15 Physical Symptoms of Anxiety That Prove It’s Not All Mental

It’s no secret that anxiety can do weird things to your mind. But the physical symptoms of anxiety can be just as unpleasant and unpredictable—anyone who has suffered through the experience of a panic attack can vouch for that. To complicate things even further, you can even experience physical anxiety symptoms without feeling anxious emotionally (or at least without being totally aware of it).

While your brain ruminates over a worry or fear that feels all-consuming, it’s also signaling the production of powerful stress hormones. This is actually your body’s way of trying to protect you from perceived danger or harm (thanks, evolution!). But since most of your anxious thoughts probably aren’t actually stemming from life-or-death situations, you just end up dealing with a cascade of symptoms that leave you feeling freaked out, exhausted, or generally lousy.

Types of anxiety | How does anxiety affect the body? | Physical anxiety symptoms | Panic attack symptoms | How long do physical anxiety symptoms last? | Anxiety treatment

Anxiety is an umbrella term for a cluster of daunting feelings that can be difficult to cope with, like fear, worry, restlessness, and stress. Many people use anxiety to describe normal, everyday feelings of stress, but they’re still able to move on from the anxiousness without feeling totally consumed by it. Other times, though, anxiety is very overwhelming and can even become chronic, which is when we get into the territory of a diagnosable mental health condition.

There are various types of anxiety disorders that are characterized by their own unique symptoms. The common thread? They all can really disrupt a person’s life. These generally include but are not limited to:

• Generalized anxiety disorder, which happens when a person experiences excessive anxiety or worry that causes issues in their everyday life for at least six months.
• Panic disorder, characterized by a fear of recurring panic attacks, which are unexpected episodes of overwhelming emotional and physical symptoms that can cause feelings of impending doom.
• Social anxiety disorder, meaning a person has anxiety or a general fear surrounding social situations. The worry is rooted in being negatively judged by others.
• Phobia-related disorders, which involve having excessive, and sometimes irrational, fear or worry around a specific object or situation.
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something that develops after a person experiences or witnesses a terrifying event that can lead to upsetting flashbacks, nightmares, and physical or emotional reactions toward anything that resurfaces memories of the traumatic event.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), meaning a person has persistent, unwanted thoughts or sensations (obsessions) that drive them to perform certain behaviors over and over again (compulsions).

Although the triggers for the individual disorders can differ, another major thing they have in common is the potential to cause physical signs of anxiety. The mental health condition can impact the body in a number of ways, and in some cases, potentially cause long-term side effects when left untreated, such as perpetuating another mood disorder like depression, fueling substance abuse, or increasing your risk of various chronic diseases.

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“From head to toe, almost every system can be impacted just by nature of your body releasing a lot of stress hormones,” Mona Potter, MD, medical director at McLean Anxiety Mastery Program in Boston, tells SELF. But why does it happen?

The physical effects of anxiety all have to do with your body’s fight-or-flight response. “When a person experiences anxiety, it’s essentially the fight-or-flight system kicking in and saying, ‘Danger!’” Neda Gould, PhD, clinical psychologist and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Bayview Anxiety Disorders Clinic, tells SELF.

Under typical circumstances, it’s meant to help you survive a dangerous situation by escaping a threat or fending it off. This made sense from an evolutionary perspective: Way back in in the days of cave people, that threat might have been something along the lines of a lion wanting to eat you. (So yeah, anxiety would have been 100% expected.)

If you have anxiety, though, your fear and worry are that threat, prompting your sympathetic nervous system, which controls involuntary processes like your breathing and heart rate, to kick into high gear. Once that happens, your adrenal glands start pumping out stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, according to the Mayo Clinic. And it’s those hormones that trigger a domino effect of physical symptoms of anxiety.

These symptoms typically subside once the anxiety-causing threat has passed. But if you’re dealing with stressful or worrying thoughts on a near-constant basis, you can start to experience chronic physical effects and even face a higher risk of certain health problems, including an increased risk of chronic fatigue, heart attack, or stroke, among other, according to the American Psychological Association (APA).

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Feeling like your heart is suddenly pumping in double (or triple) time is a classic sign of anxiety, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Remember how your sympathetic nervous system controls your heart rate? Research¹ shows that when you’re dealing with something stressful and your adrenal glands churn out hormones like adrenaline (also known as epinephrine), receptors in your heart react by sending your heart rate into overdrive. That can be helpful in real emergencies: A faster heart rate enables you to pump more blood to your big muscles so you could theoretically flee or combat a threat, Dr. Gould explains. But if you’re dealing with anxiety, that racing heart could just set off more feelings of anxiety, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

Oxygen is circulated around your body via your bloodstream. When your racing heart increases the rate at which your blood is circulating, your breathing might increase to provide you with more oxygen.

Again, that might be helpful if you need to outrun an actual threat. But breathing too fast—which can lead to hyperventilation, or over-breathing to the point where you feel short of breath—can actually enhance a lot of the physical symptoms of anxiety on this list because it upsets the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

“That’s why we often talk about belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing,” says Dr. Potter. This is a grounding technique where you essentially breathe slowly and deeply by really using your diaphragm (the main muscle involved in breathing tucked underneath your lungs), and research shows it can have a really positive effect on both physiological and psychological stress.² By slowing down how quickly you’re breathing, you have more of a chance to get the oxygen you need, Dr. Potter explains.

Feeling like you’re always tired or worn out is another physical symptom to take note of, according to the NIMH. For starters, that anxiety-activated uptick in stress hormones can keep you revved up on high alert, which can be seriously draining, says Dr. Potter. But there’s an additional factor that feeds into fatigue: Sleep and anxiety have a complicated relationship, which brings us to the next symptom.

If you have a tough time falling asleep or wake up during the night and can’t doze back off, anxiety could be a culprit, according to the NIMH. Elevated levels of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline make it hard to get a good night’s sleep, since your buzzing body may not be able to relax enough to rest. The racing thoughts that can come with anxiety are no recipe for great sleep, either.

To make matters worse, the problem can often turn into a vicious cycle. Struggling to get enough sleep (and chugging coffee the next day to make up for it)³ ends up making you more anxious, which makes it even harder to fall and stay asleep, and so on and so on, the Cleveland Clinic explains.

According to the APA, your muscles tense up as part of your stress response. And holding parts of your body so rigidly for prolonged periods can actually lead to tension and pain, says Dr. Potter, who notes that many people with anxiety report feeling tight in their neck, back, or shoulders. You might also clench your jaw or feel muscle tension all the way up into your head, leading to headaches, says Dr. Potter. This can include your everyday tension headache⁴ and range to a full-blown migraine⁵ in those who are susceptible.

“Anxiety really hits the G.I. system hard,” says Dr. Potter. People with anxiety may notice general stomach pain, constipation, diarrhea, or other kinds of digestive distress, she explains. Gassiness and bloating can become regular physical signs of anxiety as well, per the APA.

All the bad belly stuff is thought to come from what experts call the gut-brain axis, a communication system between your brain and the enteric nervous system that governs your digestion.⁶ This connection is why stress can so easily mess with your poop. There’s also the fact that anxiety-induced lifestyle choices, like eating foods that don’t agree with you or not exercising regularly, can affect your digestion as well.

Considering anxiety’s overall effect on your digestive system, it might not come as a surprise that feeling nauseous is another common physical symptom. In fact, a one-year study published in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry found that people who regularly reported symptoms of nausea were more than three times as likely to have an anxiety disorder compared to those who didn’t have frequent nausea.⁷

Remember that racing heart we talked about earlier? In some cases, it can get so intense that it can actually start to feel like your heart is skipping beats or jumping into your throat. While the sensation might (understandably) make you even more anxious, try to keep in mind that even though heart palpitations can feel scary, they aren’t typically dangerous in this context and will ease up as you start to feel calmer, according to the Cleveland Clinic. (With that said, you should seek medical attention if you experience heart palpitations with feelings of chest pain, dizziness, trouble breathing, or confusion.)

If you’re already grappling with anxiety, the thought of sweating profusely may just make it worse. Who wants to worry about pit stains or wiping their palms when they’re already feeling worried and on edge? Unfortunately, sweating is a common physical symptom of anxiety disorders, per the NIMH.

When your sympathetic nervous system gets activated, it can influence the sweat glands all over your body Marisa Garshick, MD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Cornell–New York Presbyterian Medical Center, tells SELF. And once the waterworks start flowing and mix with the bacteria that are present on your skin, you might notice an increased body odor too.

Anxiety has the weird ability to cause you to totally lose interest in food—or make you crave a big bowl of comfort. Hormones like adrenaline tend to shut down appetite when your fight-or-flight response is raging, according to Harvard Medical School experts. (Because who has time to stop and snack when they’re about to be pounced on by a tiger? Evolution, remember?)

But the hormones released from feelings of chronic anxiety or stress, like cortisol, can actually ramp up your interest in fatty, sugary foods. In other words, there’s a scientific reason for why that pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream seems more appealing when you’re seriously anxious.

If you’ve ever found yourself trembling with fear before a big event, you know how your body reacts under pressure. Turns out, you don’t need an external trigger like a scary presentation or an important meeting to start shivering like a leaf; shaking and trembling can be a by-product of anxiety-induced hormone surges, according to the NIMH.

Trying to anticipate unknown threats is a common feature of anxiety. According to research⁸, constantly being on guard has been linked with an increased “startle response,” which could be why you practically jump out of your shoes if someone taps you on the shoulder on an anxious day.

Hit with a weird sensation of not being able to swallow? It’s actually pretty normal with anxiety, which can cause some people to feel tightness in their throat or even like something is stuck in there, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This is called globus sensation, and although the exact reason why this happens is unclear, it can definitely make anxiety even worse. “You feel like you can’t get enough air,” says Dr. Potter.

There’s a clear link between chronic stress and a greater risk of getting sick, research shows.⁹ In the case of chronic anxiety that goes untreated, your immune system doesn’t function as well when your fight-or-flight response is operating for too long, according to the Mayo Clinic. This could mean that you’re more susceptible to issues such as the common cold, although a lot of other factors come into play here as well, like how robust your immune system is in general and how vigilant you are about hand hygiene.

Anxiety has the power to mess with your periods, from missed or skipped cycles to more intense or painful PMS symptoms, according to the APA. Really, it’s just a hormone clusterf*#%. Cortisol can actually affect the release of ovulation-inducing hormones like estrogen and progesterone, which can throw your cycle out of whack, per the Cleveland Clinic.

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Panic attacks are the hallmark sign of panic disorder, a type of anxiety that causes a person to feel unrelenting fear, often without warning or a clear reason why, per the APA. People who suffer from them say panic attacks can make you feel like you’re dying—as if you’re being held underwater or like you can’t move or breathe. It’s a truly frightening and debilitating experience.

That terror is an integral part of having a panic attack. Beyond that, panic attacks symptoms typically include several of the following side effects (many of which you just read about):

• Palpitations, a pounding heart, or an accelerated heart rate
• Sweating
• Trembling or shaking
• Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
• Feelings of choking
• Chest pain or discomfort
• Nausea or abdominal distress
• Feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded, or faint
• Chills or heat sensations
• Numbness or tingling
• Feeling detached from reality
• Fear of losing control
• Fear of dying

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When you have anxiety and are consumed by a big, sudden fear, you can sometimes get slammed with intense physical symptoms that peak within minutes and subside almost as quickly, according to the Mayo Clinic. That’s especially true if you’re dealing with a panic attack—your body literally can’t feel that freaked out for much longer than that. Usually, things like a racing heart, sweating, or fast breathing will ease up as you start to feel calmer.

While having persistent, lower-grade worries clouding your brain might not make you feel like you can’t breathe or that you’re about to have a heart attack, chronic anxiety can cause physical effects that seem like they’re always lingering in the background. Feeling fatigued or worn out might be your norm if your anxiety regularly makes it hard to get enough sleep. Or maybe it feels like you’re constantly walking around with a stomach ache or tight, sore shoulders, per the Mayo Clinic.

So, in a nutshell, physical symptoms of anxiety can definitely last for days, depending on your personal stressors. But there’s no one-size-fits-all description for how long anxiety-fueled symptoms will stick around. If you’re noticing them on the reg and they’re interfering with your daily life, whether for a few minutes at a time or for long stretches, it’s worth talking with your doctor to try to figure out what’s going on both physically and mentally.

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We’ve covered a lot of heavy stuff, so now for the bright side: It’s totally possible to treat anxiety and panic attacks. When you address what’s going on psychologically, you’ll usually find that you end up feeling better physically too.

There are many lifestyle changes you can take on at home that can make a big difference in the way that you feel. But a diagnosed anxiety disorder calls for some professional help too. Ultimately, the best course of anxiety treatment is different for everyone and will depend on your specific symptoms. If you have access to them, a blend of therapy and medication helps the most. Some of the most common anxiety treatments include:

Seeing a mental health professional is a big move, but working with a therapist can be a crucial tool in your anxiety-fighting arsenal. Talk therapy (also known as psychotherapy) is generally recommended for treating most types of anxiety disorders, per the NIMH. But the type of therapy you’ll benefit from will depend on the type of anxiety you’re dealing with, your symptoms, your personal health history, and your overall lifestyle.

However, many experts argue that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is considered the current “gold standard” of psychotherapy¹⁰. In these sessions, you’ll work with a therapist to unveil distorted thought patterns that push the anxiety forward, so you can ultimately retrain your brain to think, behave, and react differently when it comes to anxiety-inducing situations. Sometimes, CBT is done alongside exposure therapy, per the NIMH, which helps you stand up to the fears that have laid the foundation for a specific type of anxiety. During exposure therapy, you slowly work up to doing activities you’ve been avoiding in a safe environment, so you can learn to become more comfortable around certain objects or in certain situations over time, according to the APA.

There’s no clear-cut answer on when it’s time to seek therapy, but a good rule of thumb is if anxiety symptoms are getting in the way of your life, you might want to consider seeing a licensed mental health professional. (If you’re feeling ready to take the step forward, this guide to finding an affordable therapist is a solid place to start.)

Anxiety medication isn’t a standalone cure, but there are various prescribed treatments that may help ease some of your symptoms, per the NIMH. The first-line options typically include:

• Benzodiazepines: This class of drugs gets to work quickly and effectively as they help calm the central nervous system (the main body hub that perpetuates anxiety symptoms). However, they’re often prescribed for short periods of time because some people can build up a tolerance to them over time.
• Antidepressants: There are several types of antidepressants, including SSRIs and SNRIs, that can be helpful for anxiety symptoms, as they help guide the way your brain uses specific chemicals that influence your mood. These take a bit longer to take effect and should not be stopped abruptly or without the help of your prescribing doctor.
• Beta blockers: These drugs are commonly used to treat high blood pressure, but they can be helpful in reducing physical symptoms of anxiety like a racing heart, shaking, or trembling as needed.

It’s worth noting that all prescription anxiety medication options have their individual pros and cons, so finding the best one for you might take some experimentation. This should involve a detailed conversation with your doctor or psychiatrist, so you’re well aware of any potential side effects and prepped on how to best follow the treatment plan safely.

Though professional help is the most effective way to treat anxiety, therapy and medication aren’t always accessible for everyone. In that case, it might be helpful to know some of the common ways people with anxiety practice self-care and help themselves feel better. As we mentioned earlier, deep breathing is a big stress reliever since hyperventilation can exacerbate many of the anxiety symptoms on this list.

Beyond that, our Anxiety Center is full of helpful, expert-recommended tips to make living with anxiety a little easier. Here are a few specific articles to get you started:

• 8 Grounding Techniques to Try When You’re Spiraling
• How to Meditate When You Have No Idea Where to Start
• 9 Therapist-Approved Tips for Reframing Anxious Thoughts
• 10 Things to Try If Anxiety Is Ruining Your Sleep
• 8 Ways to Make Panic Attacks a Little More Bearable
• 11 Coping Skills Therapists Use Themselves
• 50 of Our All-Time Best Mental Health Tips to Help You Feel Better

Remember: Anxiety can feel overwhelming to the point that it seems completely beyond your control, but there are ways to manage it—and you’re definitely not alone.

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Sources:

1. World Journal of Cardiology, Autonomic and Endocrine Control of Cardiovascular Function
2. JBI Database of Systematic Reviews and Implementation Reports, Effectiveness of Diaphragmatic Breathing for Reducing Physiological and Psychological Stress in Adults: A Quantitative Systematic Review
3. World Journal of Cardiology, Autonomic and Endocrine Control of Cardiovascular Function
4. PLoS One, Anxiety and Depression in Tension-Type Headache: A Population-Based Study
5. The Journal of Headache and Pain, Anxiety and Depression Symptoms and Migraine: A Symptom-Based Approach Research
6. Frontiers in Psychology, Gut-Brain Axis and Mood Disorder
7. General Hospital Psychiatry, The Prevalence of Nausea in the Community: Psychological, Social, and Somatic factors
8. Depression and Anxiety, Startle Response in Generalized Anxiety Disorder
9. Frontiers in Immunology, Editorial: Stress and Immunity
10. Frontiers in Psychiatry, Why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Is the Current Gold Standard of Psychotherapy

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