How Anxious Is Too Anxious? 6 Signs You May Need Treatment
How Anxious Is Too Anxious? 6 Signs You May Need Treatment
Feeling excessively anxious lately? You’re not alone. In any given year, just over 18% of people are coping with anxiety in some form or another. In fact, anxiety disorders affect an average of 40 million people in the United States alone. This year, we’re all feeling a little more isolated and anxious than usual. But how much anxiety is too much?
Not every anxious moment is an indication of an anxiety disorder. Indeed, feeling nervous or stressed about something is often a perfectly normal response. An anxiety disorder, however, will result in feelings of stress, panic, or worry that become extreme, unmanageable, or unpredictable, Anxiety disorders can have a significant, negative impact on your quality of life. and as such, should be treated. Sadly, many people don’t realize they have an anxiety disorder and therefore do not seek treatment.
On your own, it can be difficult to tell if you’re worrying too much. Free online health assessments are a quick and easy way to determine whether you should talk to someone. Here are some additional (and often overlooked) signs of anxiety disorders.
We worry: from finances to food security to family issues, conflict is a way of life, and some anxiety is completely normal. However, worries that become pervasive, disruptive, or incessant could be a sign of a generalized anxiety disorder (also known as GAD). This is especially true if your worries continue even after the clear source of your anxiety has been resolved. For example, if you experience anxiety related to a job interview long after the interview has concluded, you might be contending with a generalized anxiety disorder.
Generalized anxiety disorders can make it difficult to focus on your everyday tasks and can negatively impact many aspects of your life, damaging relationships and careers alike. There are therapies that can help you successfully manage GAD symptoms. Seeking out treatment is essential.
2. Trouble Sleeping
A disruption to your sleep cycle is almost always a sign that something is off. Anxiety is not always the source of insomnia, of course. But anxiety disorders can cause particularly sharp disruptions to your sleep habits. That’s because anxiety itself can result in a particularly vicious cycle; you lose sleep because you’re experiencing anxiety. The lost sleep causes you to feel more anxious, which further disrupts your ability to fall asleep. As you become more fatigued, your ability to cope with feelings of anxiety — both heightened and normal — diminishes.
Assessing the root cause of any sleep disruption is essential. Treating the source of your trouble sleeping can help interrupt the vicious cycle and restore your equilibrium.
Whether caused by a disorder or by normal responses, anxiety is both an emotional reaction and a physical reaction. When stressed, you might clench your jaw or ball your fists, maybe even grind your teeth. (For example, dentists have reported a sharp increase in damage from teeth grinding during COVID-19.) Over time, all of these stressor reactions can cause noticeable aches and pains throughout your body. Your sore back or aching neck, in such cases, could be a secondary symptom of an anxiety disorder.
Many people with anxiety disorders have normalized or compartmentalized their anxious feelings. They may not even realize they’re feeling anxious. But aches and pains in the muscles can be harder to ignore. If there is a connection between your anxiety and muscle pain, it can be a useful way to monitor your anxiety.
4. Gastrointestinal Issues
Stress is a holistic body response. That’s good in the short term, as the fight-or-flight response helps you cope with stressful situations. But over time, these stress responses can interfere with the normal operation of your body in unexpected ways. One example of this is when an anxiety disorder causes gastrointestinal issues.
Research has shown that chronic complaints of nausea, diarrhea, indigestion or stomach pains are often linked to anxiety disorders. Treating the anxiety can often alleviate the GI issues, but it’s not necessarily a connection that many patients will instinctively make.
Panic attacks can strike for a wide variety of reasons, many of them unpredictable. It’s normal to feel panic in response to a high-stress situation. If you’re afraid of spiders and an arachnid drops from the ceiling, the panic you feel is completely normal! Your body makes a wide variety of “fight-or-flight” physiological reactions, which can lead to a thundering heart, light-headedness, numbness, or a number of other symptoms. When experienced in reaction to something frightening, this is perfectly normal.
But repeatedly feeling panicked could be a sign of an anxiety order, and should be treated seriously. When the trigger of a panic attack isn’t well known, the patient can often live in a state of constant fear, further exacerbating the anxiety and making treatment essential. There are multiple therapies that can help patients begin to control panic attacks, depending on the nature of the disorder.
6. Perfectionism and Obsessive Thinking
Sometimes, it can feel difficult to turn your brain off, to quiet the otherwise normal thoughts in your head. The inability to change your train of thought can sometimes be a sign of a possible anxiety disorder.
In some cases, this presents as an extreme focus on a certain topic — especially if that topic is the source of some anxious feelings. In other cases, you may experience feelings of perfectionism. Both experiences may occur simultaneously. If you notice extreme feelings of perfectionism or obsessive thinking, it could be a sign of an anxiety disorder, and it’s worth talking about possible therapies to address the issue.
Still not sure whether you should talk to someone about your anxiety? Try a free online health assessment.
Anxiety Is Very Treatable
It should be emphasized that none of these signs is, in itself, a sure sign of anxiety disorders. But if you notice one or more of these signs, you should talk to a mental health professional to receive an objective, medical opinion. Diagnosing an anxiety disorder could be the first step in treatment.
With the right therapies, most anxiety disorders are quite manageable and most patients are able to achieve a very high quality of life.
If you think you have an anxiety disorder, and you want to know your treatment options, contact a mental health professional today.
Visit us at Skyler Health, where we empower people to prevent and stop anxiety, pain, medication & substance dependence with professional, licensed, and vetted counselors that you can trust.
