I've had the same GP for years and there's nothing seriously wrong with me, but every time I book an appointment I feel this creeping dread for days beforehand. Even for simple stuff like checkups or minor issues. Is this some kind of health anxiety or just normal nervousness that other people experience too?
Pretty much everyone feels some version of this - it's not automatically health anxiety. Routine appointments trigger dread for a lot of people because there's this weird uncertainty hanging over them: you don't know if the doctor will find something, or what they might say, or if you'll forget to mention something important. The fact that you've seen the same GP for years and nothing serious has shown up actually suggests your nervousness is just normal apprehension rather than a pattern of catastrophizing. If the dread is intense enough to stop you booking appointments or it spirals into checking your symptoms obsessively, that'd be worth mentioning to someone, but occasional pre-appointment jitters are basically universal.
The uncertainty thing is real, but I'd push back a bit - what you're describing sounds less like generic nervousness and more like anticipatory anxiety that's become a pattern. Your brain's basically learned to treat "doctor's appointment" as a threat signal even though rationally you know there's nothing to dread, which is actually pretty common and often responds well to exposure (showing up, nothing bad happens, brain slowly recalibrates). Health anxiety is more about catastrophizing the results or convincing yourself something's seriously wrong; this feels more like your body just reacting to the appointment itself as stressful, which is a different animal.
I used to have this exact thing happen - that dread would kick in days before, even when I knew nothing was wrong. I think both answers above are touching on something real, but the pattern part matters more than just the uncertainty itself. Once you've felt that anxiety a few times before appointments, your brain starts treating the *booking* as the threat rather than anything that might actually happen there, and it just loops. The good news is that's actually easier to break than true health anxiety - it's more about your nervous system being stuck in a habit than genuinely believing something's wrong with you. Going through with a couple of appointments where nothing scary happens, and maybe paying attention to that moment when the dread peaks and then... nothing actually occurs, can help reset it.
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