Feeling anxious is a normal emotion. The difference with healthy anxiety and an anxiety disorder is when the anxious symptoms keeps someone from doing normal things in life on a regular basis.
People with an anxiety disorder worry constantly and their fears seem overwhelming and very real. There are a few problems with anxiety including:
Lack of Quality Sleep
Having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep is related to numerous health conditions, psychologically and physically. If you find yourself constantly struggling to fall sleep because you’re worrying about something specific (like money) or nothing, it might be an indicator of an anxiety disorder. Another problem is that you wake up feeling tired and your mind is still racing with worrying thoughts.
Indigestion
Anxiety stems from the mind but may manifest physical symptoms like digestive problems. When anxious, the body releases adrenaline and directs blood away from the stomach to the brain to induce the fight-or-flight reaction. Because the body isn’t focusing on digesting, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms can occur.
Muscle Tension
Headaches, sore necks, and shoulders are a painful symptom of anxiety. Someone who is anxious can have unconscious tension of muscles for long periods of time. Most people who tense their muscles constantly may stop noticing that they tense their muscles constantly until they focus on that particular muscle.
Chest Pain
A typical problem with anxiety is chest pain. Those chest pains feel like sharp shooting pains, persistent, or a constant vise like grip on the chest. Chest pains can affect one area of the chest persistently, then migrate to another area of the chest. A problem with anxiety related chest pains is that they can bring on other anxiety symptoms, or escalated thoughts that there really is something wrong with your physical health.
Perfectionism
People with anxiety often pursue perfection in their lives as a maladaptive way to cope with emotional distresses. Someone who is a perfectionist constantly pushes themselves to try to make zero mistakes in whatever task that they’re doing, poring over a project, tearing a project apart to make sure it’s flawless, and never being satisfied with the result. An anxious perfectionist has the mentality that if the end result of a project is flawed that must mean the creator is flawed as well.
Social Withdraw
People with anxiety often retreat from society, isolating themselves from the outside world. It’s not that they’re anti-social, they just find that it’s comfortable being alone instead of being in social situations. Other people with anxiety feel vulnerable when they sense a panic attack is coming, so they feel more at ease keeping their anxiety a private matter for fear of embarrassing themselves if their anxiety symptoms surface.
Self Doubt
A common problem of anxiety is self-doubt and harshly criticizing yourself or your own capabilities. Anxiety produces irrationality, so if we know we can’t rely on our own irrational thoughts, can we trust ourselves even though it seems rational? Someone with anxiety can get caught in a spiral of negative self-doubt until they come to the conclusion that they’re not good enough or not capable of performing activities that they’ve successfully accomplished in the past.
Inner Conflict
The biggest problem with anxiety is the inner conflict you have with yourself. You know that you know you’ll be alright, but you still feel terrible. You know you have people that love you, yet you feel alone. You know if you do something it will make you feel better, but you just don’t know what to do. You don’t want to struggle with the ball and chain of anxiety, you want to be well…but you can’t seem to free yourself.