Re: Anxiety symptoms

Anxiety is a disorder characterized by apprehension, uncertainty and fear, which can often be elevated to attacks of intense panic or a sense of losing control. Anxiety can be physiological and/or sub logical (subconscious). There may be a genetic tendency.

Physiological type involves arousal around the autonomic nerve system (ANS) and fight and flight (adrenal response), which is often seen in people with panic attacks. Physiological factors are individual to a person and some emotional stress usually precedes anxiety e.g. loss of a job, broken relationship, hindered sexuality, etc.

In subconscious type, hidden trauma or certain situations or events can trigger the anxiety.

Anxiety can be acute or chronic.

Acute anxiety and panic attacks are self limited and may last two minutes to two hours. A person experiences an alarm of terror for no obvious reason and it may supersede rational thinking. Symptoms associated with it may include heart palpitations, chest pain, irregular heart beat, cold sweats, tremors of the hand, dizziness, butterflies in the stomach, nausea, diarrhea, hyperventilation.

If these symptoms progress, it can lead to secondary alkalosis with a sensation of pins and needles in hand/foot/around the mouth, muscle stiffness in the extremities, and tingling. A person may become disconnected with people and objects around him (no sense of reality). Hyperventilation with perception of no sense of reality can prolong the anxiety attack and worsen it, to the point that one feels that one is losing consciousness or one’s life is in danger.

Chronic anxiety, although some symptoms are as an acute type, is less severe and less debilitating. Symptoms can be of longer duration, lasting days, weeks, and months. A person notices general undefined sense of tension, apprehension, or vague persistent dread, fear of the future. Symptoms include general fatigue, insomnia, inability to maintain concentration, pancreatic hypoglycemia, weight gain or loss, headaches, dysfunction in personal relationships, work, and life.