Problems sleeping
Sleep disturbances may be the main symptom of an anxiety disorder.
Sleep disturbances do not refer to specific days when it is difficult to sleep or days when one wakes up earlier than usual, but to persistent and recurring problems resting properly.
A person with anxiety is likely to have trouble sleeping at night, despite having done considerable physical and psychological exertion during the day.
So, although you may be tired or need to rest, it is often worrying for a person to fall asleep in the sleeping position..
This fact is explained by the physical and psychological overstimulation that a person experiences as an anxiety disorder.
Anxious people have higher brain activations on all days and find it difficult to pay attention to their thoughts throughout the day..
In this way, when they are tired or going to sleep, they find it difficult to do simple mental exercises to avoid extreme thoughts in order to sleep….
A minimum state of calm and relaxation is needed to sleep properly, so people who cannot achieve this have a lot of trouble falling asleep.
Muscle tension
Another key aspect of nervousness is muscle tension. As we have noted, when anxiety appears, the activation of the mind and body immediately increases.
In this way, the muscles of the body, no longer relaxed and in a normal tone most of the time like most people, are in constant tension.
To better understand this, let’s put the following example:
Anxiety is that brain mechanism that allows us to move our bodies before situations that require a quick and effective response.
For example, if you are in the woods and you hear a threatening noise, anxiety allows you to activate your body in the appropriate way so that you can react appropriately in an emergency.
In this way, one of the main actions your mind performs on your body is to strongly stress your muscles so they are ready for action.
If this anxiety disorder only occurs during this situation, the muscles are strongly stressed for a limited period of time and return to their normal tone when the threat disappears.
However, when you experience pathological anxiety, your mind continually activates the muscles throughout the day, every day.
In this way, when you experience anxiety, your muscles become more and more stressed, you can’t relax them, and you are likely to feel back or cervical pain…
Physical discomfort
For the same reasons we mentioned earlier, anxiety can cause a lot of physical pain or discomfort. Because our body is constantly activated, it can never relax and we start to experience certain annoying sensations.
The physical sensations that can be experienced with anxiety can vary, but the most common are usually nerves in the stomach…
This feeling is characterised by a series of unpleasant discomforts in this part of the body, which are interpreted as nerve signals, as if the nerves were held in the stomach.
This is because the intestine is an organ that is very sensitive to psychological stress, so we experience the constant activation of this part of the body as very annoying and unpleasant.
These sensations can also lead to flatulence, gas, constipation or other digestive disorders. But “nerves in the stomach” are not the only physical discomfort that can cause anxiety.
Heart palpitations, increased heart rate, sweating, tremors, a feeling of suffocation, chest tightness, unsteadiness, dizziness or nausea may be other signs of anxiety…
Uncontrolled thinking
Another feature of anxiety is the inability to think. When anxiety appears in our mind, it takes control completely and prevents us from stopping it if it causes discomfort.
Thoughts begin to arise without any control, they creep into our minds with complete freedom and sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop it.
So, no matter how annoying the thoughts we may have, and even if we want it to go away, it still acts as if it has a life of its own.
As if the haemorrhage of anxiety-inducing emotions and feelings gives us greater control over what we ourselves think.
In this way, peace exists as unattainable because we can only pay attention to our thoughts, which increase and exacerbate our state of anxiety.
Excessive worry
Similarly, the uncontrolled thoughts described in the previous section are usually not pleasant and optimistic in content.
On the contrary, they usually focus on aspects that cause us great concern and increase our feelings of anxiety and nervousness.
In this way, worries appear without any control and become bigger and bigger, making an endless loop with our feelings of physical anxiety.
Irrational fears
In some cases, excessive problems can become completely irrational in relation to various aspects.
These anxiety problems are so-called phobias, characterised by excessive fear and a lack of any kind of motivation.
These irrational fears can occur in the face of any element (snakes, spiders, heights, blood, etc.) or situation (while driving, when in contact with other people, when alone, etc.).
Likewise, the person who suffers from them is able to interpret them as irrational, but despite being aware that there is no such extreme fear, is unable to extinguish and/or reduce it….
Again, we are faced with an unthinking nature that begins to produce very anxious and unpleasant content, and although much effort is made, they always seem to win the game.
Perfectionism
One of the most common traits of people suffering from anxiety is perfectionism and the need to do things in the best way possible.
In this case, perfectionism is not itself a sign that anxiety is occurring, but can in many cases explain the origin and maintenance of this type of change…
Perfectionists have greater motivation to do things right, but at the same time have less sense of control when they perceive imperfections in many of the elements around them…
In this way, a very perfectionist person may experience a great deal of concern about aspects that other people, who are less focused on detail, would overlook…
A feeling of insecurity
Insecurity is a common symptom of most anxiety disorders.
Such signs are characterised by the emergence of a certain sense of uncontrollability, difficulty in recognising the sufficiency and lack of recognition of things that confirm mastery..
In fact, many anxiety disorders can stem from a lack of control over aspects that are important to the person.
Will my job guarantee me a stable job future? Will I improve my relationship with my partner and marry him? Did I choose well in your studies and will they guarantee me a job?.
Such aspects can create a sense of lack of control in a person who has experienced anxiety with heightened states and emotions..
In these cases, the central axis of anxiety can be a lack of security and the need to constantly activate as they make unnecessary control into a better control..
Difficulties
When you are anxious or extremely nervous, it is clearly a difficult task to concentrate and think clearly.
This is because it takes considerable energy to concentrate properly and a specific stimulus to direct our attention.
But an anxious person has to keep their mind constantly working, investing a high level of energy in maintaining the persistent thoughts that define their anxiety..
In this way, if a person is willing to change their focus and ignore their thoughts so they can concentrate on any task, their brain will usually ignore them..
In the minds of people with anxiety disorder, the worries inside them seem somewhat more important than any other aspect, in this way changing his mind and making him focus on other things is often difficult.
Anxiety or impatience
Finally, the last sign that characterizes anxiety and is very useful for identifying this type of state is restlessness or impatience.
Anxious people usually have a lot of difficulty calming down so that their body is constantly active and restless.
Similarly, this state of overactivity causes a person to be very impatient.
An anxious person’s body is faster than the rest of it, so they expect things to work at the same speed as they do. When this doesn’t happen, feelings and thoughts of impatience immediately appear.
And what other symptoms of anxiety do you have??
