What Causes Symptoms Of Anxiety?
Are you suffering from symptoms of anxiety? Panic symptoms such as a racing heart, excessive sweating, headaches and nausea are common to experiences of anxiety Believe it or not, everyone suffers from anxiety since it’s a natural response to stress.
These symptoms that we experience during anxiety are nature’s way of helping you deal with a threat. Suffering from anxiety symptoms doesn’t necessarily make you an anxiety disorder sufferer. This is because we all have experienced the stress response in some form or another.
Symptoms of anxiety are in fact the symptoms of a stress response. Negative emotions and feelings such as fear, anger and panic are seen and treated by the body the same way. The body’s release of adrenaline and other stress hormones is it’s way of dealing with a threat.
A real threat and a perceived threat are interpreted by the subconscious in the same way. The fight or flight response is designed to help you during times of danger. Say for example you’re driving and a car swerves out in front of you. In that spilt second your brain processes the danger and in turn a chain of biological responses happen in the body.
You may experience your heart racing, your muscles tighten, and your senses heighten. These changes could help save your life or prevent an accident from happening. Sufferers of frequent anxiety attacks experience the very same stress response when they have a panic attack.
An anxiety sufferer might see fear itself as a threat. A person suffering from social phobia might have experienced panic attacks in front of others and now cannot bear to be in the presence of others. The fear is of the same incident happening again.
The thought alone of the incident may be enough to trigger symptoms of anxiety. This threat to one’s pride, ego and self esteem is acknowledged by the subconscious. The body perceives this threat in exactly the same way as it perceives a real threat and does so by releasing hormones to help prepare you for the threat.
Our environment has changed immensely in a relatively short time but our biology has remained the same. We need not hunt our food and protect our family from predators in the wild. However, we find that our stress response is triggered often by daily stresses and anxiety.
This is widely known to be a cause of mental illnesses. This stress response has become overly sensitive in sufferers of anxiety disorders. This increases symptoms of anxiety making daily life difficult to cope with.
What is good news is that symptoms of anxiety are a learned response. Because of this there are ways to unlearn it or replace bad habits with good habits.
