Symptoms of Anxiety

In order to identify anxiety you need to be very familiar with the symptoms it manifests. The symptoms of anxiety are many and these are broadly classified into five categories: (i) somatic, (ii) behavioral, (iii) cognitive, (iv) emotional, and (v) defense mechanism. Each one of these categorizations is briefly described below to enable you not only to diagnose anxiety but also have a basic understanding of the condition:

Somatic
‘Somatic’ refers to the physical symptoms of anxiety, which is the result of sudden changes in the hormonal balance in the body and its impact on the cardio vascular, nervous and muscular system. These are shortness of breath, nausea, paleness, lightheadedness or head reeling, chest pain, profuse sweating, tight feeling in the shoulders, back of the neck and the lower back, headaches or migraines, diarrhea, tingling of the skin, butterflies in the stomach sensation, cold and clammy hands, among others.

Behavioral
‘Behavioral’ refers to those signs that affect the way you react to anxiety. These symptoms include pacing up and down, acute restlessness, trembling, hyperventilation, repetitive behavior, forced speech, and the like.

Cognitive
‘Cognitive’ refers to thoughts and thinking process that happens when you suffer from anxiety. The symptoms here include confused state of mind, a sinking feeling like everything is going to end (badly), relentless attack of morbid thoughts, lack of concentration, loss of memory, experiencing obsessive thoughts and others.

Emotional
‘Emotional’ refers to the feelings that are associated with anxiety, which is terror, acute panic, stringed up, ready to explode or always on the edge types of feelings, tension, unreal situation, and panic among others.

Defense mechanism
Here the reference is to automatic reactions of the human body when attacked by anxiety. These are basically psychological defenses, which are triggered to accommodate the extraordinary symptoms that come with anxiety attacks. Some of these defenses mechanisms are:

1. Repression – The thoughts that cause anxiety are simply ignored and pushed away from the mind; something similar to how the ostrich reacts in the face of danger – buries its head in the sand, leaving his whole body defenseless; but it feels that it is safe because at that time it is no longer able to see the danger.
2. Displacement – In order to rationalize these terrible symptoms, the fear and/or anxiety feelings are “attached” to a “reason for the fear”. This is one example of how phobias evolve. This means that the anxiety feelings are blamed on a scapegoat – and therefore, acceptable as long as the object to which these are attached are not within reach.
3. Somatization – These indicate translating anxiety into illness. Therefore, you would rationalize that the unpleasant feelings that you are experiencing are due to anxiety you suffer from such as diarrhea, headaches, muscular pains, recurring cough and cold infections, and so on.
4. Delusion formation – This is one of the more serious manifestations of anxiety where you would start believing that there are conspiracies generated especially to put you in trouble, or worse kill you. Logic and reality would not be able to influence or undermine these (usually) fantasy theories.