event. None of the planners or presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.
Hoffmann, D., Rask, C. U., & Frostholm, L. (2019). Acceptance and commitment therapy for health anxiety. In E. Hedman-Lagerlöf (Ed.), The Clinician's Guide to Treating Health Anxiety: Diagnosis, Mechanisms, and Effective Treatment (pp. 123–142). Academic Press.
Hoffmann, D., Rask, C.U., Frostholm, L. (2019). Acceptance and commitment therapy for health anxiety. I E. Hedman-Lagerlöf (ed.) The Clinician's Guide to Treating Health Anxiety. Diagnosis, Mechanisms, and Effective Treatment (s. 123-142). Academic Press
Frydendal, D. H., Ingeman, K., Fink, P. K., Wellnitz, K. B., & Frostholm, L. (2025). Internet-delivered acceptance and commitment therapy for COVID-19 related health anxiety: a pragmatic study. Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, 79(6), 401–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039488.2025.2506560
Ingeman K, Frydendal DH, Frostholm L, Bjerre-Nielsen E, Wellnitz KB, Onghena P, Wright K, Rask CU, Internet-Delivered Psychological Treatment for Parents With Health Anxiety by Proxy: Replicated Randomized Single-Case Experimental Design, JMIR Form Res 2025;9:e65396, doi: 10.2196/65396
Frydendal, D.H., Rask, C. U., Jensen, J.S., Wellnitz, K. B. & Frostholm, L. (2023). Mindful non-reactivity and psychological flexibility mediate the effect of internet-delivered acceptance and commitment therapy for health anxiety, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, Volume 28, p. 71-78, doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2023.03.011.
Hoffmann, D., Rask, C.U., Hedman-Lagerlöf, E., Jensen, J.S., Frostholm, L. (2020). Efficacy of internet-delivered acceptance and commitment therapy for severe health anxiety: results from a randomized, controlled trial. Psychological Medicine, 1–11.
Hoffmann, D., Rask, C., Hedman-Lagerlöf, E., Ljótsson, B. & Frostholm, L. (2018). Development and Feasibility Testing of Internet-Delivered Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Severe Health Anxiety: Pilot Study, JMIR Ment Health, 5(2)
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Understand the function of health-anxious behaviour, including why avoidance, checking, and reassurance-seeking persist despite causing distress.
- Distinguish between different presentations of health anxiety, including fears organised around a specific condition and health anxiety by proxy.
- Guide clients toward values-based action, moving away from cycles of control and certainty-seeking.
- Apply ACT metaphors and storytelling techniques suited to health anxiety presentations.
- Apply current research findings on health anxiety to clinical practice.