Anxiety is a very common issue affecting millions of people. However, its cause and symptoms are often misunderstood. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of anxiety, including common signs to look out for, physical and mental impacts, typical triggers, and advice on seeking professional help if needed.
What Is Anxiety? An Overview
According to Serenity Mental Health Centers experts, anxiety is a normal feeling that everyone experiences at some level. It occurs when a person perceives a real or potential threat and activates the body’s innate fight-or-flight response. However, for those with an anxiety disorder, feelings of fear, worry, and unease are excessive and interfere with daily activities.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health issues in America, affecting around 40 million adults age 18 and older each year. There are several different forms of anxiety disorder, with the most prevalent being generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder, and specific phobias. Anxiety can develop from a combination of genetics, brain chemistry, life experiences, and coping abilities. While the causes may vary, all types of anxiety disorders involve disproportionate worries that are difficult to control.
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
The physical symptoms of anxiety are caused by the activation of the autonomic nervous system during the fight-or-flight response. Some of the most common physical signs someone is experiencing high levels of anxiety include increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, shaking or trembling, tightness in the chest, nausea, dizziness or lightheadedness, muscle tension or soreness, difficulty concentrating, and trouble sleeping. Additionally, people who suffer from anxiety often have worrying physical symptoms that disrupt their lives, such as frequent headaches, fatigue, digestive issues like diarrhea or irritable bowel syndrome, and recurrent nausea or dizziness. All of these physical sensations occur due to anxiety even in the absence of an actual threat or danger.
Emotional and Cognitive Symptoms
In addition to physical manifestations, anxiety also affects a person’s emotional state and thought patterns. Common feelings experienced during periods of anxiety include dread, fear, panic, worry, unease, restlessness, and irritability. On a cognitive level, someone grappling with anxiety often has difficulty concentrating, struggles with making decisions, experiences racing or intrusive thoughts, and uses unhelpful coping strategies like catastrophizing potential threats. They may also be hypervigilant about bodily sensations or external situations and interpret benign occurrences in the worst possible light. Emotional and cognitive anxieties greatly impair functioning and contribute to increased distress for those living with prolonged anxiety symptoms.
Behavioral Signs of Anxiety
A person’s behavior can also reflect underlying anxiety even when they don’t consciously realize it or complain of physical sensations. Some behavioral signs to look out for include avoidance of activities that provoke anxiety, isolation from social interactions, substance abuse to self-medicate feelings of discomfort, fidgeting or pacing, dependency on others for reassurance or permission, compulsive behaviors like checking locks repeatedly, and irritability or restlessness in others due to elevated anxious energy. Behaviors serve as coping mechanisms in the short-term but maintain unhelpful anxiety patterns if left unaddressed through treatment and lifestyle adjustments.
Common Triggers of Anxiety
While anyone can experience anxiety, certain factors may predispose some individuals or trigger anxious episodes. Common triggers of anxiety include:
- Stressful life events like financial problems, relationship issues, job loss, trauma
- Stressful environments where one feels a lack of control
- Medical conditions like thyroid abnormalities, asthma, heart disease
- Use of or withdrawal from certain substances like caffeine, recreational drugs, corticosteroids
- Inherited biological vulnerability and imbalances in neurotransmitters
- Personality traits linked to neuroticism
- Learned anxious patterns from one’s upbringing or environment
- Negative thought patterns involving threat estimation errors
Recognizing personal anxiety triggers can help better manage symptoms proactively through targeted coping strategies.
Anxiety and Daily Life
The far-reaching impacts of prolonged, untreated anxiety can greatly impair quality of life. Anxiety not only causes considerable emotional suffering but also disrupts social, occupational, and educational functioning. Specific ways anxiety negatively affects day-to-day life may include:
Poor work or school performance due to difficulties concentrating, poor time-management from hypervigilance, frequent absenteeism
Social withdrawal and isolation from discomfort in social/performance situations
Strained personal relationships due to irritability, dependence on others for reassurance
Reduced life satisfaction and engagement in enjoyable activities that anxiety deems “risky”
Physical health problems if anxiety goes chronically untreated due to prolonged stress on the body
Financial burden of indirect costs like lost wages or direct costs of specialist treatment
Recognizing how anxiety permeates multiple life domains is imperative to seek appropriate support.
Anxiety vs. Other Conditions
It’s important to understand how anxiety distinguishes itself from other mental health conditions with some overlapping symptoms. Some key differences include:
- Depression involves persistent low mood, feelings of worthlessness, and loss of interest rather than constant threat estimation.
- Bipolar disorder features extreme mood swings between mania and depression rather than a single elevated state.
- Adjustment disorder relates specifically to a stress reaction following a distressing life event versus generalized, disproportionate anxiety.
- Panic disorder centers on discrete panic attacks while GAD entails chronic, excessive unease over multiple issues.
- PTSD develops after a traumatic event and creates avoidance related to trauma triggers versus general threat perception.
While symptoms may seem similar, receiving an accurate diagnosis is essential for choosing the most effective evidence-based treatments. A mental health provider can decipher underlying causes via a clinical evaluation.
When to Seek Professional Help for Anxiety
Most experts advise actively seeking help for anxiety if symptoms:
- Persist, reoccur, or intensify over several weeks or more
- Severely interfere with daily functioning at work/school/home
- Cause marked distress or impairment in one’s quality of life
- Involve suicidal thoughts as a consequence of emotional distress
- Develop alongside depressive symptoms requiring differentiation
- Worsen during periods of life stress without resolving independently
- Appear after a traumatic event and create avoidance behaviors
- Have already been unsuccessfully treated without improvement
- Become so debilitating that one cannot independently care for oneself
Early intervention improves treatment outcomes and prevents anxiety from worsening without resolution. Working with a therapist and doctor enables developing healthy coping strategies and treatments to manage even severe anxiety disorders effectively.
To Close
Anxiety is characterized by excessive; difficult-to-control worries and fears that manifest mentally, emotionally, physically, and behaviorally. Common signs include racing thoughts, restlessness, poor concentration, irritability, heightened startle response, avoidance, panic attacks, social awkwardness, and impaired functioning. Triggers may involve stress, trauma, genetics, medical conditions or substances. Left untreated, anxiety severely diminishes quality of life by damaging relationships, work/school, physical health and life satisfaction. It’s important to monitor symptoms and seek help if anxiety persists, intensifies or fails to improve independently over time. Accurate diagnosis and evidence-based treatments, lifestyle adjustments and sometimes medication enable managing anxiety successfully.