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what physical feelings of anxiety do you get?

annabay
Community Member

hey there, what physical symptoms of anxiety do you experience?

I often feel very alone in my experience of having physical chest (what I think are heart) spasms and was wanting to create a space for everyone to list their physical feelings that come hand in hand with anxiety so we can all feel less alone.

hope everyone is well.

797 Replies 797

Hi Max. im 22 and have only just been experiencing anxiety in the last couple of months, ive even gone to hospital as i was scared that something was seriously wrong with me. Thankfully all my results came back all clear. At the start my blood pressure was high (dont recall the exact reading). I also could constantly feel my heart beating rapidly which felt like it was beating fast all the time.

As months have gone on, I sometimes can feel my heart rate increase which leads me to think negative which doesnt help. I think over thinking doesnt help as it only makes the situation worse. I try not to think about it and get on with living a normal life.

My anxiety comes and goes every couple of week, some weeks im fine and have no negative thoughts or physical symptoms. Where as other weeks i feel drained and lazy. I still get chest muscle pains here and there as well as muscle pain in other areas of my body. I just try to stay positive while experiencing my pain and im normally fine

Gull14
Community Member

I can’t breathe. My heart beats too fast. I get a huge rush of adrenaline. My throat closes up. I get diarrhoea. I shake.

this often happens to me just as I am about to fall asleep.

I am on no medication for anxiety. I feel like giving up.

I struggle to eat on a daily basis. My muscles in my throat tense my heart feels like a heart attack and I feel like my chest or lungs are collapsing i have to get up and walk around and think all the time if the er is necessary. I walk around panicking like every moment is my last and I loose extreme weight due to this. I will have mental shutoffs and cant think at all and multiple doctors appointment with nothing wrong with me my throat will feel like it's closing up all the time

Mattw
Community Member
Jazky not sure about an abyss feeling but i do get those feelings of severe dread and fear of death, i was watching a show a few weeks back and it gave me a weird feeling and i got a bit anxious then all of a sudden my mind went deep and i mean DEEP into the feeling of death and how i will cease to exist when i die and become nothing erasing me from existance...this lasted for a few minutes with me pacing all around my house thinking im gonna die and dissappear forever, so then i booked into see my GP and told him about this and he said.....we all die eventually...needless to say i got a different doctor after that and am now seeing a phycolgist which is helping, get a breathing excercise that works for you it really does help

Eng
Community Member
When I am anxious I get very tired and lazy, I eat alot usually sweet stuff and I worry and think negative thoughts. I find walking therapeutic, I should go to the gym but I am usually not motivated to do so. 15 years ago I jogged every morning and dieted and felt full of energy and fantastic - this also stopped me sweating so much. However these days I am on antipsychotics which have made me fat and unmotivated. They are meant to help with the anxiety however they have made my health alot worse, I wouldn't recommend them. A good thing is narrative therapy which I have benefitted from. Have to set a daily routine which is hard with my shift work but will get a routine together which should help.

Hi maxmadthecurse

Welcome to the forums and thankyou for speaking from the heart too! I used to have bad anxiety for around 38 years and yes its horrible to have. I understand your pain. You are proactive with your health by having. You mentioned that your resting BP is normal....this is good news

From what you have posted above it does seem anxiety/adrenaline based. My BP is always raised when I am even in a low level anxiety state. Just as per my own experience the more frequent our appointments are with our GP or counsellor the less impact any level of anxiety has in our lives

You are always welcome to start your own thread topic as there many super gentle people on the forums that can be here for you 🙂

my kind thoughts

Paul

thanks for the reply guys

yeah after that post last week, I found a GP near me with a background in psych who would see me face to face, said I most likely had a panic attack that night and has generalized anxiety since then.

Before this I was only doing telehealth conferences with other GPs in a different clinic and really I don't think I got anywhere with them. I noticed you could get very different outcomes depending on the doctor you see haha.

Started medication for a week now for the first time, and seeing a psychologist next week. Checked my BP with the doctor yesterday, its lower at around 144/90 which is still high of course, then again i'm also still feeling anxious all the time.

I have been against antidepressants all this while but I guess it's time to give it a go, these episodes i'm having is occurring alot more frequently since last year.

Seeing the doctor again next week so we'll see how things turn out.

cheers.

 

 

This one happened to me today, which is new.

I Got a compliment today from a colleague on something i did at work. I got quite overwhelmed with emotion to the point where i started to tear up when they left my office. I was so happy that they had said what they said.

jump to a hour later, my anxiety kicked in real bad, and so did my OCD. I was thinking about packages in the mail, then started to think about some sort of space and time relationship between the packages. I spent about 15mins drawing what i was thinking, and in the end it turned out to be a spacetime diagram...i love physics BTW.

so now i still have the sickening feeling on nausea, and numbness, and shaking in my hands, along with some odd feeling breathing. Cant really focus either.

come-on mind and body! Cooperate with me here!

Not_Batman

Seems to be a very wide range of physical feelings experienced from anxiety in here!

Personally speaking the primary thing that gets effected for me is my breathing. I find myself hungry for air, often trying to take in a deep breath doesn't seem to satisfy this - maybe about 1 in 5 will actually satisfy the air hunger than its back very quickly. It also has me needing to yawn a lot but for some reason often cannot find enough air to do so. Also has chest tightness and eventually after putting in so much effort to try and breathe properly I find myself with a dry cough and a constant need to clear my throat - all these symptoms are not great to experience with COVID about! I also find myself clenching my jaw a lot so it ends up saw, and I find my hands very fidgety.

Previously I also had muscle twitches all over my calves (looks like invisible fingers were pressing down in random spots on my calf muscle) and actual chest pain (one DR thought I had an inflamed rib cage so prescribed strong anti inflammatories which did nothing) - thankfully these ones haven't come back yet.

I can related to a lot of the things listed in your post .