What Does Anxiety Look Like?

In this blog, we are going to explore what anxiety looks like, what it feels like, and how it shows up in our lives. I am talking about anxiety that is not productive. You know, the kind that keeps you up at night, that stops you in your tracks, that makes you and everyone around you crazy.

This unhealthy anxiety can strike at any moment and usually does. It sometimes creeps into your life bit by bit, tapping you on the shoulder like a person trying to get your attention. Or it can barge into your life like a house invader that just broke down the front door. Throwing things around without regard for your feelings. Totally unwanted and frightening.

What Does Anxiety Feel Like?

When someone asks me what anxiety feels like, I generally talk about these symptoms. You can feel panicky, unsure, irritable, jittery, numb. Sometimes you become hypervigilant. You can experience headaches, migraines, vomiting, nausea, clammy hands, clenched jaw, panting, trembling, racing heart, inability to speak or think clearly, breathlessness, tight chest or insomnia. You can start performing repeated patterns such as scratching or picking at yourself and you can develop a sensitivity to light or sound.

Thoughts You Can’t Turn Off

You may also have repetitive thoughts that you cannot turn off, no matter how hard you try. Random, flittering thoughts that are most likely negative and predict a worse-case scenario. These thoughts tend to lead from one disaster to another such as “this will happen and then that will happen and then that will cause this to happen.”

These stories that we tell ourselves are vivid and melodramatic with everything that could possibly go wrong occurring all at once. These stories are always in the future and have nothing to do with the exact moment that we are living in. Convoluted and detailed, they become ingrained in our current consciousness as if they were actually happening.

All of this thinking and imagining is so easily triggered and yet so very difficult to stop.

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