Most people think of anxiety as a collection of nervousness, tension, and restlessness. In reality, there are actually dozens of side effects of anxiety that have little to do with mental status. In fact, anxiety can have effects on every single body system. Here are five unexpected symptoms of anxiety that affect everything from your exercise routine to your reproductive status.
Your Skin is Irritated or Prone to Allergies
When we experience anxiety, the body produces cortisol and adrenaline. When there is too much cortisol, the immune system is suppressed. This leads to inflammatory responses on the skin.
People with anxiety have an increased risk for eczema, atopic dermatitis, rash, acne, psoriasis, rosacea, hives, and even hair loss. Feeling anxiety on the inside can show it on the outside.
Organs Can Even Get Damaged
While anxiety is not a cause of high blood pressure, it does cause temporary, dramatic spikes in blood pressure. This is because cortisol is a fight or flight hormone that raises blood pressure and constricts blood vessels.
When spikes in blood pressure happen day after day, it can cause damage to the blood vessels, heart, and kidneys. This predisposes anxiety sufferers to heart attacks.
You May Struggle to Get Pregnant
A whopping 40% of women struggling to get pregnant or stay pregnant have anxiety, depression or both. Anxiety can lead to infertility, and the reason lies in how anxiety affects your stress hormones.
Cortisol lowers progesterone, and progesterone is a key hormone in maintaining pregnancy. When cortisol levels are too high, women may struggle of fail to ovulate or menstruate. Furthermore, normal reproductive hormones levels fall. High stress levels have even been associated with negative pregnancy outcomes such as pre-term labor.
More Unexpected Symptoms of Anxiety?
You Have No Motivation to Workout
People who suffer from anxiety are less like to exercise. This is no good because exercise has antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects, and protects against the harmful consequences of stress.
You Hurt All Over
Anxiety is a risk factor for common aches and pains like muscle tension, back pain, soreness, and headaches. To make it worse, diseases like arthritis, fibromyalgia, and migraines cause anxiety too. Because of this, anxious people may feel more pain.
Pain sufferers dwell on the worst possible outcome, avoid movement and activities that could additional pain, and fret over their pain.
Anxious people become focused on pain and have a decreased ability to distract oneself from the pain.
This creates a vicious circle that is hard to break.
But what about classic symptoms of anxiety?
Not experiencing any of these signs of anxiety? There are classical symptoms of anxiety.
Anxiety has been linked to a wide variety of mood changes. Symptoms can be mild like feeling irritable. At the worst, anxious people think about suicide and may even attempt suicide. Other symptoms include fear of the unknown, sleep problems, nervousness, fixation and worry.
Do you suffer from unexpected symptoms of anxiety?
Comment below with you favorite natural solution that keeps nervousness at bay.
Unsure where to start. Here are blogs that might help you stay calm no matter what. Check out this article on CBD and Emotions. Or perhaps settle in to the world’s oldest anxiety cure: meditation. Here is one with Palo Santo.
When all else fails, smudge the crap out of your environment and set things back to ground zero and start again.
