Anxiety

Anxiety is by far the most common issue that clients contact me for help with, next highest would be some level of depresion. I would estimate around 50% of my clients say they are coming with some anxiety. So if you're struggling with anxiety, you're not alone.

Anxiety is something that visits us all to some degree. For some of us it's more regular, or more marked. For some people there is a sensation that it never/ rarely leaves them- but is something we all have at periods of our life, to one degree or another.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a natural response to stress, it can manifest as fear, or worry, or dread, or a sense of uneasyness. We can also see it can also manifest physically, for example through headaches, or a tightness in the chest, or through some digestive issues such as reflux.

What are the symptoms of anxiety?

This can vary from person to person, and of course you may experience anxiety in different ways. There can be one or more physical symptoms of anxiety. Some common symptoms of anxiety that I have seen time and time again are:

• A tightness in the chest

• Headaches/ head pain

• Racing heartbeat

• Digestive issues/ patterns such as a change in appetite- either stress eating, or to be 'off your food'.

There can often be tension in the body, for myself- when I feel a lot of aches and pains in my shoulders and my neck- I have to check whether this has been a stress/ anxiety response. For other people it might be a clenched jaw.

We might not be able to settle, or to concentrate. Often there is a level of fatigue, and exhaustion, that I will talk about later.

There are often similar symptoms of anxiety, but every person will experience this in a unique way to them. What we then do with that anxiety can be very different. A great example of that is we have to get to an important event, my anxiety manifests itself by sitting in the car impatiently, having an urgent desire to set off. For my wife, she always finds ways to stay in the house as long as possible. At the eleventh hour, with what feels like minutes to spare she will loop round finding something else to do - you might say she is just being organised, but that's not true. We both have observed that this happens exclusively when we have something important to get to. The more important the event is, the more we double down on our responses- I have a tendency to get more wound up, and sit in the car, and my wife has a tendency to fill the time she has (and then some!) with things that we both agree could wait under normal circumstances.

When anxiety manifests in more extreme ways, we may call this clinical anxiety, or chronic anxiety which can be defined as mental health conditions involving excessive uncontrollable fear or worry that interferes with daily life. I am not qualified to diagnose clinical anxiety, but I have worked with many clients before who are experiencing clinical anxiety and have been prescribed medication, for example.

Whether you have, or think you have clinical anxiety, or are feeling anxious- you may find counselling can help.

Types of anxiety

There are many ways anxiety manifests, but here is a brief list:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): You can't pin down what you're worried about. Most or all things give you a sense of anxiety

• Panic Disorder: Experiencing regular, unexpected panic attacks.

• Social Anxiety Disorder: Intense fear of being in social situations, usually around being judged and how other people perceive us negatively.

• Phobias: Extreme fear of specific objects or situations.

What's does having anxiety feel like?

​​​​​Whilst everyone experiences anxiety differently, I have an analogy that many people have found resonates over the years. Perhaps it may resonate with you too.

​It seems to me that anxiety is like sitting down to watch a movie. Except, unlike most people, you can't relax. The next 2 hours or so you frantically scribble, trying to pre-empt the ending of the film. Worse than that you're actually writing your own ending. This is frankly exhausting. I would say most people that experience anxiety also have a level of exhaustion. Living through anxiety means constantly creating the worst case endings to scenarios that have not yet (and may never) happened. This often means there is very little sense of enjoyment. After all, if you're always re-writing the ending to the film, you're not able to enjoy what's happening in the scene right now. The associated fatigue, mental drain, and worry about the impending situation(s) can be extremely debilitating. 

Thinking about my life, my own sense of anxiety was a blindspot for a long time, I didn't actively think of myself as an anxious person. I dismissed the symptoms of anxiety as other things. For example, arriving very early to an event factored in a traffic jam. The reality was, I was constantly re-writing that worst case scenario, re-writing the film script, and that was my default. Moving through and beyond anxiety is a long, and often un-finished road that always takes effort, but can be very worthwhile- I have found. So perhaps today is a great time to take a step in the right direction and book an introductory call.

What does anxiety feel like for you? Feel free to comment below.

Thanks for reading.

Steve at Heard Today Counselling.