Anxiety Symptoms - What Anxiety Feels Like.

How to Tell If You Are Anxious: Understanding what that word means. An in-depth analysis and explanation.

Something I’ve always found fascinating about people struggling with anxiety is when they tell me that they’ve gone to the doctor or a psychiatrist and have been given a diagnosis of it. They needed someone else to tell them that they had anxiety, as if that is a label for some other underlying medical problem that they couldn’t have known on their own.

Cancer, for example, is certainly something you need to be diagnosed with. You might have certain symptoms that come along with cancer but you absolutely cannot know for certain - without medical tests - whether or not you have cancer.

Anxiety isn’t really the same though. Anxiousness is more like a stomach-ache. You’re the only one that can know that you have it because you’re the only one that can feel it. No-one can tell you from the outside that you have a stomach ache. You can go to the doctor and tell them that your stomach hurts, and if the doctor then ‘diagnosed’ you with ‘having a stomach ache’, that wouldn’t really be helpful at all… would it? Because, yea… you told him that your stomach hurt and then he told you that you have a stomach ache. He basically just reworded what you said without giving you any extra insight that could be at all helpful.

That's kind of what it’s like when someone ‘diagnoses’ you with anxiety; even when they put the word ‘disorder’ after it, to denote that you are suffering from a particularly intense case of it.

The real reason people need to be diagnosed with anxiety is because they simply don’t know what the word means. You are the only person who can truly determine whether or not you have anxiety, you just first need to understand what that word is referring to. It’s just a vocabulary issue… and to be honest, I find that most professionals and official websites don't do a great job of truly expressing it.

So, let’s get you clear on what anxiety really is.

Anxiety involves 3 different types of symptoms: Thoughts (constant worry, overthinking, self judgment...), Emotions (an ongoing sense of fear and impoending doom and/or danger), and sensations (turning feeling in your stomach, tightness in your chest, jitteriness or shakiness). Usually, all 3 of these are present, but many people may only notice or pay attention to 1 or 2 of these areas.

The 3 Pieces of Anxiety: Thoughts, Emotions, Sensations.

1: Thoughts.

The first place you’ll notice anxiety is in your mind. The World Health Organization says that you might have trouble concentrating or making decisions, which is true… but it’s so much more than that.

If you’re prone to constant worry, overthinking, decision paralysis, negative self-talk, self-judgment and/or catastrophizing (presuming the worst case scenario for yourself in most situations), this is the mental part of anxiety. It makes it impossible to rest and be present in any moment or to truly enjoy those positive things in your life.

This is where most of us put most of our attention. We live up in our heads. So, this is most likely the piece of anxiety that is most apparent to you. But it’s truly important to recognize that our thoughts are not actually the source of the problem. They are manifestations of the deeper layers of our anxiety - the emotions and the sensations. It is only because we are stuck in these other pieces of anxiety that our minds constantly go to the negative. Our minds are simply trying to protect us by looking for logical problems that are causing our inner pain. It just doesn’t realize that the logical issues that it’s looking towards outside of us aren’t the real issue and that we can’t solve our anxiety by solving the external problems in our lives.

Nonetheless, a persistent pattern of negative inner-thinking is the surface layer of an anxiety issue.

2: Emotions.

At its most extreme, you will be walking around with a constant sense of impending doom. It’s hard to describe in words (as are any emotions), but it’s just a constant feeling of being in intense danger.

At its core, anxiety is deeply tied into the emotion of fear. It’s basically just what happens when the emotion of fear becomes our norm. It feels like you’re being pulled apart in different directions from the inside and no choice that you can possibly make can keep you safe or will be the right decision, so there is constant fear and you perpetually feel as if you aren't safe and can't relax without putting yourself into danger.

So, if you find yourself constantly in a state of fear - whether at such an intense level that you’re always paralyzed by it or just at a low level where you’re always a little on guard and unable to accept or appreciate moments of joy - then this is the emotional element of anxiety. This makes it hard to be present in the moment and truly connect with people or be truly engaged in or focused on your tasks.

3: Sensations.

The final (and perhaps most important) piece of anxiety that we need to identify is the sensations. This is the part of our experience that most directly stems from our nervous system being in a constant state of fight or flight, and the reason this is the most important is because this is what is truly at the root of the other pieces that we’ve been talking about. It is because the nervous system constantly believes that it is in danger that you are in a persistent emotion of fear. And it is only because you are in a persistent emotion of fear that your thoughts are constantly focused on the negative.

Some common sensations that we feel in relation to anxiety are:

A turning feeling in the pit of your stomach,
A tightness or a clenching kind of feeling in your chest,
A lump in your throat,
Jitteriness and being uneasy when trying to sit still,
Heart palpitations,
Nervous sweating,
Tremors and trembling in your muscles.
You might also experience a kind of nausea which can put you off of your appetite and make eating difficult.

All of these are symptoms of an unconscious sense of being in danger. They are evolutionarily beneficial responses to threats. When you are genuinely in danger (say, you are running from a predator in the jungle), these sensations keep you in a state of agitated readiness that fuel your ability to fight or to flee from the danger.

The problem is that we have taken this evolutionarily beneficial response to REAL danger and applied it to all kinds of situations in our modern lives where the threat either isn’t real at all or simply isn’t really physically dangerous. So, we may be applying this ‘life-threatened’ level of fear to simple day-to-day challenges that can’t truly harm us, or we may be so traumatized from past experiences that even things that aren’t threats at all feel like they are.

In either case, the paradoxical irony is that this fight or flight response can’t actually help us solve the anxiety and actually makes it worse.

So, the real core of healing anxiousness is to learn how to show our nervous system that we are indeed safe, on a moment to moment basis. It’s not about coping mechanisms and it’s not about analyzing our past pain. It’s about training. It’s a little bit like getting an abused puppy to trust you. We need to show your nervous system that it is safe to trust you and trust its environment and let go of this defense mechanism of being constantly on guard against a danger that isn't present and/or that fear can’t possibly help solve.

Related Symptoms

Realistically, everything that you experience can be broken down into one of the 3 categories above, but just to be clear, some other symptoms that you can experience that are caused by the looping cycle of the 3 main elements are:

Trouble sleeping.
Constant sense of exhaustion.
Low self worth.
Finding it hard to trust people.
Executive dysfunction (finding it hard to start or complete tasks).
Prone to judging yourself and others.
Quick to anger.
Easily frustrated.
Easily triggered emotional responses to small problems.

So… Are You Anxious?

If any or all of what this article has described truly resonates with your internal experience, then it is safe to say that you have anxiety. You don’t need a doctor to ‘diagnose’ you with it.

Of course, if you want to try to solve your anxiety with a medical approach, then you will need to discuss this with your doctor. And - especially in extreme cases - medication should likely be a part of your treatment approach, at least at the beginning.

But please understand that medication is not meant to be a long term solution. It can help you manage these symptoms. But ultimately you are going to need to learn the appropriate tools and skills of how to get your nervous system to relax and let go on a more permanent basis.

If you would like guidance on solving these issues for good and a guaranteed approach to ending anxiety once and for all, start off by WATCHING MY WEBINAR. If it resonates with you, we can set up a time to talk and get you on the path to ending this for good.

Tags: #anxiety-meaning, #how-anxiety-feels, #how-to-tell-if-youre-anxious, #emotional-fitness-training

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Photo of Benjy Sherer, Anxiety Coach. An emotional fitness trainer specializing in offering guaranteed relief from anixety, trauma, fear and more.

Benjy Sherer is a mental health coach and emotional fitness trainer specializing in anxiety and trauma healing. His approach is about bypassing the intellectual analysis of our past traumas and focusing instead on conquering the subconscious cycles that keep us stuck in fear and which prevent us from truly healing our pain.

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