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Recognizing Anxiety: Emotional Signs and Physical Symptoms

We feel anxiety emotionally, and we feel anxiety physically. Anxiety symptoms can be both emotional and physical.

It can drive you to act in a demanding or irrational way as you attempt to get relief from the fear. Or it can narrow your world as you reduce your exposure to situations that stimulate the fear.

Click "Read More" to increase your understanding of anxiety and find out about the emotional and physical symptoms of anxiety and panic.

What Panic Attacks Feel Like: Symptoms, Duration & Recovery

Panic typically starts with emotional causes, but those emotions stimulate intense physical reactions that mimic heart attacks and other scary physical symptoms.

One of the common repercussions of having a panic attack is that from that point forward you can get anxiety about the potential of having another attack. You get anxiety about the anxiety.

Journal Away Your Stress

Studies show that when people write about stressful situations—and they include the emotional component—their physical health improves.

The studies’ control group that wrote about troubling situations, but did not include the emotional component, did not show health improvements.

Beware of Taking on Other People’s Negative Emotions

Sometimes, we take on other people’s emotional overflow like a sponge absorbing a toxic spill. If you take on other people’s stuff, you may have no room left for yours. This can contribute to you getting overwhelmed and anxious relatively easy.

Click Read More to discover how and why you may have absorbed other people's toxic emotions, and how to protect yourself.

Use Hypnosis or Guided Meditation for stress relief

Hypnosis and guided mediation are extremely well suited to help with stress and anxiety because they are based on helping you relax. They are an anti-anxiety pill without the pill (and without the side effects).

I have had tremendous results using hypnosis to help people with various levels of stress and anxiety – from mild stress to anxiety that’s so debilitating that they can’t pass an exam that they have the knowledge to pass, or take a flight, or go into a store.

Relaxing breathing exercise

Anxious stressed breathing is often shallow breathing. 

Deep breaths relax your mind by helping you focus on something other than your worries and relax your body by oxygenating your cells. I think of it as bathing your nerve endings in oxygen--so that the electrical currents jump the nerve ending synapses more smoothly and you feel less frazzled and edgy. 

The video below shows Dr Andrew Weil, MD, demonstrating the yoga 4-7-8 breathing exercise.