The Physical Sensations of Stress and Anxiety – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket

Back when I used to struggle with anxiety, it was the anxious feelings that used to really trouble me and that used to quickly escalate to the point when they felt overwhelming and uncontrollable. There were times when I would be low, shaky and uncomfortable to the point that I just wanted to be safely back home and in a place where I felt calmer and safer (and then all the anxious thoughts would arrive to remind me of how useless I was for feeling that way). It can be hard to appreciate just how bad anxious feelings can get unless you’ve experienced it and had it affect your life. The avoidance, the escaping, the gruelling discomfort and the repetition of the unpleasantness can really start to get to you and limit your life.

Many people I work with in Ely and across Cambridgeshire find that the physical sensations of anxiety can feel unfamiliar and frightening – especially when they clash with reassurance from medical tests or logic.

And it doesn’t matter whether the anxiety is about something specific (like driving, flying or public speaking) or more generalised (where there seems to always be something that the anxiety latches onto). When those bodily sensations and feelings strike and get you, it can feel debilitating and crushing. Things you know you can ordinarily do become impossible to you. Every atom of your being seems to be focused upon how anxious you feel, how bad it makes you feel and how, in situations when you feel anxious, it seems inescapable until you flee to somewhere else and away from it all.

One of the issues that people with anxiety know all too well is how you then start to become anxious about the possibility of becoming anxious. Even when you aren’t in the anxiety-provoking situation or at the event, you can still feel the dread, the sense of approaching doom and you can still be overwhelmed with the worry. When you get there (in the car, on the plane, about to give your presentation etc.), everything becomes massively ramped up and amplified. The anxiety gets more and more linked, associated and embedded with the situation/event/person/place and so the next time a similar thing is looming, the worry, anxiety, stress and dread grow and repeat with ever increasing intensity.

Yet it is very possible to overcome those anxious thoughts and feelings and to take back control over what is going inside your mind and body. I’ve helped hundreds of people to move on from unnecessary anxiety and to learn how to effectively manage their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Yet first, it’s important to understand and remove any confusion about exactly what is happening in your mind and body that leads you to experience those physical sensations of stress and anxiety.

 

Quick Summary

Anxiety doesn’t just affect your thoughts. It changes how your entire body functions.

In this article you’ll discover:

• why anxiety creates physical symptoms throughout the body
• how your fight-or-flight response works
• why physical symptoms often feel so frightening
• why worrying about the symptoms usually makes them worse
• how understanding the process helps you regain control

One of the biggest turning points is realising that these physical sensations are signs of your body’s natural survival response rather than signs that something is seriously wrong with you.

If you’re looking for information about a specific symptom, I’ve also written detailed articles explaining:

• Shortness of Breath and Anxiety
• Can Anxiety Cause Chest Pain?
• Can Anxiety Cause Dizziness?
• Why Anxiety Makes Your Heart Race
• Can Anxiety Cause Diarrhoea?
• Can Anxiety Make You Feel Sick?

 

Related Articles

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Physical Anxiety Symptoms
• How To Calm Anxiety In The Moment
• Health Anxiety
• Hypnotherapy Reviews in Ely

 

What Happens When You Experience Anxiety or Stress?

The emotions that you experience in a situation, and the thoughts, feelings and sensations that go with it, are all linked to what happens in your brain and your automatic nervous system.

Whenever your brain detects a threat, whether it’s real or imagined, it reacts incredibly quickly. Long before you’ve had chance to logically think things through, your body’s automatic survival system has already begun preparing you to respond.

That’s because the emotional parts of the brain react faster than the thinking parts. From an evolutionary perspective, that made perfect sense. If our ancestors had stopped to carefully analyse every potential threat, they probably wouldn’t have survived very long. Instead, the brain learned to act first and think later.

Only afterwards does the more logical part of the brain begin assessing whether the threat is actually real. That’s why anxiety can sometimes feel overwhelming even when you logically know you’re safe.

Of course these days, most of us are rarely likely (if ever likely) to be in a situation where we are faced with an external threat of actual harm, yet we still respond to perceived threats in the same way, with the same anxiety and the same stress responses. These perceived threats can include all sorts of things such as an irrational phobia, worry what other people are thinking, fear of failure, anxiety about being judged or making an idiot of yourself and so on. Our brain and automatic nervous system respond with all the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of anxiety. For some people, this anxiety response will only happen when faced with particular situations, places, people or circumstances, whilst for others, it’s like their brain is in a constant state of high alert and seemingly everything is perceived as a threat that fires off the fight or flight response and leads to those uncomfortable feelings and sensations.

Our automatic nervous system is made up of two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is sometimes referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ system. It’s all about conservation and maintenance of physical resources. It’s where your breathing and heart rate are regular, your appetite and digestion function in the usual way and you feel calm and more rested.

In contrast to this, there is the sympathetic nervous system which is all about action, speed, alertness and preparing your physical resources in response to anxiety and stress. Let’s take a closer look at this and the physical sensations of stress and anxiety.

If you want a deeper understanding of how anxiety affects both body and mind, you may find the Anxiety Support Hub helpful.

 

The Physical Sensations of Stress and Anxiety

The sympathetic nervous system activates your physical resources in response to anxiety and stress. You probably think of it as the uncomfortable feelings and bodily sensations that you experience with your anxiety. As mentioned above, all of these physical symptoms are pretty helpful if you were faced with an actual threat, yet, when they are due to anxiety or unhelpful perceptions and thinking patterns then they become problematic and distressing.

This fight or flight response gets you ready to deal with a threat, or perceived threat. It gets you ready to move and take action. Helpful if you are say, faced with an angry, snarling dog and you want to get out of its way pretty sharpish. Less helpful if you experience it just at the thought that you might possibly, conceivably, maybe, perhaps see a dog when you leave your house to go for a walk.

When the sympathetic system is activated, adrenaline gets released into your bloodstream, your breathing rate increases so that you can take on more oxygen for your muscles, your heart rate increases to pump blood to your muscles, you start to sweat to get your muscles ready for action, the blood supply to your muscles increases and blood sugar levels rise. The goal of all of these changes is to quickly get your body ready for action and to make sure that your muscles have the blood, fuel and energy needed to tackle the threat.

Your pupils also dilate to take in more information about the environment (and to help with assessing threat and finding escape routes). This can sometimes lead to feeling a bit dizzy or disorientated.

Bodily functions that are less important for immediate survival, such as digestion, are downgraded. Energy for digestion is not important when all of our resources are needed for our muscles to help us to deal with the immediate situation. This is why you can get a dry mouth, experience ‘butterflies’ in your stomach, feel sick or feel like you need the toilet.

On top of all of this, your ability to think logically and rationally is limited when you experience strong anxiety and stress so it’s hard to reason yourself out of things and gain perspective (until the emotion subsides). Everything is about action and physically moving and doing something rather than thinking.

Incidentally, the physical symptoms of stress and anxiety can be very similar to those when you take part in intense exercise, although there all the adrenaline and energy gets used up and dissipated and things quickly return to normal levels. One of the challenges with anxiety is how the physical sensations can just keep going around and around with no outlet because there is no actual threat to tackle (it’s all perception, thoughts and thinking). And the whole while, those uncomfortable feelings can lead to you feeling even more anxious and stressed about what is happening and whether there is something medically wrong with you.

And, having experienced such unpleasant sensations, you might find yourself starting to worry and feel anxious about further episodes of feeling anxious, thereby leading to more of the physical sensations you so dread (and the cycle of anxiety about feeling anxious).

 

The Most Common Physical Symptoms of Anxiety

Although everyone experiences anxiety slightly differently, many people notice very similar physical symptoms.

These can include:

• racing or pounding heart
• chest tightness or chest pain
• shortness of breath
• dizziness or light-headedness
• stomach butterflies
• diarrhoea or IBS flare-ups
• nausea
• muscle tension
• shaking
• sweating
• dry mouth
• tingling sensations
• feeling detached or unreal
• fatigue after anxiety settles

Some people experience just one or two of these symptoms. Others experience several at the same time. And, of course they come with worrying thoughts about how you feel and what it means. You can start to worry about what if you feel that uncomfortable again.

It’s also common for these symptoms to change over time. One week you may notice a racing heart, the next dizziness or stomach problems. That doesn’t usually mean your anxiety is getting worse – it’s simply your nervous system expressing the same stress response in different ways.

I’ve written more detailed articles explaining each of these physical symptoms and why they happen, so you can understand exactly what’s happening inside your body.

 

Why Physical Symptoms Become a Cycle

One of the reasons anxiety can become so exhausting is that the physical sensations themselves soon become something you fear.

The cycle often looks like this:

You notice a physical sensation, such as your heart racing, your breathing changing or suddenly feeling dizzy.

Your mind immediately starts asking:

• “What’s wrong with me?”
• “What if this is serious?”
• “Why do I suddenly feel like this?”

Those frightening thoughts create even more anxiety and your body releases more adrenaline. The physical sensations become even stronger and your brain then interprets those stronger sensations as further evidence that something serious must be happening.

Before long, you’ve become caught in a self-perpetuating cycle where anxiety creates physical symptoms, and those physical symptoms create even more anxiety.

The encouraging news is that once you understand this pattern, it begins to lose much of its power.

 

One Thing I Learned About Anxiety

One of the biggest surprises for me was discovering that anxiety wasn’t just something happening in my mind.

It affected absolutely everything.

• My breathing changed.
• My stomach reacted.
• My heart raced.
• My muscles became tense.
• Sometimes I’d feel dizzy, shaky or detached from everything around me.

At the time, I thought all these symptoms meant there must be something seriously wrong with me. It could stop me from leaving the house or, if out, I’d be head down and rush home to where I felt safe again.

Looking back now, I realise my body wasn’t broken. It was actually doing exactly what it had evolved to do.

The problem wasn’t the physical sensations themselves. It was that my nervous system was producing them when there wasn’t any real danger.

Once I understood that, those sensations gradually became much less frightening.

 

What Actually Helps

Understanding the physical sensations of anxiety is an important first step, but it’s equally important to know what actually helps.

Three things usually make the biggest difference:

 

1. Understand What’s Happening

The less mysterious anxiety feels, the less frightening it usually becomes.

Once you recognise these sensations as your body’s survival response rather than signs of illness or evidence that something is wrong, you remove much of the fear that keeps the cycle going.

 

2. Calm Your Nervous System

Your nervous system responds remarkably well to regular calming habits.

Controlled breathing, relaxation, walking, exercise, good sleep and hypnosis all help shift your body away from fight-or-flight and back towards its natural rest-and-digest state.

 

3. Change the Anxiety Pattern

Ultimately, physical symptoms improve because the anxiety itself improves.

As your thinking becomes calmer, your behaviours become more confident and your nervous system becomes less reactive, the physical symptoms usually reduce too.

 

The Good News

One of the biggest misconceptions about anxiety is that once physical symptoms begin, they’ll always be there. You can feel ‘stuck’ with them. You hope they won’t happen and, when they do, you just have to endure them.

Fortunately, that’s rarely what happens.

As you begin understanding what your body is doing, you stop fearing every physical sensation quite so much. That reduces the adrenaline. The nervous system gradually becomes calmer and the body begins spending less time in fight-or-flight and more time in its natural relaxed state.

Many people are surprised how many of their physical symptoms gradually reduce once they stop fearing them and start understanding them.

 

Frequently Asked Questions about the Physical Symptoms of Anxiety

Can anxiety really cause physical symptoms?

Yes. Anxiety affects the whole body through the fight-or-flight response. It can produce genuine physical symptoms including a racing heart, dizziness, breathlessness, stomach problems, muscle tension and shaking.

Why does anxiety feel so physical?

Because anxiety is a biological survival response rather than simply worrying thoughts. When your brain detects danger, it prepares your entire body to respond to the threat.

Can anxiety affect different parts of the body?

Yes. Anxiety can affect your heart, breathing, muscles, stomach, digestive system, balance and many other parts of the body.

Why do my symptoms seem to move around?

As anxiety changes, different parts of the body’s stress response can become more noticeable. You may also become focused on particular areas of your body, making those sensations feel more noticeable and significant.

Can anxiety symptoms last all day?

Yes. If your nervous system remains switched on for long periods, physical symptoms can come and go throughout the day. Ongoing anxious thoughts can keep the physical feelings active, and those feelings then feed further anxious thinking. As anxiety settles, the symptoms usually become less frequent, less intense and shorter-lived.

When should I seek medical advice?

If you experience new, severe, persistent or unexplained physical symptoms, it’s important to seek medical assessment rather than assume anxiety is the cause. Many people I work with have already been medically assessed before focusing on reducing the anxiety itself.

Can hypnotherapy help with physical anxiety symptoms?

Many people find that as their anxiety reduces, the physical symptoms reduce too. By helping calm the nervous system and change unhelpful anxiety patterns, hypnotherapy can help people feel calmer both mentally and physically.

 

Hypnotherapy For Anxiety Help

All of the physical sensations of stress and anxiety that you experience are things that your body is designed to do and more than capable of doing. In the right situation they can be beneficial yet, with anxiety, they become draining, dreaded and overwhelming. And prolonged activation of the sympathetic nervous system can also be linked to some adverse health impacts.

As you may have seen from the many reviews on this website, it is possible to find relief from anxiety and to lessen those unwanted physical sensations. You can learn the strategies that reduce anxiety and the triggers that go with it. You can take back control over your thoughts, perceptions and feelings in ways that will help you to feel better.

Hypnotherapy for anxiety can help you to reduce anxious thoughts and feelings, and to develop the skills and strategies to maintain those improvements. There is also research supporting hypnosis as an intervention for anxiety.

Valentine, Milling, Clark, and Moriarty (2019), brought together the results of all controlled studies of hypnosis for anxiety to quantify the effectiveness of hypnosis in treating anxiety. They found that hypnosis is a highly effective intervention for anxiety, and concluded from the evidence that:

“The findings of this meta-analysis show that hypnosis is a highly effective intervention for anxiety. Our results indicate the average participant treated with hypnosis achieved more anxiety reduction than about 79% of control participants at the end of active treatment and about 84% of controls at the longest follow-up“.

These findings provide encouraging evidence for hypnosis as an intervention for anxiety.

There’s a bit more on that research in this previous article of mine:  The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy as a Treatment For Anxiety and you may find this article of interest as well: Anxiety Help in Ely and Newmarket – Dan Regan Hypnotherapy

 

Support For Physical Symptoms of Anxiety

Your body is designed, in the right circumstances, to be able to experience all of the anxious physical sensations that you’ve been struggling with. Yet right now, it’s like your mind is overprotecting you and trying to keep you safe from a threat that isn’t truly there. If you were faced with a real threat and needed to take quick action (e.g you step out into the road and a car is coming and you need to move fast) then having adrenaline and oxygen going to your muscles is pretty useful.

With problematic anxiety, we need to work out the patterns of thinking and feeling anxious that are happening in certain situations and then using hypnotherapy and other strategies, we can change those patterns and habits to something more helpful where you can think, feel and behave in the way you would desire. You become able to deal with any physical sensations of stress and anxiety and feel better in yourself. That means feeling in control over your thoughts and feelings and so finding yourself more and more calm, confident, comfortable and in control. And once you understand what your body is trying to do, those frightening physical sensations often lose much of the power they once had over you.

You can learn more here:

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Anxiety Hypnotherapy in Ely
• Hypnotherapy Reviews in Ely

Or arrange a free initial consultation to discuss what might help.

To your health and happiness,

Dan Regan

Anxiety Hypnotherapy and Therapy in Ely & Newmarket

 

Struggling with your anxiety and need some expert help to overcome your anxiety? Book your Complimentary Hypnotherapy Strategy Session with me now: Appointments

You can discover what many, many other people have said after their anxiety hypnotherapy sessions with Dan: Testimonials

And check out these powerful anxiety hypnosis downloads that can start helping you right away: Anxiety Hypnosis Downloads

 

Reference: Valentine, K.E., Milling, L.S., Clark, L.J. and Moriarty, C.L., 2019. The Efficacy of Hypnosis as a Treatment for Anxiety: A Meta-analysis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 67(3), pp.336-363.