Symptoms of Anxiety (part 1)

Anxiety is a condition that can be experienced practically in any situation or place and is something that anybody can experiment. This is the first of a series of articles where I will analyze the symptoms of anxiety, its possible causes, and the different techniques developed by psychotherapists to fight it and live in a more creative way.

                                                                                                

Anxiety is a very widespread and broad term that brings together a wide range of different symptoms. Problems frequently arise when we try to adequately define the concept of anxiety. A person tells us that he feels anxious and his opinion will be based on a subjective feeling that is trying to explain to us. It is something he feels and he is defining it as he feels it. Perhaps their external behavior reflects such a condition.

If we continue inquiring that person we'll find that he is full of worries, fears, and ideas that torment him continuously, but at the same time, he is experiencing some physical symptoms associated with the condition.  That is why we say that emotional anxiety is a subjective condition, but often also manifests itself in the person's external behavior.

Common symptoms of anxiety may be muscle tension, nausea, stiff neck, rapid heartbeat, breathing problems, physical pain in different parts of the body, dry mouth, fever, chills, cold sweats especially in the hands, excessive urination, stomach problems, excessive or diminished appetite, sleeping problems either little or too much sleep.

An example of a typical situation of anxiety occurs in a student, who despite being prepared for the exam, gets completely blocked when he has the paper in front of him. By the time the exam is over and he leaves, the tension has gone from him and he realizes that he remembers everything, that indeed in his preconscious was the memory of everything he had studied. In this case the most advisable would have been to stop concentrating on the exam, take a couple of deep breaths, relax or go out for water, to walk for a couple of minutes if this were possible.

If a person shows some of the symptoms we have mentioned, we could say that he is an anxious person. Like this simple example of the student, the same solution would serve for other circumstances generating anxiety. Getting out of the problem we are focused on could be a great help, but we do not always have the ability to do it.

Anxiety is a condition that can be experienced practically in any situation or place and is something that all we have suffered at some moment during our lives. Excessive anxiety is considered one of the main symptoms of neurosis. Some clinicians have speculated that human behavior tends to neurotic behavior. This concept has its origin in the idea that man lives cornered by the pressures of his environment and therefore experiences a continuous state of anxiety. Without being so pessimistic about the reality of human behavior, we could say that we all have some neurotic feature in our character.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash