SHARES
Anxiety is a natural response when you under pressure e.g. in a job interview, exam or first date. It is the body’s way to help you to stay alert, focused and ready to face imminent challenges. But when excessive anxiety becomes chronic or overwhelming, it interferes with your daily life and hampers your relationships, this becomes a disorder. It is one of the most common mental disorders today in the world.
An overly anxious person becomes tense, jumpy, irritable, apprehensive and sometimes may feel the mind has gone blank! Thus overwhelming worry and fear that characterise anxiety can be disabling to your mental well-being. But it can inflict just as much chaos on the body as it can the mind.
Anxiety triggers a fight-or-flight response in your body. It’s a natural response to help you survive a threat by fleeing or fending it off. In the prehistoric era, that threat might have been something along the lines of a predator preparing to pounce.
If you have the condition, fear and worry set off feelings of threats, triggering your sympathetic nervous system. This system controls involuntary processes like breathing and heart rate. Consequently, leading the adrenal glands to release hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol (reference: the Mayo Clinic). This domino effect unleashes a host of physical symptoms, outlined here below:
12 Effects of Anxiety on Your Body
1. You have a racing heart
This is a typical sign of anxiety, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). When you’re dealing with something stressful, your adrenal glands produce hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Receptors in your heart react by speeding up your heartbeat. The purpose is to enable you to pump more blood to your big muscles providing you with more energy so you could theoretically flee or combat a threat.
But if you’re dealing with anxiety, that racing heart could just make you feel more nervous in a vicious cycle.
2. You’re sweating profusely.
If you’re already fighting with anxiety, sweating profusely may just make it worse. Unfortunately, sweating is a common side effect of anxiety disorders, according to the NIMH.
When your sympathetic nervous system gets activated, it can influence the sweat glands all over your body. You have two kinds, according to the Mayo Clinic: eccrine, which cover most of your skin, and apocrine, which are only on body parts that have a lot of hair follicles.
Both types of sweat glands can cause anxiety-induced perspiration, but it’s the milky fluid from your apocrine glands in particular that may make sweat smell bad.
3. Your stomach feels “out of sorts”.
People with anxiety may notice general stomach pain, constipation, diarrhoea, or other kinds of gastrointestinal distress.
A lot of this may boil down to what experts call the gut-brain axis, which is a communication system between your brain and the enteric nervous system, that governs your digestion. This connection is why stress can so easily mess with your poop. There’s also the fact that anxiety-induced lifestyle choices like eating foods that don’t agree with you or not exercising can affect your digestion as well.
4. You are short of breath.
Your blood circulates oxygen around your body. When your stress response boosts how quickly you’re sending blood around your body, your breathing might increase to provide you with more oxygen.
If you breathe too quickly (also known as hyperventilation), you can actually enhance a lot of the physical anxiety symptoms on this list because your oxygen-carbon dioxide balance gets out of whack, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This can go on to set off a panic attack.
5. You’re always tired.
A constant feeling of exhaustion is a common sign of anxiety, according to the NIMH. There are two reasons for this. First, that anxiety-activated uptick in stress hormones can keep you on high alert, which can be draining. But there’s an additional complicating factor: Sleep and anxiety have a complicated relationship, which brings us to another typical physical side effect of anxiety…
6. You’re not sleeping well.
A person with anxiety might have a tough time falling asleep and/or staying asleep, according to the NIMH. Elevated levels of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline make it hard to get a good night’s sleep. Consequently. since your system is flooded with hormones your body may not be able to relax enough to rest. The racing thoughts that can come with anxiety are no recipe for great sleep, either.
It’s not just that anxiety contributes to sleep problems. Sleep issues such as insomnia can make you more prone to anxiety too, the Mayo Clinic explains.
7. Your muscles tense up.
Your muscles tense up as part of your stress response. Holding parts of your body so rigidly for prolonged periods can lead to pain which can be noted in the tightness in one’s neck, back or shoulders. Individuals with anxiety also tend to clench their jaw causing a muscle tension that can inevitably lead to a headache.
8. You’re shaky.
If you’ve ever found yourself trembling with fear before a big event, you know how your body reacts under pressure. Turns out, it doesn’t need an external trigger like a scary presentation or an important meeting to start shivering like a leaf; shaking and trembling can be a by-product of anxiety-induced hormone surges, according to the NIMH.
9. You’re jumpy, nervous and startle easily.
Trying to anticipate unknown threats is a common feature of anxiety. Constantly being on guard has been linked with an increased “startle response,” which could be why you practically jump out of your shoes if someone taps you on the shoulder on an anxious day.
10. You have a hard time swallowing.
Anxiety can cause some people to feel tightness in their throat or even like something is stuck in there, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This is called Globus sensation, and although the exact reason why this happens is unclear, it can definitely make anxiety even worse. “You feel like you can’t get enough air,” says Dr Potter.
11. You get sick frequently with colds.
Some people tend to get sick more often in periods of high anxiety, says Dr Potter. Your immune system doesn’t function as well when your fight-or-flight response is operating for too long, according to the Mayo Clinic. This could mean that you’re more susceptible to issues such as the common cold, although a lot of other factors come into play here as well, like how robust your immune system is in general and how vigilant you are about hand hygiene.
12. You may experience Panic Attacks
When do these physical symptoms signal a panic attack? Some of the physical symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks overlap, like sweating, trembling, and a fast heart rate. But there’s one major difference: Panic attacks cause an extreme sensation of fear that strikes out of nowhere. That terror is an integral part of having a panic attack. Beyond that, panic attacks include at least four of the following symptoms, some of which you just read about as physical effects of anxiety:
- Palpitations, a pounding, or racing heart rate
- Sweating
- Trembling or shaking
- Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
- Feelings of choking
- Chest pain or discomfort
- Nausea or abdominal distress
- Feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded, or faint
- Chills or heat sensations
- Numbness or tingling
- De-realisation (feeling like reality is confusing) or de-personalisation (feeling detached from yourself)
- Fear of losing control or “going crazy”
- Fear of dying
Conclusion
Commonly, everyone suffers from anxiety now and again. However, if it becomes chronic, it affects your health and quality of life with serious consequences. Consult your healthcare professional to treat and help you manage you are the condition. There are also strategies and steps you can take to deal with it.
Further Read: How to Deal with and Cope with Anxiety
by Yashwini Ravindranath
Born & raised in Malaysia, Yashwini earned her M.D. studying in Moscow's Russian National Research Medical University. With an affiliation towards research, all things coffee and the startup ecosystem, she now contributes articles to GetDocSays View all articles by Yashwini Ravindranath.
