By: Matthew Hick
Anxiety is a complicated thing. Anxiety can easily make an otherwise very happy and healthy person become quite the opposite. Depression and physical sickness can quickly set in as a result of anxiety. Let's take a much more detailed look at anxiety and its physical and mental signs and symptoms.
Physical symptoms of anxiety:
Have you ever looked at a person and just knew immediately that they were suffering from some sort of anxiety? Perhaps he or she looked haggard, stressed, unhappy, or mentally exhausted. If you didn't already know it -- physically, anxiety can make you very ill. Anxiety over events in your life can cause ever illness from Irritable Bowel Syndrome to heat problems to the common cold. You can become physically ill from anxiety because it actually lowers your immune system's ability to fight off infections or bacteria. Anxiety strains the heart, and can cause rapid or irregular heartbeat. Severe, recurring and untreated anxiety can ultimately lead to heart attack and stroke.
If you look at a person with severe anxiety, you may be able to see the wrinkles in his or her forehead, the seemingly permanent grimace on the face, and black circles under the eyes. Severe anxiety can also cause him or her to be over or under their normal weight. This is because anxiety often does one of the two things: causes binge eating (which is when a person frequently overeats to deal with stress) or under eating (which is when stress completely wipes out a person's appetite and they are unable to gain any appetite).
There are other physical symptoms of anxiety that can be found in the manifestation of other mental illnesses. For example, in people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), severe anxiety can cause a flareup of highly obsessive behaviors. A person who is worried about something may obsessively repeat routines in order to alleviate the stress that they are under. Repetition is often a stress reducer for some with OCD. A chronically depressed person, on the other hand, may have a different reaction to anxiety. They may find it impossible to get out of bed in the morning, and therefore miss a great deal of time at work or school. You may notice that these people are physically absent from their usual activities.
Mental symptoms of anxiety:
Mental symptoms of anxiety are stressful to those who struggle with it. Those who suffer from extreme anxiety may find it nearly impossible to focus on anything except the thing that they are anxious or stressed over. It may seem that no matter what they try to focus on, their thoughts always come back to the same negative things. This can cause a highly depressed state in a person suffering from anxiety. It can also cause a person to have a mental breakdown and be unable to preform the day-to-day tasks that they usually do.
Mentally, anxiety can cause a person to become totally changed. Someone who once used to go out and be social with friends may now be a homebody, unwilling to talk much to others. Severe anxiety can cause mood swings, One minute a person an be content, and the next minute they can be completely unreasonable. Anxiety can cause a person to be unusually quite, distracted, and disorganized. The anxiety can be so overwhelming, that the person suffering from it may not want to explain it to others. In fact, it may seem almost impossible for the person suffering from it to even put it into words. Overall, anxiety is an extremely difficult thing for a person to deal with mentally and physically. If you are suffering from any of the above symptoms or have reason to believe that you are chronically stressed, it is in your best interest to seek the help of a mental health professional right away.
