The many faces of anxiety
It’s not just worry, it can be physical pain and an impending sense of doom
Worry less they say, it’ll be easy they say…
Anxiety is more than just worry and isn’t something you can just turn off. Anxious thoughts are more like persistent loops and are very convincing. Typically, when we are experiencing anxiety, the thoughts feel like reality. For example, if you are worried something bad is going to happen to your health, then you might start noticing that your stomach doesn’t feel quite right or doing a body scan until you feel like something is off. This starts a chain reaction and our bodies react as if the worry is coming to fruition.
I once heard someone describe it as the sensation you get from being in a chair that almost tips backwards, but you catch it just in time. That feeling, sometimes for no identifiable reason, for long periods of time or sometimes all day.
Physical
Anxiety causes our bodies to release adrenaline, causing some or all of the following: increase in heart rate, rapid/ shallow breathing, chest pain, feeling of a “lump in the throat,” butterflies in the stomach, shakiness, dizziness, sweating, or nausea. You might only notice one or a few of these at a time, or sometimes they might come all at once. You might be asking yourself “HOW DOES THIS HELP ME IF I AM HAVING TEST ANXIETY?” The long and the short answer is that this is the same mechanism in your brain that kept us safe as cave men and women from things like tigers and mammoths. The exact same part of your brain is being activated when we fear something, whether real or a “what-if” situation.
Thoughts
Anxious thoughts often go in loops that feel impossible to break, it can feel as if someone else has control over the thoughts that enter your head and they spiral out of control. There are most likely thought distortions as well, such as thinking about the worst case scenario or catastrophizing. These thoughts are often not based in facts or things that have happened, but instead are fears about something that might happen. Anxiety tricks us into thinking that considering all 1 million ways something bad could happen will better prepare us. But we need to ask ourselves, does it reaaaaaally help? We do still want to look both ways when we cross the street, so anxiety can help us, but we don’t want it to be out of control or in situations that won’t benefit us. Bottom line, if you feel like you aren’t in control of it, you might want to work with a therapist to retrain your brain.
Hidden
Sometimes anxiety can also be hidden and less obvious. This might include a constant need for reassurance, perfectionistic tendencies, fear of failure, being a “people pleaser,” insomnia or difficulty sleeping, limiting social connections, and fatigue. There are a lot of people with anxiety who are high functioning, they might even look like an overachiever. However, we never know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. They might be driven by some of these things, like a fear of failing or reaching for perfection with everything that they do. These underlying core beliefs need to be in check or else it may become difficult to enjoy our lives or celebrate even the small wins. If you want to learn how to put anxiety back in the passenger’s seat instead of the driver’s seat, let’s chat.
Doc Hotz