How Does Anxiety Affect Your Body
Anxiety affects your body in different ways that are defined as anxiety symptoms. When you feel overly anxious, many people feel a constriction in their pulmonary and respiratory systems, noticing an increase in their heart rate, a heaviness in the chest, or difficulty breathing. Others manifest their stress in their digestive system, with nausea, indigestion, stomach cramping, diarrhea, and sometimes vomiting. The severity of the discomfort can range.
Anxiety is a natural response to danger or a threat. It happens when the brain releases neurotransmitters to prepare the body for fight or flight. When some of these neurotransmitters get into the digestive tract, they upset the gut microbiome, and this can cause stomach symptoms that include nausea. During a moment of high anxiety, you might feel just a bit queasy, like that butterflies in your stomach feeling you might have before giving a public presentation or going on a job interview. This kind of nausea may be brief, while other instances of anxiety-related nausea can make you totally sick to your stomach. Your upset stomach churns so much that you have to make a dash for the bathroom, even reaching the point of dry heaving or vomiting.
Common Symptoms Of Anxiety Are:
-
Feelings of panic, danger, or dread
-
Increased heart rate
-
Increases nervousness, or a feeling of restlessness and being tense.
-
Increased breathing, or hyperventilation
-
Difficulty focusing on anything other than what youre worried about
-
Insomnia
-
Digestive problems like gas, diarrhea, or constipation
-
Obsessively focusing on or avoiding a thing that triggers anxiety
-
Heightened anxiety about a life situation that triggers a memory of past trauma
If you experience these symptoms often, then you might be showing signs of anxiety.
Breathing Exercise For Panic Attacks
If you’re breathing quickly during a panic attack, doing a breathing exercise can help. Follow these steps:
You should start to feel better in a few minutes. You may feel tired afterwards.
Also Check: How To Get Rid Of Morning Anxiety
When To See A Doctor
If anxiety-related nausea is interfering with your quality of life and you cant manage it on your own, its time to see your doctor. If its not due to a medical condition, ask for a referral to a mental health professional.
Everyone experiences stress and anxiety at some point. There are steps you can take to lower stress and deal with occasional bouts of nausea.
There is help. Anxiety, nausea, and anxiety disorders can be identified and effectively managed.
Its Both An Acute And Chronic Problem
Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that the anxiety creates a negative feedback loop.
The dizziness and vertigo cause the initial feeling of panic and anxiety, which in turn causes the vertigo and dizziness to worsen and happen more frequently. This only causes more anxiety, at which point the vicious cycle repeats.
In a lot of ways, the panic and anxiety experienced during acute vertigo or dizziness is like throwing gasoline on a fire. It multiplies your suffering at the height of an already horrible experience, while also worsening your symptoms on an ongoing basis.
Fortunately, its not all bad news.
Because the balance issues and anxiety are so closely intertwined, if you work to get your anxiety under control, the severity of your dizziness, vertigo, and other symptoms should improve as well. At the very least, you will be able to cope a lot more effectively.
The best strategy is to immediately start taking steps to reduce your anxiety.
So to help you get started, Ive put together a list of strategies that have helped me manage my own anxiety-related Menieres disease, a vestibular disorder Ive lived with for nearly a decade.
Some of the strategies are best used during acute episodes of dizziness or vertigo, while others are meant to bring overall stress and anxiety levels down throughout your life.
Read Also: How To Deal With Anger And Anxiety
Can Anxiety Cause Shortness Of Breath
Certain anxiety disorders can cause feelings of shortness of breath.
General anxiety increases your respiration rate, causing you to breathe more rapidly than usual. This faster breathing, also called hyperventilation, isn’t the same as shortness of breath, however.
Shortness of breath feels like a tightening in your chest and often comes with trouble breathing. It’s not a common symptom of general anxiety.
However, similar to feelings of chest pain, shortness of breath is associated with panic attacks and panic disorder, a specific type of anxiety disorder.
Since it can be a sign of heart attack or another life-threatening condition, unexplained shortness of breath is a medical emergency. Whether you have a history of panic attacks or not, you should go to the emergency room if you’re experiencing sudden and/or severe shortness of breath.
Should You See Your Doctor About Panic Attacks
A panic attack can make you feel like youre about to collapse or even die, but it’s usually harmless. However, in some cases, you may need medical advice to rule out an underlying physical cause.
Get medical advice if:
- your panic attack continues after doing 20 minutes of slow breathing
- you still feel unwell after your breathing returns to normal
- you still have a rapid or irregular heartbeat or chest pains after your panic attack
- you regularly have panic attacks, as this could be a sign that you have panic disorder
Don’t Miss: How To Comfort People With Anxiety
Breathe White Light Down Into Your Belly And Make It Surround The Nausea Making Space
But I just ask you to stick with me and to follow me as you imagine that churning feeling in your stomach visually.
And then you bring white light down into your stomach to make space around that churning nauseous feeling.
The best way to bring white light and space around a churning stomach is to simply breathe it in deeply down into your tummy and then while youre doing that, visualizing white light around the churning and then breathing that white light out.
And as you breathe out, that space that you inhaled, remains.
So you dont get rid of nausea from anxiety by fighting it but you allow it to remain but you bring space around it. The best way to do that is by breathing it in. So, breathing in white light down into your belly, making space, breathing that white light out again but the space remains.
How To Prevent Nausea
There are a few things you can do to try to keep nausea from surfacing at all. An ounce of prevention, right? You can try these strategies12:
If youre prone to nausea, try avoiding certain triggers, like food and cooking smells, perfume, smoke, stuffy rooms, heat, humidity, flickering lights, and driving, when possible.13
Also Check: How To Help My Wife With Anxiety And Depression
Am I Sick Or Is It Anxiety
Another side effect of anxiety is flu-like symptoms. Do you remember the description of the stretched elastic band? If you stretch the band too often or too fast, it loses its elasticity. This makes it harder to do its job, like keeping your hair in place or holding together a bunch of pens.
In the same way, anxiety causes your body to exert itself as a response to danger. But if you experience trauma, or youre over-stressed for a long time, your bodys new default is in danger mode.
Danger mode is exhausting for the body. It causes muscle tension, which brings aches and pain. It increases your breathing, which makes you short of breath. Anxiety also causes increased blood flow, which can make you dizzy and warm. All these symptoms can be mistaken for the flu.
Over time anxiety can cripple your immune system, causing you to feel sick and weak. This also makes it easier for viruses like the flu to attack your body.
Can Anxiety Cause Nausea
Many different things can lead to nausea. We dont know exactly why this happens, but it appears to be a bodily response to something that irritates or disrupts the natural state. Did you eat too much? Nausea. Did you get an illness? Nausea. Have you spun around in a circle? Nausea. You didnt get enough sleep? Nausea. Did you run too fast? Nausea. Certain illnesses are associated with nausea, and it also often accompanies feelings of disgust.
The evolutionary purpose of nausea is thought to be to notify a person of something and prevent the person from repeating whatever they just did. Although unexplained nausea is possible, nausea is generally your bodys way of telling you that it doesnt like something that occurred or the results of that action.
Nausea is triggered by internal signals. These signals can come from all over the body from the cerebral cortex to the chemoreceptor trigger zone to the peripheral and vestibular systems. The messages travel toward the brain stem, where they trigger a series of actions that ultimately lead to feelings of nausea and the movement of the contents of the stomach up the digestive tract.
It should come as little surprise that anxiety can also cause nausea. Its intensity is largely related to the causes and types of anxiety youre experiencing. Not everyone will experience nausea, but those who do may have mild to severe nausea.
Nausea is one of the most common anxiety symptoms. But why does it happen, and what can you do about it?
Recommended Reading: What Does Anxiety Look Like
How Does Nausea Caused By Anxiety Feel
Youve probably had nausea many other times in your life from causes other than anxiety. Stomach bugs, food poisoning, eating a lot of junk food over the holidays, and so on.
Anxiety-induced nausea can feel similar to those.
But it can also feel different, and that can make it scarier than standard nausea. To help you to identify your nausea as a symptom of your anxiety it might help if you learn how anxiety-induced nausea can feel.
If your anxiety causes nausea, you may:
- feel like your stomach is cramping
- feel like your stomach is churning
- feel like your stomach is bloated
- feel like youre about to throw up
- feel like your stomach is full of trapped wind
- feel like you have butterflies in your stomach
- feel like you desperately need to use the bathroom
- feel like moving makes the sickness worse
On top of these feelings, anxiety-induced nausea also has a few other characteristics that make it different from standard nausea:
- it can appear quickly without warning
- it can disappear quickly like nothing was ever wrong
- it can get worse the more you focus on it
- it can occur at the same time as dizziness
- it often doesnt get better with standard nausea medicines
If a lot of these symptoms and feelings sound familiar, you can be pretty sure that what youve been experiencing is anxiety-induced nausea.
Now that youre aware of how this type of nausea can feel, take note of your symptoms whenever you feel nausea in the future.
Re: Anxiety Vs Nausea
Hi,When your nauseated it’s much more intense than with just anxiety, the very sight of food can be repulsive. I get that sometimes after I’ve eaten too much. When I’m anxious the thought of food just sounds unappealing but not repulsive, I can look at food and just think “no I don’t want it”.Food poisoning is possible in food cooked at high temperatures, the food still has to be cooked properly. If your not sure how to tell if the food is cooked, I usually look it up on the internet to double check and also cook it for longer than it states, until I can see it’s getting slightly overcooked. Also I avoid eating sea food because food poisoning is pretty common in that kind of thing .Don’t let yourself feel doomed by the statistics. As an emetophobe your less likely to v* per year than most people, because you take extra precautions not to. Think of a series of castles all lined up next to eachother. Yours is better defended than all the others. It’s more likely the other castles will get invaded than yours because you have better defences , but just because all the other castles are getting invaded that makes you panic. Weird as it is I like to try and remember that when I’m feeling anxious in general.I hope that helps a little
- 68
Don’t Miss: Do I Need To See A Therapist For Anxiety
If You Typically Have A Nervous Stomach Your Symptoms Are More Likely To Be Stress
The telltale sign that differentiates early or mild coronavirus infection from anxiety and stress is fever.
“If you’re a gut responder, someone whose stomach is influenced by stress, if you get get butterflies or feel nauseous when you’re nervous, what you’re experiencing right now is mostly likely to be stress, especially if there’s no fever,” Keefer said.
However, if those symptoms are unusual for you, or escalate to include other symptoms like extreme fatigue, body aches, or difficulty breathing, it’s always best to err on the safe side and contact a medical professional if you’re uncertain.
“Unfortunately, we just don’t know enough about the GI manifestations of COVID-19,” Deutsch said. “At this time there does not seem to be a reliable way to differentiate the GI symptoms related to COVID-19 versus from other causes.”
“Everyone should keep in mind that providers want to hear from you, no matter how minor you think your concern is,” she added.
How To Handle A Panic Attack
Professor Paul Salkovskis, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science at the University of Bath, says its important not to let your fear of panic attacks control you.
Panic attacks always pass and the symptoms are not a sign of anything harmful happening, he says. Tell yourself that the symptoms youre experiencing are caused by anxiety.
He says dont look for distractions. Ride out the attack. Try to keep doing things. If possible, its important to try to remain in the situation until the anxiety has subsided.
Confront your fear. If you dont run away from it, youre giving yourself a chance to discover that nothings going to happen.
As the anxiety begins to pass, start to focus on your surroundings and continue to do what you were doing before.
If youre having a short, sudden panic attack, it can be helpful to have someone with you, reassuring you that it will pass and the symptoms are nothing to worry about, says Professor Salkovskis.
Read Also: Can Anxiety Go Away On Its Own